In December, Gov. Ron DeSantis designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Brotherhood “terrorist organizations.”
His executive order called upon the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to “undertake all lawful measures to prevent unlawful activities” by those groups, and requires all executive agencies to prevent “any person known to have provided material support or resources to such organization” from receiving “any contract, employment, funds or other benefit or privilege” from “any state executive agency, any state entity regulated by such agency, or any county or municipality in the state.”
CAIR Florida immediately went to federal court and persuaded U.S. District Judge Mark Walker to issue a temporary injunction blocking the designation, citing First Amendment concerns.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier responded on April 20 by filing a 55-page plea in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, arguing the executive order doesn’t target protected speech or activity but “simply designates terrorist organizations in an effort to keep state resources from those designated entities and their material supporters.”
(In a separate filing, the AG’s office is trying to get Walker tossed from the case, alleging he made “several derogatory statements directed at Florida officials” that demonstrate bias against DeSantis and Uthmeier.)
DeSantis’ move came weeks after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott similarly designated the two groups as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations. Meanwhile, Florida GOP U.S. Rep. Randy Fine filed legislation in Congress a year ago designating CAIR a foreign terrorist organization. The measure has picked up just seven co-sponsors and has never received a committee hearing (Fine sponsored a similar bill in the Florida House during the 2024 session; it passed but never acquired a Senate companion).
That followed correspondence by Arkansas Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and then-Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik requesting that U.S. Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent investigate potential ties between CAIR and Hamas, already a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
CAIR, founded in 1994, has labeled itself the most prominent civil rights organization for the Muslim community in the United States. Its national headquarters is in Washington, D.C., and it has more than 25 chapters around the country, including in Tampa and Sunrise, in Broward County.
So why, during the past year, has the organization has become such a target for some conservatives?
CAIR’s critics would say it’s not an overnight epiphany.
They look back to the aughts, when CAIR was listed as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation (HLF) for Relief & Development case in 2007. That listing lost the organization credibility and support in certain circles. Nearly two decades later, it remains the top talking point when critics such as DeSantis and Abbott attack CAIR.
The Holy Land Foundation case
The foundation at the time was considered the largest Muslim charity in the country. In a 42-count indictment unveiled on July 27, 2004, a federal grand jury in Dallas accused it and seven of its senior leaders of providing and conspiring to provide material support to Hamas, the Islamic militant group that operates in Gaza and was designated a foreign terrorist group by the U.S. government in 1997.
A May 29, 2007, government filing listed 246 individuals and entities as unindicted co-conspirators in the case, including CAIR. They were accused of acting as part of a network designed to aid Hamas, although they were not criminally charged or indicted. CAIR was cited for alleged involvement with the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee (a designated foreign terrorist organization since 1997) or its offshoots.
CAIR responded by filing a brief with the U.S. District Court for the Northern Division of Texas asking the court to remove its name, arguing the filing continued the “demonization of all things Muslim” that began after Sept. 11, 2001.
Both the federal trial court in Dallas and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the release of the names of those 246 groups and individuals violated their due-process rights under the Fifth Amendment.
However, U.S. District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government had presented “ample evidence to establish the association” of CAIR as well as the Islamic Society of North America and the North American Islamic Trust with Hamas, by as reported by Politico’s Josh Gerstein.
Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford University, says that move was extremely prejudicial to all the organizations named in that document.
“There’s a number of Muslim organizations and people named, and the decision to do that when you don’t have evidence actually to accuse them of a crime, but to surface their names in that fashion and expose them to public vilification, is a problem,” she told the Phoenix.
READ MORE: CAIR Florida comes to the Capitol, despite ‘terrorist’ designation
“I think that was a deeply problematic decision and it did have consequences, unfortunately, for those whose names were raked through the mud at that time.”
CAIR officials emphasize a fact: Neither they or their organization has ever been charged with any crime. “Not once,” the group says on a page on its website set aside to address “conspiracy theories about CAIR.”
