• CAIR was co-founded in 1994 by Ibrahim Hooper, Nihad Awad, and Omar Ahmad, all of whom were officials of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and functioned as Hamas’ recruitment arm in the United States.
• CAIR opened its first office with the help of a $5,000 donation from the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a self-described charity founded by Mousa Abu Marzook. In December 2001, the Bush administration seized all HLF assets because it had raised millions of dollars from Americans to fund Hamas.
• Co-founder Nihad Awad candidly asserted at a 1994 meeting at Barry University, “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.”
• On February 2, 1995, U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White named CAIR Advisory Board member and New York imam Siraj Wahhaj as one of the “unindicted persons who may be alleged as co-conspirators” in Omar Abdel Rahman’s foiled plot to blow up numerous New York City monuments. On June 6, 2006, CAIR's Ohio affiliate held a large fundraiser in honor of Wahhaj.
• In October 1998, CAIR demanded the removal of a Los Angeles billboard describing Osama bin Laden as “the sworn enemy.” According to CAIR, this depiction was “offensive to Muslims.”
• In September 2003, CAIR's former Community Affairs Director, Bassem Khafagi, pled guilty to three federal counts of bank and visa fraud and agreed to be deported to Egypt. Federal investigators said that a group Khafagi founded, the Islamic Assembly of North America, had contributed money to terrorism-supporting activities and had published material supporting suicide attacks against the United States.
• In April 2005, Ghassan Elashi, a founding Board member of CAIR’s Texas chapter, was convicted of knowingly doing business with Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook, who was his brother-in-law.
• In 2006 FBI agents raided the home of Muthanna al-Hanooti, one of CAIR’s directors, in connection with an active terrorism investigation.
• Randall Todd Royer, who served as a communications specialist and civil rights coordinator for CAIR, worked for Lashkar-I-Taiba, an al Qaeda-tied Kashmir organization that is listed on the State Department’s international terror list. He also was indicted on charges of conspiring to help al Qaeda and the Taliban battle American troops in Afghanistan.
• Onetime CAIR fundraiser Rabih Haddad was arrested on terrorism-related charges and was deported from the United States due to his subsequent work as Executive Director of the Global Relief Foundation, which in October 2002 was designated by the U.S. Treasury Department for financing al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
• During the 2005 trial of Sami Al-Arian, who was a key figure for Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the United States, Ahmed Bedier of CAIR’s Florida branch emerged as one of Al-Arian’s most vocal advocates.
• In the aftermath of 9/11, federal agents raided the Washington-area home of CAIR civil rights coordinator Laura Jaghlit as part of a probe into terrorist financing, money laundering and tax fraud.
• Abdurahman Alamoudi, one of CAIR's former directors, is a supporter of both Hamas and Hezbollah, and is currently serving a 23-year prison sentence for terrorism-related convictions.
• CAIR board member Nabil Sadoun co-founded, along with Mousa Abu Marzook, the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), which, according to investigators, is a key Hamas front in America.
• One of CAIR’s founding directors, Rafeeq Jaber, is a supporter of Hezbollah.
• In 1998 CAIR sponsored a rally at Brooklyn College where Islamic militants exhorted the attendees to carry out “jihad” and described Jews as “pigs and monkeys.”
• CAIR’s parent organization, the Islamic Association for Palestine, was named in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as one of the Brotherhood's likeminded “organizations of our friends” who shared the common goal of conducting “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands ... so that ... God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.”

There is no excuse for a U.S. congressman to be ignorant of these facts. It is less acceptable for him to be indifferent to them.

But Joe Sestak is well practiced at skating evasively around even the most stubborn facts. Consider, for example, his slavish support for the presidential ambitions of Hillary Clinton. Shortly after Hillary claimed, falsely, to have narrowly evaded enemy fire during a 1996 trip (as First Lady) to Bosnia, Sestak, in an interview with Chris Matthews, defended Clinton by likening her “mistake” to the verbal miscues of some great Americans of yesteryear:

“Well, Chris, you’re a student of history,” said Sestak. “You remember when Teddy Roosevelt was running for president. He claimed he led the charge up San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders. Actually, he didn’t. He went up Keaton Hill. And it turned out to be that was not true. You remember....”

Matthews interrupted: “But he [Roosevelt], in fact, faced enemy fire, and in fact, I read all about it, Admiral, and you did, too. He actually was in a firefight. Was Hillary Clinton ever under enemy fire? Did she ever duck and cover because of sniper fire ever in her life? That’s the question.”

Sestak’s reply: “No, and that’s what’s great about her. She said, Hey, I misspoke. I was mistaken. But let’s take all the incidences because the important issue here, Chris, is the whole cloth of the woman. You had Franklin Roosevelt, who when he ran for vice president, actually claimed he was a Latin American expert, and here he was, saying he wrote the constitution for Haiti. Or John F. Kennedy – he claimed that there was a missile gap, and he had Addison’s disease. The point is this, Chris. Would we have wanted them as President? You bet we would have.”

Sestak’s strained defense of Mrs. Clinton becomes easier to understand when one considers that he served as National Security Council Director for Defense Policy in the Bill Clinton administration. Not only that, but his 2006 congressional campaign received strong support from onetime Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, infamous for having stolen, in advance of the 9/11 Commission hearings in 2003, National Archive documents that characterized the Clinton administration’s anti-terrorism practices as woefully inadequate.

In March 2006, the same Sandy Berger held a fundraiser for Joe Sestak’s congressional campaign. The event raised tens of thousands of dollars for Sestak, whose spokesperson Allison Price was Director of Communications at Berger’s DC Consulting and Lobbying Firm. The venue for the fundraiser was the Washington, D.C. law office of attorneys Janice Enright (Treasurer of Hillary Clinton’s 2006 Senate campaign) and Harold Ickes, onetime Deputy Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton.

Ickes had been dubbed the “Director of Sanitation” in the Clinton White House because so much of his time was taken up with scandal-related damage control for President Clinton. “Whenever there was something that [Bill Clinton] thought required ruthlessness or vengeance or sharp elbows and sharp knees or, frankly, skullduggery, he would give it to Harold,” former Clinton advisor Dick Morris once told Vanity Fair.

Nor were Berger and Ickes the only controversial contributors to Sestak’s 2006 campaign. Among the more notable private donors to his congressional run were: Media Matters for America CEO David Brock; former Bill Clinton advisor Vernon Jordan; former Clinton counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke; former Democrat Senator Bob Kerrey; actor Edward Norton; comedienne Rosie O’Donnell; entertainer Barbra Streisand; billionaire financier George Soros; President Clinton’s Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick (who in the 1990s called for restrictions on information-sharing between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies involved in terrorism investigations, thereby hampering the government’s ability to derail terror plots like 9/11); and Norman Hsu (a businessman who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Hillary Clinton’s 2006 Senate campaign, causing Mrs. Clinton great embarrassment when it was learned that Hsu had been charged with fraud in California, and had illegally bundled donations to Clinton as a way of circumventing campaign-finance rules). The League of Conservation Voters also sent money to Sestak’s campaign.

All in all, Joe Sestak’s tenure in office is notable more for what he has not done, than for what he has done. He has not repudiated a group with demonstrated ties to Islamic extremism; in fact, he actually hired someone from that organization to work for him. He has not protested when his party allies fabricate dangers that they never faced. And he has not distanced himself from an admitted thief who endangered national security for purely political ends.

Small wonder, then, that he remains popular with his party’s partisan base. In Rep. Sestak, they recognize one of their own.