The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) — the organization labeled a terrorist organization in the United Arab Emirates — is calling on 2016 Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz to remove individuals from his national security advisory team which CAIR has labeled “infamous Islamophobes.”
Cruz announced his robust 23-member national security coalition on Thursday.
On Thursday, CAIR released the following declaration:
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today called on GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to drop designated hate group leader Frank Gaffney Jr., retired Lieutenant General William G. “Jerry” Boykin and other Islamophobes as foreign policy advisers.
CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad stated, “Who a candidate picks for his or her advisers says volumes about that candidate’s worldview. By choosing infamous Islamophobes as foreign policy advisers, Senator Cruz indicates that he subscribes to their conspiratorial worldview and to the anti-Muslim bigotry that would inevitably shape their policy recommendations. We ask Senator Cruz to drop any adviser who has a past history of promoting conspiracy theories or religious bigotry.”
Federal prosecutors named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation’s Hamas-funding operation.
The organization cited the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as designating Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy (CSP) as a “hate group.” In a February article published by Breitbart News, Gaffney denounced the “hate-mongering of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
CAIR also called out Cruz Security Team members Clare Lopez and Fred Fleitz of Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy. Cruz coalition member Andrew McCarthy was also called out by name.
Gaffney is founder and president of the Center for Security Policy. In December, Gaffney described the organization to CNN’s Don Lemon,:“It’s a group that I started with a number of my colleagues back in 1988, essentially to promote what President Reagan, my old boss, used to call a strategy of peace through strength.”
In February, CAIR executive director Nihad Awad accused Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump of crossing “the line from spreading hatred to inciting violence.”
Four members of Cruz’s national security coalition were identified as having served in President Ronald Reagan’s administration, five served or participated in some facet of the George W. or George H. W. Bush administrations, and one member that served as a former aide to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
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