CAIR Blasts Trump as the ‘New Biden’ for Continued Support of Israel Amid Gaza War
CAIR officials give press conference on the Israel-Hamas war. Photo: Kyle Mazza / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization that advocates on behalf of Muslim Americans, has repudiated US President Donald Trump as “the new Joe Biden” because of his strident support of Israel’s military operations against Hamas in Gaza.
CAIR, which has been embroiled in controversy for years over alleged ties to terrorist groups, lamented the number of casualties in Gaza as a result of the war there. The organization lambasted Trump for backing Israel’s so-called “genocide” and called on the US president to withdraw all material support for the Jewish state.
“As the minimum death toll in [Gaza] crosses 50,000, the Israeli government is completely out of control because Donald Trump is the new Joe Biden: a president who supports genocide and puts Israel first in violation of federal law and disregard for the wishes of the American people,” CAIR said in a statement on Sunday. “President Trump must force [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu to permanently stop his self-serving genocide and accept the comprehensive ceasefire deal that that frees all captives. If President Trump wishes to be remembered as a peacemaker and not Netanyahu’s poodle, he must act before the death toll crosses 100,000.”
The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry claims that over 50,000 Palestinians have been killed from Israeli operations in the embattled enclave, although the ministry does not distinguish between terrorist combatants and civilians. Moreover, researchers have shown that casualty figures published by Gaza’s Hamas-run health authorities have been inflated to defame Israel.
During his campaign for president, Trump vowed to unwaveringly support Israel’s defensive military operations against Hamas, criticizing then-President Joe Biden for supposedly buckling to progressive pressure to distance himself from the Jewish state. In February, the White House approved the delivery of a shipment of heavy bombs to Israel that were withheld by the Biden administration over concerns about civilian casualties in Gaza. Trump has also expressed less public criticism of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, urging the Jewish state to “finish the job” against the Hamas terrorist group.
In the 17 months following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel, CAIR has repeatedly lambasted Israel’s military efforts, accusing the Jewish state of committing “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”
In December, the controversial Islamic group said the Jewish state was guilty of “ethnic cleansing” in Syria following the recent collapse of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime, despite the limited nature of Israel’s military operations in the neighboring country.
Then last month, CAIR accused Israel of “moving the genocide from Gaza to the occupied West Bank,” where Israeli forces launched a counterterrorism effort coined “Operation Iron Wall.”
In the months following Trump’s return to the White House, CAIR has accused the US federal government of practicing discrimination against Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. The group decried the Trump administration’s attempts to punish American universities for allegedly not doing enough to combat campus antisemitism, accusing the White House of promoting “unconstitutional” censorship and Islamophobia. The organization also decried the administration’s attempt to deport non-Americans students who participate in pro-Hamas rallies as “anti-Palestinian.”
CAIR has a long history of stepping into controversy. In the 2000s, the organization was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association'” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.'”
CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The head of CAIR, for example, said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israelis in what was the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” CAIR co-founder and executive director Nihad Awad said in a speech during the American Muslims for Palestine convention in Chicago last November. “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”
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