Ed Morrissey links to a Washington Times article containing some statistics regarding the Council on American Islamic Relations that you won’t be seeing on the evening news anytime soon:
According to tax documents obtained by The Times, the number of reported members spiraled down from more than 29,000 in 2000 to less than 1,700 in 2006, a loss of membership that caused the Muslim rights group’s annual income from dues to drop from $732,765 in 2000, when yearly dues cost $25, to $58,750 last year, when the group charged $35.
The organization instead is relying on about two dozen individual donors a year to contribute the majority of the money for CAIR’s budget, which reached nearly $3 million last year. …Critics of the organization say they are not surprised membership is sagging, and that a recent decision by the Justice Department to name CAIR as “unindicted co-conspirators” in a federal case against another foundation charged with providing funds to a terrorist group could discourage new members.
M. Zuhdi Jasser, director of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy, says the sharp decline in membership calls into question whether the organization speaks for 7 million American Muslims, as the group has claimed.
Indeed–as Morrisey adds:
For a group that only has 1,700 members, it has an inordinate amount of political clout. The fact that roughly 25 people paid $3 million and represented the majority of its financing should raise some eyebrows. It comes to an average contribution of $120,000 each for last year alone.
Who are these fundraisers and what do they want? The organization just got named an unindicted co-conspirator in support of the terrorist group Hamas. They pressed hard for Keith Ellison’s election here in Minnesota; it would be helpful to know who these donors are to understand the motivation behind using CAIR’s rapidly-diminishing resources for the election.
But don’t expect the legacy media to investigate anytime soon. They’ve got bigger stories to persue.
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