US Muslim Brotherhood Group Publishes Directory of Muslim US Elected Officials

On 25 Octo­ber 2022, the Coun­cil on Amer­i­can-Islam­ic Rela­tions (CAIR) pub­lished a direc­to­ry list­ing Unit­ed States elect­ed offi­cials of the Mus­lim faith, includ­ing some tied to the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (GMB). Accord­ing to the direc­to­ry intro­duc­tion:

Despite the ever increas­ing threat of domes­tic and inter­na­tion­al Islam­o­pho­bia, Amer­i­can Mus­lims are clear­ly tak­ing con­trol of their own nar­ra­tive by reg­is­ter­ing to vote in large num­bers and run­ning for office. […] While Mus­lim Amer­i­cans have tak­en sig­nif­i­cant steps towards increas­ing our polit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion in gov­ern­ment, much work remains to be done. Stud­ies show the U.S. Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion con­tin­ues to grow; and Mus­lims are on their way to becom­ing the sec­ond-largest reli­gious group in the coun­try. That means we have to con­tin­ue build­ing foun­da­tions in every state that will one day ensure we have equi­table rep­re­sen­ta­tion across all lev­els of our democracy.

Read the rest here.

The doc­u­ment was authored in coop­er­a­tion with Jet­pac; a Mus­lim polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee co-found­ed by for­mer CAIR-Mass­a­chu­setts board mem­ber Nadeem Mazen. Jet­pac and CAIR also thanked the Mus­lim Amer­i­cans in Pub­lic Ser­vice (MAPS), a Wash­ing­ton, DC-based group seek­ing to serve as a net­work among Mus­lim pub­lic ser­vants in gov­ern­ment, for their con­tri­bu­tion in iden­ti­fy­ing some of the officials.

The direc­to­ry lists 189 elect­ed Amer­i­can offi­cials who iden­ti­fy as Mus­lim and hold state or local office across thir­ty states. They include mem­bers of Con­gress, state leg­is­la­tors, may­ors, coun­cilors, school board offi­cials, judi­cia­ry mem­bers, and law enforce­ment. With 40 Mus­lim elect­ed offi­cials, New Jer­sey has the most Mus­lim offi­cials, fol­lowed by Michi­gan with 39 offi­cials. The report lists sev­er­al that are tied to orga­ni­za­tions part of the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (GMB), including:

• Mau­ree Turn­er, a for­mer board mem­ber of the CAIR-Okla­homa chap­ter who was elect­ed to the Okla­homa state legislature
• Michi­gan State leg­is­la­tor Abra­ham Aiyash, who served as pres­i­dent of the Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty Mus­lim Stu­dent Association
• Ako Abdul-Samad, re-elect­ed to the Iowa state legislature’s 35th dis­trict and was chair­man of the Amer­i­can Mus­lim Alliance, a Mus­lim advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion tied to the US Mus­lim Brotherhood
• New York State Assem­bly­mem­ber Zohran Mam­dani, the founder of a New York chap­ter of the Stu­dents for Jus­tice in Pales­tine, a pro-Pales­tin­ian activism group described by one anti-Semi­tism expert as fos­ter­ing “an aggres­sive anti-Semit­ic atmos­phere on campus”
• Iman Jodeh, the first Mus­lim and Arab woman elect­ed to the Col­orado State Leg­is­la­ture in Novem­ber 2020, par­tic­i­pat­ed in a high-lev­el vir­tu­al con­fer­ence of the Amer­i­can Mus­lims for Pales­tine, a Pales­tin­ian advo­ca­cy group with strong ties to both the US Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and the Hamas sup­port infra­struc­ture in the US.

All of the above are mem­bers of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. The doc­u­ment also con­tains sev­er­al Demo­c­ra­t­ic Mus­lim offi­cials with a his­to­ry of close­ly coop­er­at­ing with GMB orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashi­da Tlaib, Rep. André Car­son, and Indi­ana Sen­a­tor Fady Qaddoura.

Recent­ly, CAIR has demon­strat­ed an inter­est in elect­ing addi­tion­al US Mus­lims to pub­lic office, and in April 2021, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed that a CAIR/Jetpac direc­to­ry of Mus­lim elect­ed offi­cials list­ed three Demo­c­ra­t­ic state rep­re­sen­ta­tives and one appointee to the Biden admin­is­tra­tion tied to orga­ni­za­tions part of the GMB. In Octo­ber 2020, the GIOR report­ed that Cal­i­for­nia Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty offi­cials work­ing for CAIR had authored an elec­tion vot­ing guide pos­i­tive­ly rat­ing votes by Demo­c­rat law­mak­ers, includ­ing Vice Pres­i­dent Kamala Har­ris, who ear­li­er had sent let­ters of sup­port to CAIR.

CAIR describes itself as “a grass­roots civ­il rights and advo­ca­cy group and as “America’s largest Islam­ic civ­il lib­er­ties orga­ni­za­tion.” It was found­ed in 1994 by three offi­cers of the Islam­ic Asso­ci­a­tion of Pales­tine, part of the US Hamas infra­struc­ture at that time. Doc­u­ments dis­cov­ered dur­ing the ter­ror­ism tri­al of the Holy Land Foun­da­tion con­firmed that the founders and cur­rent lead­ers of CAIR were part of the Pales­tine Com­mit­tee of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and that CAIR itself is part of the US Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. The orga­ni­za­tion is led by Nihad Awad, its long­stand­ing Exec­u­tive Direc­tor and one of the three founders. Recent­ly, CAIR has been gen­er­al­ly por­trayed in the media as a Mus­lim civ­il rights group.