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-Lurid Crime Tales-

Controversial Muslim group CAIR now fighting a sex scandal lawsuit after it's dropped by White House over ‘happy' Hamas attack remark

2024-01-26

[NYPost] A controversial Islamic group — which the White House cut ties with after its director said he was “happy” about Hamas’ terror attack against Israel on Oct. 7 — is facing allegations of sexual assault and harassment. The suit could see the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) forced to open its books amid claims secret foreign donors are funding its multi-million budget.

Lori Saroya was once, in the words of one person who knows her, the “golden child” of CAIR. Based in Blaine, Minnesota, where she was a CAIR chapter leader, Saroya became so important to the national leadership that they brought her to the White House and groomed her to become a senior leader because she was the group’s “pride and joy.”

Now Saroya, 42, is shaping up to be CAIR’s worst nightmare as she pushes back in an ugly legal battle with the controversial Muslim civil rights organization that includes charges of sex assault and harassment allegations involving several CAIR leaders.

Saroya, who is now the first Muslim to serve on the Blaine City Council, filed a federal defamation lawsuit against the group last week in federal court in Minnesota. That suit was in response to a statement put out by CAIR in January 2022, accusing Saroya of “cyberstalking” CAIR staffers by using burner email and social media accounts to spread “Islamophobic tropes and conspiracy theories” about the organization. In her complaint, Saroya said that the press release led to her being bullied online and made her so afraid that she stopped going to her mosque. She also said the allegations in the press release came up during job interviews and she wasn’t offered jobs by those people. She has said she left CAIR after she called on the organization to look into sex assault and harassment allegations against several leaders, including one Saroya — who other members praise as “courageous” — said “engaged in a pattern of unwelcome and highly inappropriate conduct” toward her.

Saroya’s filing comes almost two years after CAIR dismissed its own federal defamation suit against Saroya in which leaders accused her of waging “a systemic and continuous internet smear campaign designed to damage [CAIR’s] reputation and to cause it severe economic harm.”

CAIR also charged in that lawsuit that Saroya “voluntarily resigned” from CAIR after a female staffer said Saroya had harassed her to the point that “the female staffer was contemplating seeking a restraining order.”

Saroya calls CAIR’s claims “outrageously false” in her own civil complaint and one of her lawyers wrote in the suit that all the organization’s accusations are “part of a concerted effort to blacken her reputation, destroy her credibility, and silence her and others who have raised serious concerns about CAIR’s abuse of women, dishonest practices, and violations of civil rights, among others.”

“The complaint lays out a record of serious problems within an organization that holds itself out as as civil rights organization but as the complaint makes clear has engaged in a pattern of conduct which is the very opposite,” Saroya’s Boston-based lawyer, Jeff Robbins, told The Post.

Formed in 1994 by a group of young Muslim activists concerned about the rise in anti-Muslim discrimination, CAIR is now the biggest Muslim civil rights group in the US and includes about 33 local chapters across the US.

But there has also been controversy around the group and its uber-powerful co-founder of CAIR, Nihad Awad, who is Palestinian-American.

Last month, the Biden administration said it had ended its work with CAIR on crafting a national antisemitism strategy after Awad said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’ terror attack against Israel on Oct 7. Awad made the shocking statement at the 16th Annual Convention for Palestine in Chicago on Nov. 24, according to video footage circulated by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

The New Venture Fund — part of a liberal dark-money network — gave $40,000 to the Arizona chapter of the CAIR which shared a template on Instagram to help others denounce school administrators or employers who issue statements “in support of Israel.”

CAIR was also rocked by a lengthy National Public Radio investigation in April 2021 that focused mainly on the then-head of the Florida chapter of CAIR, Hassan Shibly, and allegations involving secret marriages, bullying and sexual harassment. Shibly has denied the allegations reported by NPR. The report included claims from numerous women who had issues with Shibly as well as other senior leaders at CAIR.

Saroya, however, according to several people who know her, was unusual in having the courage to stand up to the CAIR leadership. Prior to resigning from CAIR in 2018, she headed CAIR’s Minnesota chapter from 2007 to 2016 and then jumped to the national office as a national chapter development director and board member.

A former volunteer for CAIR, who did not want to be identified publicly, told The Post that she witnessed some of the same abusive behavior on the part of CAIR senior leadership that Saroya claims she did. She blamed Awad for engendering a culture of fear at CAIR which enables senior leaders to target staffers and volunteers, mainly women.

Posted by:Skidmark

#4 Can we finally get their filth out of our schools? Too much to ask?

Posted by: Rex Mundi 2024-01-26 11:54

#3 I wonder if Biden is a secret Muslim?

He's sure acting like one!

Posted by: Seeking Cure For Ignorance 2024-01-26 03:08

#2 Well, they got Al Capone on tax evasion.

Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2024-01-26 01:17

#1 Lest we forget....

Posted by: Mercutio 2024-01-26 01:09

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