On September 13, 1993, Yasser Arafat, the inventor of the Palestinian identity, and Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, shook hands on the White House lawn, and for one brief moment, it looked like the Middle East might actually find its way to peace. The Oslo Accords had been signed, and a two-state solution was on the table.
In a small circle of men scattered across American cities, the news landed like a bomb. Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood had spent years building a support network inside the United States — raising money, organizing mosques, shaping opinion. Their goal was the Islamization of the West and the destruction of Israel, and a genuine peace agreement between Israelis and ’Palestinians” threatened to unravel everything they had worked for, you cannot build a movement on eternal conflict if the conflict ends.
They decided to act fast; three weeks after the Oslo handshake, on October 1, 1993, twenty senior figures of the Hamas support network in America gathered at the Marriott Courtyard hotel near Philadelphia’s airport. The meeting was called as an emergency session — a three-day closed-door summit to decide what to do next. Attendees were told not to say the word “Hamas” out loud. Instead, they would refer to the organization as “Samah” — Hamas spelled backward.
What they did not know was that the FBI had learned about the meeting in advance and had already wired the hotel. Every word was recorded, and what they heard was about to change the face of the Middle East and the West forever.
One senior leader opened with a vow: “I swear by Allah that war is deception, deceive, camouflage, pretend that you’re leaving while you’re walking that way. Deceive your enemy.” Another participant rose and described a suicide bombing as “a beautiful operation.” Then, Shukri Abu Baker, who would later be convicted of terrorism financing, spoke. And he had a plan. “Let’s not hoist a large Islamic flag,” he said, “and let’s not be barbaric-talking. We will remain a front, so that if the thing happens, we will benefit from the new happenings instead of having all of our organizations classified and exposed.”
In other words: hide. Blend in. Build something that looks American, sounds moderate, and serves as cover for everything underneath. The organization they decided to create that weekend was given an English name, a Washington address, and a mission statement about protecting Muslim civil rights in America. They called it the Council on American-Islamic Relations. You know it as CAIR. And this week, Gavin Newsom gave them $26 million.
The FBI tapes captured what CAIR was actually for.
The men in that Philadelphia hotel room were not building a civil rights organization. The FBI wiretaps recorded them discussing how to spread Hamas’s message across America without attracting attention, how to raise money for Hamas through charitable fronts, how to establish institutions that would give the Islamist movement permanent political roots in America, and how to build a network of organizations to spread a militant Islamist message and raise money for Hamas. CAIR was part of that network; the goal was never civil rights; the goal was Islamic dominance.
Four years after that Philadelphia meeting, CAIR’s own chairman, Omar Ahmad, said so out loud. Speaking before a crowd in California in 1998, he told his audience: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Quran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.” Ahmad would later deny saying those words, but the FBI wiretap transcripts from the Philadelphia meeting show Ahmad himself agreeing with the assembled Hamas operatives on the need to “camouflage” their true intentions.
Building CAIR was easy; they already had the money. The Holy Land Foundation, operating out of Texas since 1989, was quietly raising millions of dollars across American Muslim communities under the cover of humanitarian aid. What they needed now was something more sophisticated — a political shield. An organization that could operate in the open, speak the language of American democracy, and make anyone who questioned them look like a bigot.
The architecture was elegant in its simplicity. Holy Land would raise the money. CAIR would spend it on influence. One would fund Hamas. The other would make sure nobody in Washington was allowed to say so. The strategy has three layers:
First layer: The mosques.
In November 2024, Nihad Awad delivered a sermon at a Maryland mosque. “America’s 4,000 mosques”, he told his audience, “should redirect thirty percent of the nearly one billion dollars American Muslims send abroad each year toward scholarships in journalism, law, filmmaking, political science, and history”. Each mosque, five scholarships per year. Within a decade, twenty thousand trained operatives embedded in America’s most powerful institutions. By 2050, one hundred thousand, writing the narratives, arguing the cases, making the films, and running for office at every level of government. It is the pipeline, planned thirty years ago.
Second layer: Politics.
To understand what happened next, you need to know who Linda Sarsour is. She co-founded the Women’s March. She has addressed CAIR’s national leadership conference. She has called for jihad against the American government.
She has declared that Muslims must not “assimilate.” She has said, openly, that fellow Muslims should not “humanize” Israelis because they are “the oppressor.” She was eventually pushed out of the Women’s March — not for her views on Israel, but for her embrace of Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader whose antisemitism was too much even for the progressive establishment to ignore. She praised the Muslim Brotherhood as “the coolest.” And she is on record attending events alongside Rasmea Odeh, a woman convicted in Israel for her role in a terrorist bombing.
This is the woman CAIR invited to speak at its 2025 Leadership and Policy Conference. And it was there, in that room, that she said the quiet part out loud. CAIR had created a super PAC called the Unity and Justice Fund that was the single largest institutional donor to the campaign of Zohran Mamdani — the democratic socialist mayor of New York City, whose ties to the Muslim Brotherhood have been documented, and whose election would place a CAIR-aligned politician in charge of the most important city in America. And then she said something that no amount of legal maneuvering could walk back:
“The story is not just that it’s random that Zohran ascended to this place. It is our Muslim-American community. And I’ll also say that it’s Muslim money. The PACs that have supported Zohran — over 80% of Muslim-American donors in this country.”
