Part 7 of the Investigative Project’s huge report on CAIR’s true agenda focuses on their ongoing campaign of disinformation about jihad: CAIR Seeks To Define Away Threat Posed by Radical Islamists.

Jihad? Fatwa? Wahhabism? Islamist terrorism? All terms distorted or created by the U.S. government and media to stigmatize the Muslim religion and scare the public — or so CAIR officials would have you believe.

But their protestations ignore much evidence to the contrary available in radical Islamist writings, as well as statements by CAIR officials themselves intended for internal consumption.

IPT’s detailed examination of CAIR focuses today on its leaders’ reassuring words, and places them in the context of reality.

* CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad sought to define away Islamic fundamentalism in an August 1998 interview on NPR’s “Weekend Sunday.” Said Awad, “You know, holy war is like fatwa, it’s become a buzz word. And I think they’re severely misunderstood. I don’t see holy war as a concept in Islam, it is not, it does not exist … . Jihad means legitimate struggle.” He listed what he termed “noble meanings” of jihad in Islam: A mother’s effort to raise her children, a struggle against injustice, “an honest person who wants to get good life.”

* Hussam Ayloush, director of CAIR-Southern California, agreed in an April 2005 lecture at Chaffey College. “Jihad is the Arabic word for strive. Any struggle in a person’s life, not just a Muslim’s, is a jihad,” Ayloush said. “Being a student is a jihad because you are striving to learn.”

But those, and other, reassuring definitions appeared to be aimed for public consumption. In contrast, when CAIR Chairman Omar Ahmad spoke at the 1999 IAP convention, he defined “jihad” as, in part, “to fight in the Way of Allah. To make war.”

* CAIR rejected negative meanings ascribed to a broader range of words when teams taking part in a Muslim football tournament in California in 2004 chose names such as “Intifada,” “Mujahedeen” and “Soldiers of Allah.” As an article in The Washington Post described the teams’ uniforms: “Intifada featured a man wearing a military helmet, his face — save his eyes — covered by a bandana. The Soldiers of Allah emblem showed a masked man in the act of firing a slingshot, and Mujahedeen’s depicted a horse-borne figure in flowing robes, bearing a weapon on his shoulder.”

Responding to community protests, Sabiha Khan, communications director of CAIR’s Southern California chapter, asserted: “These terms are basically very positive terms within the Muslim community and historically speaking … The popular definitions … are twisted. They’re no longer what they mean, Islamically speaking.”

The list of CAIR’s deliberate obfuscations goes on and on. The full version of today’s installment is in this PDF file.

Previous LGF posts on the IPT CAIR exposé:
Major New IPT Report: CAIR Exposed
CAIR’s Funding
CAIR Officials Convicted of Crimes
CAIR’s Ties With Hamas
CAIR Questioned Al Qaeda’s Role in 9/11
CAIR Portrays ‘War on Terrorism’ As Malicious ‘War on Islam’