One thing you can say about the left: they almost always take care of their own. While many establishment Republicans and self-professed conservatives have been all too willing over the years to throw their compatriots under the bus at the slightest sign of leftist disapproval, leftists generally tend to stand by any of their number who is in trouble. The targeted leftist, meanwhile, can always count on the left’s media establishment to rush to his or her or xis defense and to defame any of the leftist’s patriotic critics as hateful, bigoted, and racist.
However false the charges may be, when the establishment media is broadcasting them to every nook and cranny of the nation, they’re hard to counter, and lo and behold, before too long the leftist who was being criticized has been transformed into a victim of the right-wing smear machine. In this vein, the Washington Post on Sunday went to bat for the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), attacking Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for having the temerity to designate it and the Muslim Brotherhood as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
Breaking out its finest sad violin music, the WaPo piece led off with an anecdote about how wonderful CAIR is. “Whether speaking at local government meetings or protesting over the war in Gaza and Islamophobia in public schools,” wrote the Post’s Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “Amina Ishaq counts on the Council on American-Islamic Relations to defend her rights and those of the growing Muslim community in this politically divided Houston suburb. ‘They used to come out to our protests to make sure we were okay,’ said Ishaq, a social worker who is active at her local mosque.”
Gee, that’s swell, because you know how violent and dangerous those crazy right-wing redneck racist yahoos are. Back in the real world, however, Muslims are rarely the target of hate crimes, so CAIR’s presence at Muslim protests in Houston was likely unnecessary. JNS reported in Aug. 2025 that “of the 2,942 religion-based hate crimes that were reported to the FBI in 2024, 2,041 (69%) offenses targeted Jews… The next largest anti-religious bias type last year was the 256 offences targeting Muslims, which made up about 9% of all religion-based biased incidents. That means Jews were about 660% more likely than Muslims to be victims of anti-religious bias offenses in the United States last year.”
The Post, however, painted a very different picture, sobbing that “to Ishaq, it is as if Abbott and other Republican officials are attacking the Anti-Defamation League, a historic anti-hate group founded to combat antisemitism, or the NAACP. ‘They’re protecting our civil liberties,’ she said of CAIR.” The story complains that “Abbott’s declaration accused the D.C.-based nonprofit of having ties to Hamas, which the federal government has labeled a terrorist group (CAIR officials deny any ties to Hamas).”
The Washington Post’s tiny and hapless band of remaining readers are thus likely to get the impression that the only problem with CAIR is that Abbott accuses it of having ties to Hamas, which the federal government, for reasons it does not bother to explain, has designated a terror organization. (Those who are confused about that point can consult the Oct. 7, 2023 jihad massacre in Israel.)
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The venerable publication does not bother to mention the fact that back in 2010, U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Solis denied CAIR’s appeal of its designation as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case. Solis found "ample evidence to establish the association" of CAIR and two other Muslim groups with Hamas. FBI officials have stated publicly that they cut ties with CAIR because of its links to Hamas.
When Hamas brutally massacred 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, Nihad Awad, CAIR’s cofounder and longtime executive director, expressed his happiness: “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7. And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”
This is the group for which the Washington Post is running interference. While it’s no surprise that the far-left rag would side with CAIR over Gov. Abbott, this is a particularly vivid example of how the establishment media is not in any sense a news source anymore. It’s a propaganda outlet for the hard left and its allies, and nothing more.