“The HLF case in Texas is probably one of the classic examples of a mockery in the courts,” CAIR Florida executive editor Hiba Rahim told a Phoenix reporter during a news conference in Tampa on April 7.
“There were over 200 organizations that were listed at that time as unindicted co-conspirators. The court struck that down. And since then, CAIR has never been accused of anything. And I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to this word ‘unindicted,’ which has a very heavy meaning. If there was anything to be charged with, we would be indicted, which we have not been, because there is nothing there.”
As Rahim noted, the first prosecution against the HLF defendants ended in a mistrial. In a second trial in 2008, the Holy Land Foundation and five of its leaders were found guilty of providing material support to Hamas. One of them, Ghassan Elashi, a co-founder and former chairman of HLF who was reported to have been a founding board member of CAIR’s Texas chapter, was sentenced to 65 years in prison.
The reverberations for CAIR were palpable.
The FBI says evidence introduced in that trial “demonstrated a relationship between CAIR, individual CAIR founders (including its sitting president emeritus and executive director) and the Palestine Committee,” wrote Richard C. Powers, assistant director in the Office of Congressional Affairs in the FBI, in a letter to then-Arizona U.S. Sen. Jon Kyle in June 2009.
“The FBI’s decision to suspend formal contacts was not intended to reflect a wholesale judgement of the organization and its entire membership,” Powers wrote. “Nevertheless, until we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS, the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner.”
In June 2009, Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio said she would no longer designate a day in November of that year to honor CAIR, citing communications from at least two interest groups about the group’s alleged ties to terrorism, as reported in the Tampa Tribune.
In 2011, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller said the bureau had no “formal relationship” with CAIR, but that the organization’s officials and chapters regularly worked with FBI officials on investigations and related matters, The New York Times reported.
(It’s not unprecedented for the FBI to cut ties to groups it has previously worked with. The agency announced in October that it was cutting ties with both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center).
Elad Ben David is a researcher in the Institute for National Security Studies-Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and an expert on contemporary Islam in the United States and other western societies. Ben David, who holds a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies, says that, for CAIR’s critics, the designation in the HLF case has become a recurring reference point — often invoked without much legal context — serving more as a “symbolic marker than as definitive proof of wrongdoing.”
“Over time, this has created a kind of reputational stickiness,” he wrote in an email to the Phoenix. “Once an organization is publicly linked to a major terrorism-related case, that connection can endure well beyond the legal process itself. It tends to resurface in public debates, policy discussions and even official rhetoric, reinforcing a particular narrative regardless of the lack of prosecution.”
The Hamas surprise attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 Israelis, gave the issue fresh urgency. That was followed by the furious military response by the Israeli Defense Forces, which has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to an Israeli military spokesperson, the Times of Israel reported in January. That’s roughly the figure given by the Gaza Health Ministry.
Protests against Israel’s response took place on Florida university campuses in the fall of 2023, led by the group Students for Justice in Palestine. In response, Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System, issued an order banning the group from participating in protests at the University of Florida and the University of South Florida. CAIR Florida filed a legal complaint challenging that order, although ultimately the case was dismissed.
A year later, DeSantis opined that pro-Palestinian student protesters should be expelled from their universities, and that those who were international students should have their visas canceled.
“CAIR’s conduct following the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks, merit [sic] renewed scrutiny,” Cotton and Stefanik wrote in their letter to Secretary Bessent in October. As did CAIR’s efforts “supporting anti-Israel campus protests,” which, the two Republicans said, “have led to incidents of antisemitic harassment and violence.”
Ben David believes the convergence of those factors helps explain the escalation.
“It’s less about a single organization in isolation and more about a broader political and cultural moment in which issues related to Islam, Israel and activism have been become especially salient,” he said.
No Florida lawmaker has been more critical of CAIR than Fine, whose X post that, “if they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” prompted CAIR to demand he resign, calling him a “a modern Klansman and Nazi all wrapped into one, only his targets are Muslims and Palestinians.”
“CAIR was formed for the sole purpose of supporting Muslim terror,” Fine, who is Jewish, told the Phoenix in a text message.