She wasn’t describing a civil rights movement. She was describing a political operation. When Mamdani won, he wrote to her directly: “You did so much to make this a reality.” She had already promised her community that she would hold him accountable — that she would make sure he dismantled the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, the unit responsible for policing terrorism threats. “It’s not ‘we’re going to vote for Zohran and just let him do whatever the hell he wants when he gets to City Hall.’”
The third: money — and this is where it becomes criminal.
To understand what CAIR really is, you have to look not at its press releases — you have to look at its people.
The men who ran CAIR's offices did not merely sympathize with terrorism — they were convicted of it. Ghassan Elashi, founding board member of CAIR's Texas chapter, was sentenced to 65 years in prison for funneling 12.4 million dollars to Hamas. Randall Todd Royer, CAIR's communications specialist, trained with an Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group and was sentenced to 20 years for conspiring to kill American soldiers. Bassem Khafagi, CAIR's community affairs director, was deported to Egypt after pleading guilty to funding terrorist activities and publishing material advocating suicide attacks against the United States. Abdurahman Alamoudi, director of CAIR's Northern Virginia chapter, stood at a CAIR rally and declared his support for Hamas and Hezbollah to a cheering crowd, then pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and was sentenced to 23 years. Rabih Haddad, a CAIR fundraiser, was deported after an immigration judge found him to present "a substantial risk to national security." Five executives and directors. One organization.
CAIR was designated as a terror organization
The United Arab Emirates, an American ally, officially designated CAIR a terrorist organization in 2014. To understand why, you have to understand what the UAE saw that Washington preferred not to see.
In November of that year, the UAE Cabinet issued a sweeping anti-terrorism decree and published a list of 83 designated organizations. The list included ISIS, Boko Haram, and Al-Qaeda affiliates operating across three continents, as well as CAIR—a Washington-based organization with a civil rights budget, a congressional lobbying operation, and a direct line to the Obama White House.
The UAE, along with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, had watched the Brotherhood’s network — patient, institutional, generational.
But what happened next was a surprise: John Kerry, the U.S. Secretary of State under President Obama, authorized State Department officials to begin lobbying the UAE government, using the full weight of the United States foreign policy apparatus, to have a Hamas-linked organization removed from a terrorism list. The effort failed. The designation was never withdrawn. It stands to this day.
To understand why John Kerry advocated for CAIR, you need to understand what the Obama administration, at the highest levels of American government, decided to do with political Islam. The Obama White House adopted what its officials called an “engagement” strategy, a deliberate policy of treating Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups as partners to cultivate. The FBI had cut them off, the president was inviting them in. White House visitor logs showed that CAIR officials visited the Obama White House at least 20 times, while the bureau had formally suspended all contact with the organization and, in writing, declared it was not “an appropriate liaison partner” due to its ties to Hamas.
Barack Obama gave CAIR something more valuable than money. He gave it legitimacy. He made it a White House partner, and sent a signal to every federal agency, every state government, and every progressive institution in America: this organization is not a threat — it is a stakeholder.
The Holy Land Foundation Trial
The FBI had been monitoring several Hamas operatives in the United States since the early 1990s, watching money move and listening to phone calls. What the tapes revealed led to an investigation that would span a decade, cross four continents, and produce the largest terrorism financing prosecution in American history. Investigators tracked millions of dollars flowing from donors across the United States through a Dallas-based charity, the Holy Land Foundation, and then through a network of so-called zakat committees in the West Bank and Gaza. The money funded the families of suicide bombers, the infrastructure of Hamas’s military wing, and the organization’s recruitment pipeline.
In December 2001, President George W. Bush froze the Holy Land Foundation’s assets and shut it down. What did not disappear was the network. The Palestine Committee, the Muslim Brotherhood's American infrastructure that had birthed CAIR at the same Philadelphia meeting in 1993, simply redistributed.
The money that had flowed through Holy Land began moving through other channels, including mosque networks, smaller affiliated charities, the Gulf states, and Qatar, which has served for decades as the primary financial patron of the global Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates. The same ideological and financial ecosystem that built Holy Land also built CAIR, and that ecosystem did not need Holy Land to survive.
Gavin Newsom writes the checks.
In the years after the Holy Land Foundation convictions, as the FBI cut off contact and federal prosecutors sent its associates to prison, CAIR quietly executed the next phase of the plan those men had designed in Philadelphia. It expanded its chapter network to more than twenty states. It built a legal operation. It launched a voter mobilization website — Muslims Vote — and began publishing congressional scorecards rating every member of Congress on how well they served Muslim political interests. It trained mosque leaders. It recruited candidates. It created a super PAC. And it began embedding itself within the progressive coalition reshaping the Democratic Party, positioning itself as the indispensable gateway to 2.5 million Muslim-American voters concentrated in the swing states that decide American elections.
