OPINION:
As the U.S. confronts deadly Islamism worldwide, some here at home have been quietly helping extremists make inroads in our education system.
In 2022, 2023 and 2024, Sacramento County, California, awarded grants totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, to be distributed to the San Juan Unified School District in the state’s north-central region.
CAIR, whose stated mission is “to enhance understanding of Islam, protect civil rights, promote justice, and empower American Muslims,” has been designated a terrorist organization by Texas and Florida. It will be designated as such by the U.S. government if Congress passes a bill currently before it.
The purpose of the given funds: to support “refugee and newcomer students in district and greater community,” the district told The Washington Times.
You read that right. California taxpayer money was given to CAIR, an organization from which at least seven officials have been arrested, convicted or deported for terrorism-related offenses.
From 2022 to 2023, the group awarded about $180,000 in cash in Sacramento County, according to a recent report by the nonprofit Defending Education. In fiscal year 2024, it gave $175,602.
The district used the money on “resources for refugee students, such as online tutoring, Chromebooks to support language needs and online learning at home, the IntelliBricks coding program as an after-school activity and school supplies for newly enrolled students,” the San Juan Unified School District told us.
Our questions to the district about who approved the acceptance of the money went unanswered.
Were there any religious or political preconditions for accepting the grants? “The San Juan Unified team had to provide invoices and proof of how the money was spent; there were no other requirements,” the district told us.
So why use CAIR to disburse the funds? No entity — much less the county containing the seat of government of the world’s fourth-largest economy — could reasonably claim ignorance of CAIR’s highly concerning associations.
In 2008, Ghassan Elashi, chairman of CAIR’s Texas branch, was convicted in the Holy Land Foundation case of giving material support to a terrorist organization (Hamas) as well as tax fraud and money laundering.
The next year, the FBI cut off contact with CAIR on the grounds that the group was a Hamas front. In 2014, the United Arab Emirates declared CAIR a terrorist organization.
Yet in 2024, a district office staffer reportedly invited a CAIR representative to a “strategic core planning” meeting for parent night at Starr King K-8 School in Carmichael, California.
The strategic plan aims to “partner with our San Juan Unified community in setting high expectations for academic achievement rooted in equity and unity.”
Who better to ensure equity and unity than someone from a group with known ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?
When we asked the district why it had invited CAIR to the event, it said, “As a community organization that serves many families and students in our community, CAIR was invited to participate in identifying needs and hopes for our community and schools.”
Serves them how? With the aforementioned coding initiative? Even if we all agreed that among the most urgent needs of Afghan refugee children is after-school robotics and STEM enrichment, why should such a dubious organization be the one to provide it?
CAIR seems to spend most of its time acting as a sort of Islamic ambulance chaser anyway — filing lawsuits against entities that have supposedly infringed on the rights of Muslims in America or engaged in anti-Muslim behavior.
Yet that does not seem to be a major problem in California. In 2024, the Golden State reported 24 such incidents, according to the state Department of Justice. By contrast, it reported 310 anti-Jewish incidents that year.
No matter how you slice it, CAIR’s invitation to and presence at a public school’s parents’ night make no sense.
The district told us that it no longer receives CAIR-distributed funds from the county, but the fact that it did (and that Sacramento County gave CAIR the job of issuing those grants in the first place) does not sit right.
America’s local governments should not be handing over say in public education to groups with known terrorist associations — even if we believe, as we were told, that there was no political or religious component to the involvement.
We are not sure we do believe it.
• Anath Hartmann is deputy commentary editor for The Washington Times.
Follow the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.