Condemn ‘Rising Islamophobia,’ CAIR Urges Obama Ahead of Oval Office Address
(CNSNews.com) – Ahead of President Obama’s primetime Oval Office address on the terrorist threat Sunday – following what appears to be the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 – the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) urged the president to use the opportunity to condemn what it called “rising Islamophobia”
“Hate-filled rhetoric and anti-Muslim attacks are putting the lives of American Muslims and their families in real danger,” said the group’s national executive director, Nihad Awad.
“We are particularly concerned by an emerging pattern of government officials and employees, as well as other public figures, seeming to endorse or encourage violence against Muslims.”
Awad said that since the Paris terror attacks last month CAIR has received more reports about attacks, threats, intimidation and discrimination against Muslims – or people thought to be Muslim – and against Islamic institutions “than during any other limited period of time since the 9/11 terror attacks.”
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL) claimed credit for the orchestrated Nov. 13 attacks in the French capital, which cost 130 lives, and is also associating itself with last week’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.
Law enforcement authorities are treating the killing of 14 people at a party attended by county employees as a terrorist attack, although Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Sunday it was too soon to say whether ISIS was indeed responsible.
The perpetrators in San Bernardino, subsequently killed in a shootout with police, were a Muslim married couple – the U.S.-born son of Pakistani immigrants, Syed Rizwan Farook, and his Pakistani-born wife Tafsheen Malik, who lived for years in Saudi Arabia and moved to the U.S. in mid-2014 on a “fiancé visa.”
Awad called on Obama to include in his address “a clear condemnation of the rising anti-Muslim attacks and hysteria we have witnessed in recent weeks, and to state that violence against American Muslims and their institutions will not be tolerated.”
“ISIS knows it cannot defeat our nation militarily, so the terror group’s only hope is to divide Americans along religious and ethnic lines,” he said. “This address provides the opportunity to clearly demonstrate national unity, not division.”
CAIR, which calls itself “the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization,” did not elaborate Sunday on its allegation about government officials and public figures “seeming to endorse or encourage violence against Muslims.”
But in previous recent statements it has accused some GOP presidential candidates of espousing “extreme anti-Muslim rhetoric and falsehoods.”
It has also said the climate was being worsened by the debate over Syrian refugees, charging that some state governors and lawmakers were “playing on public fears and spreading misinformation about the federal government's ability to screen Syrian refugees being resettled into the United States.”
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