The Dailycaller is reporting that Barack Obama’s deputies are holding “hundreds” of closed-door meetings with a jihad-linked lobbying group that is widely derided by critics as a U.S. arm of the theocratic Muslim Brotherhood.
The admission of meetings with the Council on American-Islamic Relations came from George Selim, the White House’s new director for community partnerships, which was formed in January to ensure cooperation by law enforcement and social service agencies with Muslim identity groups in the United States.
“There is hundreds of examples of departments and agencies that meet with CAIR on a range of issues,” he told The Daily Caller, after being asked if his office refuses to meet with any Muslim groups.
CAIR is “the group with the worst record of deception and the deepest ties to terrorists,” said Steven Emerson, the director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which tracks the public activities of Islamist lobbying groups.
“The White House is so clueless and/or compromised” when dealing with the brotherhood, said Robert Spencer, the author of several books about Islam and jihad. CAIR, he said, is “the political front of a radically repressive, Jew-hating, woman-hating organization.”
The House of Representatives last month prodded the Department of Justice to end all contacts with CAIR.
“The [appropriations] committee understands that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has an existing policy prohibiting its employees from engaging in any formal non-investigative cooperation with CAIR [and] the committee encourages the attorney general to adopt a similar policy for all department officials,” said the committee report accompanying the 2013 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill, passed in mid-May by the House.
The DC interviewed Selim during a June 7 State Department conference on diversity that was hosted by the Office of the Special Representative to Muslim Communities.
After he admitted the extensive ties, Selim declined to explain further. He walked away, but returned to insist to TheDC that it cannot record his comments.
The office’s deputy director, Adnan Kifayat, also berated TheDC for taping the interview with Selim. “That was wrong… it is really bad form,” he said.
“You’re putting a career at risk by asking [questions] without telling him… you cannot ambush people and expect them to actually cooperate,” Kifayet said, adding that TheDC could have committed a felony by recording Selim when he was using a cellphone shortly before the interview.