“These disgusting people said what happened on Oct. 7 made them happy. Muslim terror has no place in the state of Florida — or America — and I am glad to see the state continuing the efforts I began with HR 1209 in 2024, where the Florida House officially designated CAIR Muslim terrorists. I am continuing that fight at the federal level.”
Shortly after the Oct. 7 attack, Nihad Awad, CAIR’s national executive director, said he was “happy to see people breaking that siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land, that they were not allowed to walk in,” in a video posted on X by the Middle East Research Institute.
“And yes, the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves, and yes, Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense.”
Those comments triggered a firestorm of criticism.
Awad released a statement two weeks later claiming “an anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian hate website selected remarks from my speech out of context and spliced them together to create a completely false meaning,” referring to the Middle East Research Institute.
Targeting civilians “is never an acceptable means of doing so, which is why I have again and again condemned the violence against Israeli citizens on Oct. 7 and past Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, including suicide bombings, all the way back to 1990s — just as I have condemned the decades of violence against Palestinian civilians.”
Nevertheless, the remarks sparked sharp objections, this time from Democrats.
The New York Times quoted a spokesperson for then-President Joe Biden as condemning “these shocking, antisemitic comments in the strongest terms.” Arizona Democratic U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego called the comments “despicable and downright antisemitic.”
Ben David argues it was a “mistake” for CAIR not to be clear in condemning the Oct. 7 attack, but one that reflected strategic tension CAIR faces “between the expectations and prevailing sentiment of a Muslim base that is hostile toward Israel, and the need to maintain public political legitimacy — against the backdrop of intensified anti-Israel discourse following Oct. 7.”
Last month, three groups — the Middle East Forum, the National Jewish Advocacy Center, and the Network Contagion Research Institute — filed an amicus brief in support of DeSantis’ executive order against CAIR.
“CAIR is not the benevolent civil rights organization that it purports to be or that the district court believed it to be,” the brief argues, contending Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood created CAIR to “carry out their mission within” the United States.
Their brief repeats another argument critics of CAIR have alleged over the years: that it was conceived “not as an independent ‘civil rights’ organization” but instead “as an instrument to support Hamas’ political, financial and ideological campaign in the U.S. while avoiding detection.”
The Phoenix reached out to all three groups behind that brief, as well as the law firm that filed it. A representative of the National Jewish Advocacy Center initially agreed to speak but ultimately declined to do so.
When asked to respond, a CAIR spokesperson referred the Phoenix to a section of the organization’s website that addresses “urban legends.” The page cites a letter by then-Secretary of State John Kerry in 2014 to Awad in which he wrote, “Let me reiterate, first, that the U.S. government clearly does not consider CAIR to be a terrorist organization.”
CAIR also cites a newsletter written by Awad in 2000 in which he states that the organization was formed to address “stereotyping and defamation” of Muslims in the United States.
Members of the Jewish and Christian communities have appeared with CAIR Florida at press conferences in Tampa and Tallahassee in support of the group.
“The most important thing is solidarity. CAIR has always stood with us in the community,” said Samuel Ronen of the Progressive Jewish Coalition of Tampa Bay.
“CAIR on paper and in practice is really no different than an organization like the ACLU, which, while the right might target every now and then, certainly not with the same bile, not the same fear mongering that they’re bringing to CAIR, right?” Rosen said.
“And the only real difference there that I can tell, at least based on the work that I have seen inside the ACLU and the work that I’ve seen being an ally of CAIR, is that these are Muslims. That’s truly the only difference that I can think.”
Andy Oliver, pastor of Allendale Methodist Church in St. Petersburg, said in a text message to a reporter that his faith compels him to “stand with my Muslim neighbors when they are targeted by the state.”
“If I follow Jesus, I cannot stay silent while another community is scapegoated. Today, it’s Muslims being called terrorists. Tomorrow it will be churches, nonprofits and anyone else who refuses to bend to DeSantis’ narrow view of who belongs in Florida.”