All aiming to execute the 100-year Muslim Brotherhood plan to infiltrate Western institutions — universities, media, government agencies, political parties — from the inside.
And here is something that should make your blood boil: while Texas and Florida designated CAIR a terrorist organization and Congress introduced bill after bill to revoke its tax-exempt status and freeze its funding, a watchdog investigation quietly uncovered what had been hidden in plain sight in California’s state budget. CAIR California had received at least 26 million dollars in government grants in 2022 and 2023 alone — funds it had deliberately concealed in its tax filings. The Department of Justice opened an investigation. And the man who had signed those checks, welcomed CAIR’s leadership, and announced 76 million dollars in new grant funding available to faith communities — is the governor of California: Gavin Newsom.
Gavin Newsom governs San Francisco, a city where the Pride flag flies from every corner. Let him explain, when the time comes, how he squares that with giving $26 million dollars to an organization whose ideology would tear every one of those flags down. It's already happening in Hamtramck, Michigan — a Muslim-majority city where the Pride flag has been banned, and now Newsom is creating the same scenario in the capital of LGBTQ in California.
Will LGBTQ+ in San Francisco remain silent, similar to those in Michigan, because it doesn’t align with their narrative? The hypocrisy is truly revolting.
The left and political Islam share one thing: the will to destroy what exists. They share nothing in common about what comes after. Europe already knows how that story ends. The continent that once built Western civilization is now watching it be dismantled in real time, one city at a time, as its governments fund the dismantling and call anyone who objects a racist.
And Israel — the one country that refuses to pretend, the one country actually fighting for the values the West claims to hold and for its Jewish identity — is labeled a Nazi for doing so and for not giving in to the Islamic conquest.
Barack Obama legitimized them. Gavin Newsom funds them. Europe appeases them. And Trump, who ran on stopping it, just shook hands with Tehran. America lost. Europe lost the same way — slowly, quietly, one funded NGO and one unanswered atrocity at a time. Iran executes protesters in the streets. Syria slaughters Christians. And the West writes checks to CAIR and issues statements about Islamophobia.
The enemies of the West do not fear it — and why would they? They watched Europe surrender city by city, and then they watched America follow. Obama and Newsom were useful idiots, but they surprised no one. Trump was the last hope — the one who would finally draw the line. Instead, he buckled under domestic and economic pressure, and shook hands with Tehran anyway.
While Western progressives hold their arms open in the name of inclusion, the movement they fund is already planning what comes next. The rape statistics from Europe do not lie. The no-go zones do not lie. The honor killings, the Sharia courts, the torn-down flags, and the ones raised in their place — none of it is false. Those who lie are the people watching it happen and calling it diversity. Good luck to all of us. We are going to need it.
This piece is free because the truth about what is happening to our civilization is too important to put behind a paywall, and because I want it to reach everyone who needs to read it. But every article I publish takes days of research, sourcing, and writing. I do this work because the safety of our children and the future of the West matter to me more than anything else. If this piece gave you something — clarity, ammunition, a framework for understanding what you are watching in real time — please consider becoming a paid subscriber, making a one-time donation, or picking up one of my books to keep this work alive. The people we are writing about are very well funded. We should be too.
Much love, Yama Bar
Sources & References
FBI Philadelphia wiretaps, October 1993 — United States v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, Northern District of Texas, 2008. Holy Land Foundation trial transcripts and conviction records — U.S. Department of Justice, November 2008. Ghassan Elashi conviction — U.S. Department of Justice, 2009. Randall Todd Royer conviction — United States v. Royer et al. (Virginia Jihad Network), Investigative Project on Terrorism. Bassem Khafagi deportation and guilty plea — Congressional Record, HR 4097, 119th Congress. Abdurahman Alamoudi conviction — United States v. Alamoudi, Investigative Project on Terrorism, 2004. Rabih Haddad deportation — DiscoverTheNetworks.org. Omar Ahmad quote, 1998 — reported by Lisa Gardiner, San Ramon Valley Herald. UAE terrorism designation list, November 2014 — UAE Cabinet Decree. John Kerry / State Department lobbying of UAE — reported by The Daily Beast and Politico, 2014. Obama White House visitor logs — Investigative Project on Terrorism analysis, published by The Daily Caller. CAIR California government grants — watchdog investigation, California Department of Social Services public records, 2022–2023. Nihad Awad mosque sermon, November 2024 — reported by multiple outlets including The New York Post. Linda Sarsour speech, CAIR Leadership and Policy Conference, 2025. Hussam Ayloush public statements — documented by ADL and Investigative Project on Terrorism. Zahra Billoo statements — documented by CAMERA and Canary Mission. Hamtramck, Michigan Pride flag ban — reported by NBC News and Associated Press, 2023. ISGAP report: “The Muslim Brotherhood’s Strategic Entryism into Western Society,” November 2025. Texas Republican Party resolution denouncing CAIR, 2025. Governor Greg Abbott designation of CAIR as a terrorist organization, November 2025.
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