Of CAIR, Michael Graham and Me

At Accuracy in Academia’s 20th anniversary dinner, a fine man—Michael Graham—served as emcee of the event, gratis. At the time, Graham was the popular conservative host of a morning program on the ABC radio affiliate in our nation’s capital—WMAL. The week after Mr. Graham spent the evening with us, WMAL suspended him. One month later, he was fired. There is no cause and effect vis`a vis AIA. Graham was fired for allegedly calling Islam a terrorist organization while on the air. This occurred the week after the dinner. Ironically, this is about the one current event he did not explore in his remarks.

I say “allegedly” because Graham’s full quote went like this:

“Because of the mix of Islamic theology that—rightly or wrongly—is interpreted to promote violence, added to an organizational structure that allows violent radicals to operate openly in Islam’s name with impunity, Islam has, sadly, become a terrorist organization.”

“It pains me to say it,” Graham added. “But the good news is it doesn’t have to stay this way, if the vast majority of Muslims who don’t support terror will step forward to reclaim their religion.” For these words, the vocal and visible Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) wanted Graham “punished,” as CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper put it. As columnist Joel Mowbray points out, CAIR and Hooper have never recommended punishment for actual terrorists, most notably, The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and its longtime elder statesman, Yassir Arafat.

Indeed, a couple of years ago when Arafat was still alive and kicking, I gave Hooper at least a half a dozen opportunities to denounce Arafat and the PLO in a five-minute telephone conversation. The CAIR spokesman ignored them all. Hooper was actually calling me to complain about a story we had posted on Ken Timmerman, author of Preachers of Hate, an in-depth book on radical Islamicists. When we posted that story, our web statistics showed that we had 3 visits from Saudi Arabia, for the first time. Those three visits preceded about 300 e-mails complaining about the Timmerman story, demanding that we pull down the article from our web site. Actually, about 300 people sent us the same e-mail, cut and pasted from a site set up specifically for that purpose.

What those letters, or that letter, did was point out that when Al Neuharth (USA Today’s publisher) made statements similar to Timmerman’s, CAIR demanded and got a retraction. I guess that’s why I never offered one: I am not Al Neuharth.

The first e-mail that I received accused me of being a Zionist. I was so thrilled that I forwarded the missive to my entire address book with a short personal note. “Someone has finally called be a Zionist,” I wrote. “All my friends have been called Zionists and I hadn’t.”

“I felt so left out.” By way of contrast, now I feel like a reaffirmed, validated member of a larger community. And I am in good company indeed; Michael Graham, for example.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.