Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Los Angeles branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), complained recently that the U.S. government monitors Muslims who volunteer to fight for Islamic terrorist organizations abroad but does not monitor Jewish Americans who volunteer to fight in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Ayloush made his comments at an April meeting at the Islamic Institute of Orange County called “Challenging Islamophobia with My Vote.”
He complained that the U.S. government applied its Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program to Muslims and not to Jews, seeing that as an example of Islamophobia.
His remarks were reported Friday by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
His comments, as transcribed by MEMRI, were as follows (from 3:00 to 4:30 in the video that follows):
You know how many hundreds of Jewish American kids are recruited to join the Israeli occupation army? Hundreds. Every year. They leave their country, leave America, to go join with an army that is engaged, with no debate [sic], in major violations of human rights, and maybe some would argue, and I’m one of them, war crimes. And yet people in America leave this country and go there. No one has ever established a CVE program to see, why would normal Jewish American kids leave their home and join to be part of an army committing war crimes. Why? But none of that is happening. They go to the American Muslim community, although again and again we’ve seen the numbers of Muslims who join extremist terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda is very, very, very, very tiny. Very tiny. Not justifying these tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions… But again the point is going back to the question that sister Asma asked, and that is stigmatizing American Muslims, making us feel that somehow we’re guilty, we’re suspect, and making the rest of the country feel that there is a reason, there is a need to scrutinize this community. So that’s why fighting Islamophobia is not just about us feeling good. It’s not just about me being able to go to the supermarket or drive without feeling threatened. This is important, but it’s more than that. It’s about the future of our existence as proud Muslims in our own country.
Ayloush has been CAIR’s executive director in Los Angeles since 1998, according to MEMRI.
CAIR has been declared a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates and was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-funding operation.
Ayloush has a history of making notorious statements.
In December 2016, he tweeted, then deleted, a wish that more Russian military personnel had died in a plane crash. In December 2015, he blamed American foreign policy for an Islamic terror attack in San Bernardino, California that killed 14 people.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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