Health and Human Services
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking a beat from his busy day job ending the scourge of vaccines and modern medicine to take up a right-wing push attempting to link the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the United States to terrorism.
The MAHA enthusiast
announced
last month that HHS was demanding federal action on allegations that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also known as CAIR, and its California and Washington affiliates had misused federal grant funds. “If there is evidence of fraud, abuse, or ties to designated terrorist organizations, we will act,” he wrote on X.
The post came as a shock at CAIR’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C., because the organization had never received nor solicited federal funding from Health and Human Services.
“Not even a penny,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of CAIR. “[Kennedy] would know that if he had spent any amount of time doing research before he decided to publicly attack us in this way.”
Kennedy’s mystifying crusade appears to be an attempt to satisfy the demands of a group of Republican members of Congress led
by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas
, as an emboldened right wing chomping at the bit to target Muslim Americans dictates the decisions of the executive branch. After Roy and his colleagues argued without evidence that CAIR and its affiliates were connected to international terrorist organizations and had misused federal funds intended to help settle Afghan refugees, Kennedy’s fumbling attempt to address their concerns set off a bizarre chapter in the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent that left the intended targets wondering whether they were under a real investigation or had become pawns in a challenging midterm cycle.
“During election cycles we see the ramping-up of this type of anti-Muslim rhetoric,” said Saher Selod, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. “Saying we n
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