WhatsappThe 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.
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.
