Now that the Holy Land Foundation Hamas funding trial has resulted in convictions, will the unindicted co-conspirators in the case still be treated by the media as legitimate “civil rights organizations?” Steven Emerson says this is CAIR’s Make or Break Moment.

Recently, we lightly mocked the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its quick condemnation of Al-Qaeda No. 2 man Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s slur of President-Elect Barack Obama as a “house Negro.” Way to take the hard stand, folks.

Our point was serious though. If CAIR wants to be accepted as the mainstream Muslim-American civil rights advocacy organization that it claims to be, it must take an unequivocal stand against terror from all actors, including those who kill, and those who enable the killers, in the name of Palestinian liberation.

It has never done so. And evidence unveiled at the Hamas-support trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) shows why. CAIR was born of an effort to support Hamas in America – its founders part of the Palestine Committee who agreed in 1993 that a prospective peace deal was bad and who saw the need for a new organization to bring their message, surreptitiously, to Washington.

HLF now stands guilty of routing more than $12 million to benefit Hamas through a series of Palestinian charities. As witnesses like Matthew Levitt and Bruce Hoffman testified, that support – even when channeled to humanitarian needs – is crucial in winning popular support for the terrorist group responsible for it.

And, as the evidence made clear, the view about HLF and the charities it supported was not merely an Israeli belief. Palestinian Authority security documents reach the same conclusion. That took away a key defense argument from the first HLF trial, which ended in a mistrial last year.

Quite simply, it is time to move past the reflexive and discredited denials. If CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) want to show that we’re wrong when we consider them terror apologists, they can start by offering unequivocal endorsements of the jury’s verdict and their respect for the justice system even when it disappoints them.

Don’t hold your breath. On Wednesday, CAIR issued a brief statement…

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