Exclusive: CAIR’s Cruel Summer

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has suffered some stunning setbacks this year: rapidly declining membership, named unindicted co-conspirator by the Feds in a terrorist financing trial and more. But as Patrick Poole reports, what may be most difficult to recover from is the financial fallout the group has experienced in recent months during CAIR's cruel summer.

It’s been a bad summer for the Council on America-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Shrinking membership. Being named unindicted co-conspirator in a federal terror financing trial. And as I will show below, plummeting finances in recent months. Is there any good news in sight for America’s most prominent mouthpiece for Islamic extremism?

An inspection of CAIR’s most recent publicly available IRS Form 990 (2004) shows for that year they received $119,029 in membership dues for that year (line 3). But at $25 per membership (the current rate is $35), that would mean that in 2004, CAIR only had 4,761 dues-paying members – less than 5,000 members out of 8 million Muslims in America. This would mean that CAIR only represents 1 out of every 1,680 Muslims. Even if a lower 6 million Muslim population figure were assumed, CAIR would still only be able to claim representation for 1 out of every 1,260 Muslims for that year.

Then in May after the release of CAIR’s 2006 Annual Report and their 2005 IRS Form 990, I updated that data:

But their new 2006 Annual Report and their recently posted 2005 IRS Form 990 shows that CAIR continues to hemorrhage members. Whereas my estimates for 2004 showed that based on their membership receipts in that period they had approximately 4,761 dues-paying members, in 2005 their membership plummeted dramatically to an estimated 2,615. This puts CAIR on the same comparative membership level as the American Indian Kaw Nation in Kansas, the Cleveland Section of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, the Society for News Design, the University of Texas Longhorn Alumni Band, and the South Dakota chapter of the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), none of whom are consulted near as frequently by Beltway politicians or sought after for comment by the media establishment as CAIR.

…If this trend continues at the same pace, their 2006 Form 990 numbers will show $29,419 in membership revenues, representing only 1,177 members, roughly comparable to the membership of the Genealogical Society of Rockingham County, Virginia and the Garden Club of Tacoma, Washington – neither of which has a Washington DC lobbying office.

Audrey Hudson of the Washington Times extended that story in a June 12^th article by reporting that CAIR membership in 2006 had fallen to less than 1,700 members – a 90 percent drop since 2001 and the 9/11 attacks. Despite the fact that the information was derived from data obtained from their own tax filings and annual report, CAIR vehemently denied those findings.

In the meantime, Josh Gerstein of the New York Post reported on June 4^th that CAIR had been named as unindicted co-conspirator in the federal Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial. The impact of that designation has been so severe that CAIR remarkably filed an amicus brief with the trial judge in mid-August to have them de-listed as unindicted co-conspirators, which prompted Douglas Farah to comment here at Family Security Matters:

The underlying premise here is what, I believe, moved the DOJ to name the unindicted co-conspirators. It is not the smear campaign CAIR alleges, but rather the most expedient and possibly sole way to get evidence introduced from other members of the Muslim Brotherhood network, into the trial…

Here, the government files something in court that is customary, and generally required when a criminal defendants obtains a bills of particulars in a federal case. CAIR then files a brief, claiming it is “unprecedented.” But we should be used to CAIR’s claims by now.

In a shameless maneuver, CAIR appealed in their amicus brief to the Washington Times article they had denounced just weeks before.

But one added element to CAIR accumulating troubles that has yet to be discussed is the impact that these woes had on the organization’s finances. Until earlier this month, CAIR kept a running tally of donations on their website which showed current receipts with their budgeted goal. With an estimated $3 million annual budget, CAIR showed on their website that they needed to raise $250,000 each month. But from the beginning of June to the end of August, they fell well short of that goal.

I tracked their stated receipts every day, and the monthly contributions to CAIR and the percent that amount represented compared to their budgeted monthly goal were as follows:

CAIR pulled their running donation total from their website earlier this month as part of a comprehensive site overhaul. The last day that they had their current donation total for this month posted, September 9^th, their website showed that they had only received $1,775 for the month, meaning that CAIR would need to raise $11,820 every single day for the rest of this month to meet their monthly budget – an unlikely prospect. No wonder the information has been removed from public view.

Summer 2007 has proven to be CAIR’s cruel summer. As they are coming under increased scrutiny from multiple independent new media outlets and confronted by activists on the local and national level, their public credibility is waning rapidly.

Is there any good news for CAIR? As has been revealed in recent months, CAIR has even been abandoned by their supporters, which doesn’t bode well for their prospects. This means that CAIR will need to rely more on the extremist elements within the American Muslim community, and try to maintain their media visibility with increasingly shrill media stunts, much like the “flying imams” incident last November. Such antics don’t play well with the American public, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

At the time of this writing, the jury in the Holy Land Foundation trial is still out. Any finding of guilt will only compound CAIR’s present woes. Regardless of the trial’s outcome, much of the damage has been done as CAIR’s close ties to HAMAS and the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizational network in the US have been revealed.

Those of us that have been watching throughout CAIR’s cruel summer of 2007 may be witnesses to CAIR’s dying days. Let’s hope so.

Stop the terrorist Saudi money and these monsters will disappear. What do they have, all of 1200 “members.”

2 posted on 09/20/2007 9:34:52 PM PDT by FormerACLUmember (The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims.)

To believe that CAIR has only these sources of funding is naive. Their themes and the pattern of action, speech, and array of offices, and most of all, those terrorist lovers who are CAIR’s leaders all make it clear the CAIR is a front group, seditious vanguard of the deep pocket, oil-rich enemies of America.

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