Designated Terror Group CAIR ‘Pay-For-Jew-Hatred’ Policy

For decades, the Palestinian Authority’s “pay-to-slay” system has rewarded terrorists and their families — and now that same moral sickness has crossed into the United States. CAIR-California’s “Champions of Justice Fund” is paying students who break the law during anti-Israel protests, turning campus disorder into a cash-reward system that experts warn will only fuel radicalization. Even more alarming, this is the same organization once tapped by the Biden administration to help shape national antisemitism policy, despite its leadership’s past statements praising Hamas, its history as an unindicted co-conspirator in terror-financing cases, and the FBI’s decision to cut ties. With lawmakers now pushing to strip CAIR of its tax-exempt status and designate it as a terrorist-linked entity, the warning is unmistakable: when extremism is rewarded instead of crushed, it doesn’t fade — it metastasizes.

The evidence shows that CAIR is a criminal terrorist organization. This conclusion is shared by the United States government. The Department of Justice named CAIR in the federal criminal trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development,[1] which concluded with multiple guilty verdicts, as an unindicted co-conspirator in a massive conspiracy to fundraise for, and otherwise pursue, the terrorist agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestine Committee, a public relations and fund raising arm of Hamas in the United States.[2]  See generally HLF.[3]  Specifically, CAIR was named as one of the organizations formed by the defendants and co-conspirators to create the appearance of legality in the effort to raise funds and public support for Hamas and its jihad abroad.  As the evidence in the HLF trial demonstrated, these plans were part of the 1993 Philadelphia planning meeting carried out by Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas operatives, a meeting which the FBI secretly recorded pursuant to a lawful court order, the entire transcript of which was introduced into the record at the HLF trial.[4]  Two of the key participants at this Muslim Brotherhood-Hamas planning meeting were Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad.[5]  Ahmad co-founded CAIR, along with CAIR’s executive director Awad, in 1994 soon after this meeting. Ahmad served as CAIR’s chairman of the board until 2005 and Awad still serves as CAIR’s executive director.

Further, the federal prosecutors successfully resisted every effort by CAIR to have the public designation of CAIR as an “unindicted co-conspirator” removed from the court record and concluded as follows in its brief to the court:

Indeed, CAIR’s request to strike its name from the government’s co-conspirator’s list is moot, since its conspiratorial relationship with the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) was confirmed by testimony and documentary evidence admitted at trial prior to the date CAIR even filed its brief.[6]

1. After the convictions, CAIR and another co-conspirator filed motions to have their names stricken from the co-conspirator list.  The trial judge refused based on the fact that the evidence fully supported this co-conspirator designation.  (Filed as Doc. No. 1356 in HLF; see also Ex. B to the Declaration of John Stemberger filed in support of Defendant’s opposition to Plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment.)
2. A key piece of evidence introduced at the HLF trial and linked to the Muslim Brotherhood-Palestine Committee-Hamas conspiracy was a “planning memo” which describes the purpose of the “legal” organizations, such as CAIR, that the Muslim Brotherhood sought to establish in the United States:

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means.  The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.[7]

1. In addition, the FBI has publicly stated that it will have no formal or official contacts with CAIR precisely because of the evidence that linked CAIR and its senior management to Hamas and its purposes.[8] Finally, in response to a letter from Congresswoman Sue Myrick, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the U.S. Department of Justice recently wrote in relevant part: (above)

CAIR’s ‘pay-for-Jew-hatred’ policy

The California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations launched a “Champions of Justice Fund” that pays $1,000 “educational grants” to students disciplined for anti-Israel actions.

By: Mitchell Bard, JNS, December 8, 2025:

For years, the Palestinian Authority has rewarded terrorism through its “pay-to-slay” stipends—monthly salaries for Palestinians who murder Jews and for the families of “martyrs,” including suicide bombers. Some of the killers recently freed in Israel’s hostage exchanges have even become millionaires. That morally bankrupt model is now being replicated inside the United States. Hamas’s supporters here have created their own incentive system—this time to reward anti-Israel activism on American campuses.

The California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) launched a “Champions of Justice Fund” that pays $1,000 “educational grants” to students disciplined for anti-Israel actions. In October 2024 alone, CAIR-CA distributed $20,000 to protestors from elite universities like Harvard University, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.

According to the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), the fund raised more than $64,000 and framed unlawful encampments as “acts of solidarity,” urging universities to collaborate with demonstrators and portraying police enforcement as “violence.” NCRI’s Joel Finkelstein warned, “These programs support students after acts of criminality and violence, creating a reward structure for building the most militant face of the movement. This is how ideologies metastasize.”

This is not an aberration.

CAIR has a documented, decades-long record of extremism. Founded by leaders of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP)—described by the U.S. government as part of Hamas’s “propaganda apparatus—CAIR is led by Nihad Awad, IAP’s former public-relations director. Awad publicly declared, “I am in support of the Hamas movement” in 1994. He eulogized Sheikh Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, a recruiter and fundraiser for Al-Qaeda. He asserts that “Zionist organizations” are “enemies of the Muslim community” and are the “core of the Islamophobia network in the United States.” He has claimed that the “Zionist lobby, or pro-Israel” lobby has corrupted Congress.

Astonishingly, the Biden administration had listed CAIR among the organizations that would help implement its national strategy to counter antisemitism. Then came Oct. 7.

Awad publicly celebrated the massacre as Palestinians “breaking the siege,” while denying Israel the right to self-defense, later offering a farcical, antisemitic “clarification” that the attackers were merely taking a symbolic walk on “ethnically cleansed land.” It wasn’t clear which “average Palestinians” he was referring to when the video footage shot by the terrorists showed “civilians” participating in the attack.

The White House disavowed the organization and erased its name from the antisemitism plan’s website. Spokesman Andrew Bates said that “we condemn these shocking, antisemitic statements in the strongest terms.”

Other CAIR officials have echoed similar themes: comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, denying Israel’s right to self-defense and cheering Hamas’s atrocities as “decolonization.” CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial, where Hamas funders were convicted, prompting the FBI to sever all ties in 2008.

Lawmakers have taken notice. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) introduced legislation urging the U.S. State Department to designate CAIR as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. “This takes long-overdue action to confront the terrorist threat posed by CAIR, a Trojan horse for terrorism operating inside our own borders,” said Fine.

He noted that “CAIR still maintains a direct relationship with Hamas” and “is a group that celebrated the massacre on Oct. 7, saying it made them ‘happy.’” In an interview with The Daily Signal, Fine said CAIR is an “orchestrated Muslim terror front intended to legitimize Muslim terror and to shut down critics of it.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) requested that Internal Revenue Service commissioner Billy Long investigate CAIR’s nonprofit status “due to the group’s ties to terrorist organizations like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has already acted, designating CAIR as an FTO under state law and barring it from acquiring land. “The actions taken by the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR to support terrorism across the globe and subvert our laws through violence, intimidation and harassment are unacceptable,” he said.

By adopting its own “pay-to-slay” model (“pay-for-Jew-hatred”), CAIR has again revealed that it is an organization that excuses terror, rewards antisemitism and works to mainstream extremism under the veneer of civil rights advocacy. The federal government should follow Texas’s lead. The State Department and IRS must strip CAIR of its tax-exempt status and formally designate it for what its record plainly shows it to be.