Colin Wright@SwipeWright
A terrorist on the FBI Most Wanted list was sitting on the board of an American nonprofit. How can that happen?
We’ve been tracking Islamist influence networks in American civil society, and my new piece in @CityJournal with Florida Lt. Gov. Jay Collins (@JayCollinsFL) and @ncri_io's Joel Finkelstein, shows why Florida is a key battleground.
The CAIR California story is a good place to start. CAIR received more than $40 million in public money even as its Hamas-linked ties were being documented in congressional testimony.
But Tampa shows how all of this works on the ground.
We found that the actual secretary-general of Palestinian Islamic Jihad—an FBI Most Wanted terrorist sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury—was simultaneously sitting on the board of an American nonprofit. This is documented in public filings.
And after federal prosecutions exposed the network, it just rebranded under new organizational names, with many of the same people, regained nonprofit protections, and kept going.
CAIR Florida then worked closely with this network, inviting convicted members and terror financiers to its annual gala, dismissing their terrorism convictions as baseless, and featuring them in fundraising videos.
Code Pink and Medea Benjamin are part of the same story because they fund CAIR.
Big mistake doing that in Florida.
Lt. Gov. Jay Collins is pushing the right measures at the state level and deserves real support. The federal designation process is slow by design, and these networks know how to exploit it.
What we’re calling for is simple and straightforward: if an organization’s leadership or major donors have terrorism convictions or Treasury sanctions on record, its tax-exempt status should face enhanced scrutiny.
This would provide basic accountability for a government-granted privilege these networks have learned to exploit.
States need to lead here. If they don’t, this will keep happening.
Read our report below.
🔗city-journal.org/article/florid…
