The Council on American-Islamic Relations has suspended operations in Florida after a federal court rejected its request to block the state’s designation of the organization as a domestic terrorist group.
Earlier Thursday, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier posted on X: “This morning, a federal court upheld Florida’s Domestic Terrorist Organization law and rejected CAIR’s attempt to stop the designations.”
Later, the attorney general posted, “CAIR has officially suspended operations in Florida.”
In April, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation establishing designations for domestic terrorist organizations that included CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In late October, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida heard arguments in a case brought by CAIR to block the terrorist designation. The court on Thursday sided with Florida.
The Daily Signal reached out to CAIR for comment. The national organization had not responded as of publication.
The CAIR Florida webpage says: “We have suspended our operations in Florida because of Governor DeSantis and other state officials’ baseless and unconstitutional enforcement of the state’s unprecedented new ‘domestic terrorist organization’ laws against us. The ACLU, SPLC, and their partners are representing us in a federal lawsuit challenging this designation on First Amendment and due process grounds.”
The webpage then directs people to the American Civil Liberties website. “CAIR is the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country and CAIR-Florida is its state chapter. The nonprofits are organized under the laws of the District of Columbia and Florida, respectively,” the ACLU post says. It adds, They have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime. They do not engage in “terrorist activity.” They serve, and employ, Floridians.”
CAIR was founded in 1994 and characterizes itself as a civil rights group for Muslims. It is also politically active.
CAIR Action, a separate political advocacy organization, announced that a record 97 Muslims were elected nationwide in Tuesday’s elections.
During the federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, first brought in 2004, prosecutors presented evidence concerning a network known as the Palestine Committee, which was established by individuals associated with the Muslim Brotherhood to support the Palestinian cause and Hamas.
In 2007, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator along with other domestic Muslim organizations and individuals when evidence presented in the Holy Land Foundation case included a wiretapped 1993 meeting of Palestine Committee leaders in Philadelphia showing that the Hamas support network established CAIR to defend its front groups via both information warfare and lawfare
CAIR has said it is not connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, saying the “so-called 1991 ‘Muslim Brotherhood memo’ has nothing to do with CAIR. The document never mentions our organization, which wasn’t even founded until 1994.”
CAIR has repeatedly said it does not support acts of terrorism, “whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group.”
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