Some conservatives have advanced that same argument, at least regarding legislation DeSantis signed into law last month allowing a handful of state government officials the power to designate domestic terrorist organizations in Florida. The bill (HB 1471), sponsored by Rep. Hillary Cassel, R-Dania Beach, also bans state funds for schools affiliated with designated foreign or domestic terrorist groups.
“I think that when you give that much authority to an elected, or, in the case of this bill, sometimes non-elected officials, I think that’s very dangerous,” former Florida Panhandle state House Republican Joel Rudman told a Phoenix reporter on WMNF radio in Tampa in March.
“Now, my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle, I’m sure they’re looking at this bill, saying, ‘These statutes. They can’t be warped. They can’t be abused. We have no intention of abusing them.’ But you have to understand that every bill you pass into law, there’s going to have some unintended consequences, and you have to be prepared for how those statutes are going to be interpreted when you’re not the majority party. … I think any constitutional conservatives Republicans should have a problem with that bill.”
A focus on Sharia law
That bill also bans Sharia law in Florida.
Mustafa Akyol is a senior fellow at the libertarian CATO Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. He wrote in The Dispatch in October that, as a Muslim who has long admired America’s freedoms, he agrees Sharia should “never be the law of the land, not only in America but anywhere else, including the Muslim world.”
Aykol writes that in places like Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, Sharia is a “huge concern” but says that it’s not really “law” in the Western sense.
“It is rather about how Muslims pray, dress, eat, or fast,” he says. “It also includes rules of marriage, divorce and raising children, as well as business contracts and loans. None of these mandates violate human rights, as long as they are observed voluntarily, and they don’t have to define the laws of any state.”
He goes on to note that while the Muslim-majority world itself is considerably secular, fearing Sharia law in the United States — where the Muslim minority makes up 1% of the population “is highly far-fetched.”
Some GOP candidates have put their opposition to Islam and the threat of Sharia law at the center of their campaigns in the past year.
In late March, Republican former Florida House speaker and gubernatorial candidate Paul Renner held a press conference in Tampa during which he claimed “the long-term compatibility of Islam in this country does not exist.” If elected governor, he said, he would propose a federal ban on Muslim immigration to the United States.
Other Republicans around the country have made startingly brash comments about Islam.
“Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Tennessee U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles has said.
Akyol worries the elevated anti-Muslim rhetoric will leave Muslims unsafe.
“This will also harm America’s story of being a free country where everybody can worship freely and everybody can live in peace and equality regardless of their religion,” he told the Phoenix in a phone conversation.
“And these politicians that are worried about Islamists — they see Islam as a major problem. They have a point — Islamism is a major problem in some parts of the world but, if American Muslims are unsafe, if American Muslims are demonized, I think the biggest winners will be the Islamists, because their narrative to other Muslims is that ‘freedom is a lie. Democracy is a lie. The western countries are always hypocritical and hateful of Muslims. Never trust in them. They will always come after you.’
“And, actually, if Muslims are demonized simply because for what they are or what they believe in or how do they live, then that will be a vindication of the Islamists’ narrative, which will use this very effectively.”
Meanwhile, litigation continues in CAIR’s lawsuit. The DeSantis administration hopes the Eleventh Circuit overturns Judge Walker’s injunction halting the governor’s executive order.
The underlying lawsuit challenging the designation remains in Walker’s court in Tallahassee. For now, anyhow.
DeSantis and Uthmeier want the Eleventh Circuit to remove Walker from the case, claiming that his order blocking the designation of CAIR as a terrorist organization “demonstrates his inability to put aside his contentious history with the governor and fairly decide the case.”
As examples, the governor’s attorneys cite Walker’s written comment in his order granting CAIR Florida’s motion for a preliminary injuncton that, “The First Amendment bars the governor from continuing the troubling trend of using an executive office to make a political statement at the expense of others’ constitutional rights.”
Another sentence they say that demonstrates his bias is this: “Once again, Florida chooses political posturing over the First Amendment.” In all, they cite six statements from Walker that they claim show his alleged bias.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
