Thread by @orangebegum

One of CAIR's core functions, like any Muslim American civil rights group in the last 20 yrs, is to protect Muslims against state surveillance. That the legal director was working as an informant for an antiMuslim hate group with ties to Israeli intelligence scrambles everything.

https://twitter.com/ayshabkhan/status/1470969247132229635

It also underlines the messy and common connections between the surveillance governments and right wing organizations do.

And I know for a fact that Romin represented people who were caught up in the FBI's anti-Muslim surveillance dragnet. This is one of the legal services CAIR offered the community here, like it does across the country: cair-ohio.com/home-page-vers…

So you have a legal director representing individuals, purportedly to protect them against state surveillance, acting as an informant in another context. It makes you wonder what other lines were crossed.

To be clear, I've known amazing people who work at CAIR in Ohio and around the country. CAIR has done amazing work for Muslim communities under very hostile conditions--hostility ginned up by Islamophobes like Emerson and also decades of US foreign and domestic policy.

This more than anything else screams again how strong right wing revanchist forces are, and the resources they have at their disposal, to organize narratives, and to pressure and incentivize people to do terrible things.

making already vulnerable communities more vulnerable. Attempting to undermine what little organization our communities have by infiltrating, dividing, criminalizing.

I would be remiss to not add that the feds have also directly targeted CAIR over the years, national leadership and chapters, in ways that have long been public.