by Robert Spencer
A rock is overturned - and a toxic subculture is revealed.
The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), aided by a sympathetic establishment media, has never been known for its transparency. For years, this Muslim Brotherhood-linked organization has successfully maintained near-total silence about its inner workings. A few years ago, when a non-Muslim posed as a convert to Islam, got a job as a CAIR intern, and revealed some of this sinister and unsavory organization’s private goings on, CAIR went to court to silence him. But now, this notoriously sealed-off organization is being sued by one of its own former employees, and in the course of a bitter, protracted dispute, its toxic institutional subculture has been revealed.
The Star Tribune reported Friday that CAIR and Lori Saroya (pictured above), who was the head of its Minnesota chapter for nine years and is now a city council member in Blaine, Minnesota, are “locked in an ongoing, bitter legal dispute that has seen accusations lobbed ranging from defamation to cyberstalking and Islamophobic extremism.”
Saroya “sued CAIR in federal court in Minnesota earlier this week — nearly two years after CAIR dismissed its own federal defamation suit against her.” This is because the hot-blooded folks at the Hamas-linked org issued a press release in Jan. 2022 in which they “accused Saroya of using anonymous email and social media accounts to harass CAIR employees and spread ‘Islamophobic tropes and conspiracy theories’ about the organization.”
This is dubious on its face, as Saroya is a Sharia-observant, hijab-wearing Muslim. And so in her civil complaint, she says CAIR’s accusations are “outrageously false.” Saroya said that CAIR had an “unfortunate record of sanctioning and indulging serious allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination within its organization, retaliating against women who raise these issues and engaging in profoundly dishonest conduct vis a vis the public, the Muslim-American Community and even its own Board.” She added: “CAIR’s defamatory statements about me were intended to intimidate not just me but others like me.”
This follows Saroya earlier allegations that CAIR “maintains a culture of misogyny,” and “has been dishonest and misleading with its donors, whose contributions it has frequently misused for the purpose of silencing critics.” She also stated that CAIR’s “leadership has been dishonest with and breached its fiduciary duties to the CAIR Board, that it has violated basic rules of good governance and mismanaged the enterprise, all to the detriment of the causes about which it professes to care.”
According to IPT News, Saroya accused CAIR of “discriminating against women in pay and other workplace issues, and of ignoring allegations of sexual harassment.” Saroya has “documented a pattern of discrimination and abuse inside CAIR,” which includes “sexual harassment, abuse, and exploitation,” as well as discrimination against non-Sunni Muslims.
CAIR denies all this, but is it really unbelievable that people who believe that Sharia is divine law would obey its often misogynistic precepts? Saroya also charged that CAIR’s national Executive Director Nihad Awad engaged in “a pattern of unwelcome and highly inappropriate conduct” toward her. Even after she rejected him, “Days later he continued this conduct, following her around the site of a conference, insisting on sitting next to her every time she moved to a different seat, and pursuing her at the conference.” For Saroya, this was part of a “toxic culture at the highest levels of the organization and at certain CAIR chapters overseen by CAIR, a culture which was exacerbated by a culture of impunity.”
Saroya said that all this hadn’t come out before because CAIR “spends substantial amounts of donors’ money in order to threaten, intimidate and sue those who have the courage to speak about CAIR’s culture of discrimination and misogyny.” This culture was so deeply embedded that in 2018, when CAIR was considering hiring an attorney named Karen Hernandez as executive director of its Dallas-Fort Worth chapter, Awad was furious, claiming that Hernandez, a survivor of domestic violence, had written a “vulgar and disgusting” article about the issue. Awad declared that if Hernandez were hired, he would “dis-affiliate CAIR-National from CAIR-DFW.” Hernandez’s employment offer was withdrawn.
There is a great deal more in Saroya’s legal filing to worry Awad and company. At last, this sinister gang that traffics so freely in intimidation appears to have encountered someone who refuses to be intimidated. It could mean, at long last, their downfall.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 26 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest books are The Critical Qur’an and The Sumter Gambit. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-linked-cair-gets-sued-by-one-of-its-own/
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