The fourth installment of the Investigative Project’s devastating report on the terrorist links of the Council on American Islamic Relations is now online, and as someone who has been personally targeted for harassment and character assassination by CAIR, this title really hits home: CAIR Remains Apologist for Terrorist Hamas, Seeks To Silence Critics.

To say that The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has contorted logic and language to avoid criticizing its early patron, the terrorist group Hamas, would be damning enough. But the full truth is even worse: CAIR and its leaders have, over the years, actively supported Hamas positions and regularly done their best to discredit critics of militant Islamic activity.

Those ties with Hamas are at the center of today’s installment in our examination of CAIR’s history and activities.

* CAIR’s incorporator and current executive director, Nihad Awad, stated his position unequivocally in a 1994 symposium at Barry University in Florida. “I am in support of the Hamas movement,” he declared.

Awad also echoed Hamas’ absolute rejection of Israel’s right to exist, writing later that year to the American Muslim publication, The Messenger, that he hoped its use of the word “Israel” in an article had been “the result of an oversight” and that the magazine would “return to the terminology ‘Occupied Palestine’ to refer to that Holy Land.”

* Awad repeatedly has sought to justify his pro-Hamas statements by contending that they came before the group had been designated by the United States government as a terrorist organization. That argument falls apart when one considers a long history of Hamas terrorist acts committed before the 1995 designation — acts that included the stabbing of five people in a Jerusalem market in 1989 and of a Jewish seminary student in 1992, and the bombing of busses in 1993 and 1994, killing 14 and wounding dozens more.

Indeed, U.S. government condemnation had come as early as 1992, when the State Department found “various elements of HAMAS have used both political and violent means including terrorism, to pursue the goal of establishing an Islamic Palestinian State in place of Israel … Other elements, operating clandestinely, have advocated and used violence to advance their goals.”

* CAIR questioned the 1995 executive order labeling Hamas as a terrorist group. Said CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper: “We’ve been fearing something like this for a long time because there have been elements in the pro-Israeli lobby accusing Muslim groups of raising money for these kinds of purposes, with no evidence whatsoever of diversion of funds.”

* Direct statements of support for Hamas continued even after that 1995 designation. Ghazi Khankan, then executive director of CAIR-NY, told an audience at a 2001 event, “The people of Hamas who direct their attacks on the Israeli military are in the correct position.”

Again, a highly detailed PDF file accompanies this article.