From an interview in frontpagemag.com:
The Last Days of CAIR
FP: It appears that CAIR is in quite a bit of trouble lately. Give us an update.
Yerushalmi: Four of my clients, who were all once clients of CAIR, have filed a federal civil complaint alleging criminal fraud and racketeering against CAIR.
The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, arises out of what we can call the Morris Days affair. CAIR’s Herndon office, now shuttered, had hired Morris Days in June 2006 as their “Resident Attorney” and “Manager for Civil Rights”. As it turns out, Days was in fact not an attorney as he and CAIR represented to the public and as one might expect, he did not provide the legal services for those clients who came to CAIR for assistance.
What many people don’t realize is that CAIR operates and presents itself as a public interest law firm, much like the ACLU. As a PILF, it must comply with the codes of professional responsibility applicable to lawyers in the jurisdictions in which it operates and keep sacred the fiduciary duty it owes its clients. As the complaint sets out in careful detail, CAIR trampled on its clients and disregarded its professional obligations with a callous and calculating malice.
Specifically, according to the complaint we have filed on behalf of our clients, CAIR failed to conduct a background check on Days prior to hiring him and when CAIR officials did discover his massive fraud, they immediately set about to cover it up. CAIR officials purposefully concealed the truth about Days from their clients, law enforcement, the Virginia and D.C. state bar associations, and the media.
The complaint identifies CAIR as a racketeering enterprise under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which is a criminal racketeering statute that allows victims to sue the defendants in civil court. In addition to damages, my clients are seeking injunctive relief under this and other statutes to shut down CAIR and to prevent the individual defendants from engaging in public interest legal work in the future.
The named defendants are: the Council on American-Islamic Relations Action Network Inc. (dba CAIR); Nihad Awad aka Nihad Hammad who serves as executive director of CAIR National; Parvez Ahmed who was the chairman of the board of CAIR National during the relevant time period; Tahra Goraya who was the national director of CAIR but who has since resigned; Khadijah Athman who is the manager of the “civil rights” division of CAIR; and Nadhira al-Khalili, Esq., who is in-house legal counsel for CAIR.
Also named as defendants are Ibrahim Hooper and Amina Rubin, CAIR’s director of communications and coordinator of communications, respectively. According to the complaint, these two were directly responsible for issuing fraudulent press releases about the Days fraud scheme, thus aiding and abetting the CAIR cover-up.
FP: Why in your view did CAIR behave in this way?
Yerushalmi: Fundamentally, I would surmise for two reasons. The first and one more specific to CAIR is the fact that they really don’t care about “Muslims civil liberties”. They have the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas agenda to pursue. They use American Muslims as “victims” to advance da’wa and lawfare against the US all in the name of Jihad fisabilillah—Jihad (“soft” or “stealth”) in the name of Allah.
The second and more generic answer is something I have witnessed over my more than 24 years as a litigator dealing with securities fraud and other white collar issues. A criminal organization that presents itself as a legitimate law abiding corporate citizen invariably, when put under stress, falls prey to its own bad character. In this case, CAIR, and its host of bad actors, had a serious decision to make when they learned of the Days fraud. They could have come clean or covered up. The complaint is clear what choice they made.
FP: Can you talk a bit how CAIR exploited Muslim “victims” to advance the Islamist agenda in the U.S.?
Yerushalmi: To begin, the complaint shows that Muslims and non-Muslims, but certainly mostly Muslims, came to CAIR with a variety of legal problems. In the Herndon office, they saw hundreds of clients. Morris Days, in his capacity of “resident attorney” and “manager of the civil rights division” engaged with these clients and even took money on behalf of CAIR to represent these people. But, he was not a lawyer. The complaint explains that CAIR failed to conduct even a minimal due diligence or oversight to protect their clients from charlatans like Days. Days was not the first person in the world to claim he was a lawyer when he was not. CAIR owed its Muslim public and everyone else who came to them a fiduciary duty of care—that is the highest duty in the law. When CAIR discovered his fraud, they “joined” the fraud, per the complaint, by covering it up.
Why would a putative Muslim civil rights organization behave this way? Seemingly wholly at odds with the safeguarding of the legal interests of the very people they claimed to protect.
The answer of course is that they are not in the business of protecting individual Muslims. They are in the business of advancing the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas agenda in this country through lawfare and stealth jihad. And, that is not my characterization but the US Attorney’s office which prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation. What we see in this particular case that we have brought in federal court on behalf of our clients is this characterization born out in real time.
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