CAIR membership plummets

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

CAIR membership plummets

June 11, 2007

The Washington Times

From the article:

Membership in the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has declined more than 90 percent since the 2001 terrorist attacks, Audrey Hudson will report in Tuesday's editions of The Washington Times.

. . .

M. Zuhdi Jasser, director of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy, says the sharp decline in membership calls into question whether the organization speaks for 7 million American Muslims, as the group has claimed.

"This is the untold story in the myth that CAIR represents the American Muslim population. They only represent their membership and donors," Mr. Jasser said.

These figures come from tax documents.

There has been a lot of sound and fury over CAIR as if it were an important organization, especially from the anti-Islamist camp. It isn't important at all. The twenty-some odd annual donors are probably under heavy scrutiny by Homeland Security and there is no real bite to its bark. Muslims do not even patronize the organization except for a small handful.

Time to focus on real problems.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Incidentally, here is the link to the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. Here is a quote from its "About Us" description:

Through regular commentary AIFD will intellectually stand against the religious fanatics who exploit the religion of Islam for a nihilistic, anti-American anti-Western war. In fact a major component in the war on terror is the intellectual deconstruction of the claim Islamo-fascists have upon the religion of Islam. AIFD was formed as an unmistakable expression of American liberty and freedom in an attempt to take back the faith of Islam from the demagoguery of the Islamo-fascists.

Michael

[James Heaps-Nelson]

Time to shoot for it declining 100%.

Jim

[Robert Campbell]

To what extent is CAIR a creature of the mainstream media?

As a possible analogy, Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam still gets a ton of media attention, even though Farrakhan led a minority that broke away from Warith Deen Muhammad's sect after it ditched Elijah Muhammad's old racist mythology and its calls on African Americans to separate themselves from Whites.

A few years ago, Farrakhan's sect was estimated to have 20,000 members. More than CAIR now has, but a tenth or less of the membership of Warith Deen Muhammad's group, which is rarely in the newspapers or on TV.

Robert Campbell

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Robert,

Media is the name of the game. I believe that the attention lavished on CAIR by anti-Islamist rhetoric provided it with much more publicity than it deserves or ever would have garnered on its own.

I see CAIR as a rich man's club without much popular support. There is some monkey-business going on, but nothing like taking over America or inciting the masses.

You are right about Warith Deen Muhammad's following. He seems to be fairly moderate, though, on just about everything. Not at all like his father.

Michael

[Chris Grieb]

Robert;

I would be delighted if CAIR's membership is declining. Such information is kept close to the vest.

On the question of relative sized of the black Islamic organizations it would take a lot of eyeballing. My own take is both organizations seem to be doing well.

[Aggrad02]

One thing that I worry about is extent that the Qur'an is moderate. I am right now reading the Qur'an to find out. I also recently read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography Infidel and it was very revealing. She talks about the extent to which Islam is radical and talks about how most of the people that are "moderate" Muslims are not very familiar with the Qur'an since it is taught in Arabic, and most places with Muslim populations do not speak Arabic. It would be if all of the Christian factions taught in Latin or Italian, all over the globe. I will let you know what I find out.

On a side note, it was interesting to find out how Mohammad received his vision of the Angel Gabriel. He went into the dessert near Makkah, in the month of Ramadan (the hottest month of the year), found a cave a meditated for a month while fasting. I am sure anyone will tell you that if you go into the dessert and stay in a cave with temperature hovering around 100 degrees and you do not eat or drink anything during the day and only the bare minimum during the night you are going to have hallucinations. Also Mohammad did not believe the visions until he went home and told his wife about them. At which point she declared that he must be a prophet.

[Neil Parille]

I question the claim that there are 7 million Moslems in the US. I think that was refuted by lots of folks in 2001.

[Chris Grieb]

Neil;

Seven Million people would be a little over two percent of the America population. That sounds about right to me.

I would suspect that more than half were under twenty-one.

[zantonavitch]

This is a bit of good news. It shows the current strength of the ideology of Western liberalism versus the ideology of Islam, at least in America.

Still, the world of Islam is awash in stolen oil funds and tyranny. And the American-backed slave states of Iraq and Afghanistan don't help. I think the dictatorships of Saudi Arabia (our "ally," who always hurts us) and Iran (our "enemy," who we never attack) can and will richly fund and empower CAIR and similar organizations for a long, long time to come.