France’s interior ministry reported last year how Islamic supremacists, specifically the Muslim Brotherhood, use “entryism” to infiltrate and subvert the country’s democratic institutions. This spring, the French Senate adopted legislation seeking stronger authority to detect and prevent entryism, which confiscates the vocabulary of civil rights and leverages Western protections of minority equality to make societies more Islamic.
It may be too late for France, given two generations of large-scale, often unassimilated immigration from Muslim-majority countries, expansion of urban neighborhoods virtually off-limits to authorities, and influence within them of both anti-Western imams and criminal gangs. The United States is not Europe, but entryism is at work here too, as a recent example from suburban Washington, D.C., indicates.
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The Council on American Islamic Relations sued the Fairfax County Public Schools over the system’s attempt to discipline members of Muslim Student Association chapters at two of its 28 high schools. They had attempted to recruit others with videos posted to social media, apparently made on school property, that echoed or mocked Hamas terrorist kidnappings during the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres in Israel.
Initially, FCPS allegedly imposed in-school suspensions on four students for violating policy on freedom of expression by using visual imagery and speech that might disrupt the educational program. Pending the outcome of a lawsuit to overturn any disciplinary action at all, last month FCPS buckled to CAIR. The system temporarily agreed to neither release the students’ disciplinary records to colleges or anyone else nor discipline pupils for wearing clothing with a map of “Palestine,” that is, one that erases the Jewish state of Israel.
Fairfax County, population 1.2 million, ranks fourth of all U.S. counties in median household income at nearly $154,000. Its public school system is the ninth largest in the U.S., with 177,000 students who speak 194 languages. What could the MSA videos — at first glance, perhaps just misguided teenager speech — have to do with entryism?
Enter CAIR, posing as defenders of unfairly disciplined students. The council claims to be the biggest Muslim American civil rights group. But CAIR was an unindicted coconspirator in the nation’s largest terrorism funding case to date, the 2008 federal Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development trial. Five men, including the cofounder of CAIR’s Texas operation, went to prison for raising more than $12 million for Hamas, a U.S. government-designated terrorist organization.
Settlement in 2006 of a CAIR defamation lawsuit exposed even then that Muslim American civil rights was not the council’s real game. Dropping court action against an anti-CAIR website, the group tacitly let stand allegations it was founded by Hamas supporters and members and by Islamic terrorists.
FBI investigations revealed that CAIR, founded in 1994 by Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, had roots in the Islamic Association for Palestine. And IAP, in turn, sprang from the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood, mothership of Sunni Islamic terrorist movements including al Qaeda, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and Hamas, began in Egypt in 1928. Anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, opposed to modern, secular societies, its credo remains: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” No surprise then that Ahmad once declared that the Koran — Islam’s scripture — should be “the highest authority in America and Islam the only religion on earth.”
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Give CAIR leaders credit for consistency. In 2023, George Washington University’s Program on Extremism published “The Hamas Networks in America: A Short History.” There were CAIR’s founders. And in 2024, the Biden White House was forced to boot CAIR from its oxymoronic participation in a task force to counter antisemitism after Awad, still council executive director, celebrated Hamas’ massacres in Israel.
CAIR does not come into court in Fairfax County or anywhere else with clean hands. The D.C.-area chapter of End Jew Hatred urged county schools to stand fast in disciplining the MSA students. Executive orders by the governors in Florida and Texas have branded CAIR a terrorist organization. Virginia should do likewise.
Eric Rozenman was a member of the 2022 Virginia Commission to Combat Antisemitism. He is the author of Jews Make the Best Demons: “Palestine” and the Jewish Question, among other works.
