The Weekly Standard - Rep. Peter King Blasts CAIR's "Don't Talk to the FBI" Poster

Press Release

By Michael Warren

Fox News reports that the Council on American-Islamic Relations has asked a chapter in California to stop using a provocative propaganda poster:

The poster, which appeared on the website of CAIR's California chapter, features a sinister-looking FBI agent with the headlines "Build a Wall of Resistance" and "Don't Talk to the FBI." The poster was designed in the late 1970s or early 1980s and has been reproduced by various groups and activists since then in response to alleged harassment by the FBI and to protest grand jury subpoenas.

"I think it's subject to misinterpretation," spokesman Ibrahim Hooper told Fox News Radio when speaking about the poster. "We decided out of extreme caution to take it down."

The poster was promoting a conference called "FBI Raids and Grand Jury Subpoenas: Know Your Rights and Defend Our Communities." The keynote speaker is Hatem Abudayyeh, identified by CAIR as an activist and Palestinian community leader whose home was allegedly raided by federal agents in September.

The conference is scheduled for Feb. 9 at the East Side Cultural Center in Oakland.

Hooper conceded the poster "crosses the line," but refused to renounce the artwork and blamed critics for fomenting what he called a manufactured controversy.

New York Republican Pete King told THE WEEKLY STANDARD this afternoon that the poster is "disgraceful" and that CAIR's response to it doesn't go far enough. CAIR should have condemned the poster, King said, as he dismissed CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper's explanation that the poster is "subject to misinterpretation" and that it was taken down out of "extreme caution. "To me, it's clearly wrong, and they should say so," King said. "They should have been full speed ahead on this."

The New York Times reported earlier this week that King, as the new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, will be investigating the radicalization of certain American Muslim organizations and concerns from law enforcement officials that leaders of such groups are sometimes uncooperative. "[This poster] goes right to the essence of the matter," King told TWS.

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