Republican claims of ‘terrorism’ leave everyone unsafe, Muslim leader warns

The deputy director of the US’s biggest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group warns that Republican governors’ steps to declare his organization a “terrorist organization” won’t stop with the Muslim community.

“No governor should have the power to unilaterally declare a civil rights or advocacy group he disagrees with a terrorist organization, take punitive action against them, all in violation of due process and free speech,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told the Guardian this month. “If any governor can get away with abusing that kind of power, then no organization is safe.”

In November, the Texas governor Greg Abbott designated Cair and the Muslim Brotherhood, the century-old movement founded in Egypt and active through chapters overseas, “foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organizations”. The Florida governor Ron DeSantis issued a similar order in early December.

Mitchell cautioned conservatives who care about free speech to take the threat seriously.

“A Democratic governor could declare the Republican party a terrorist group and ban it from state contracts or ban it from owning land,” Mitchell said. “Anyone could be on the chopping block if a governor is able to win this power to simply declare American organizations to be banned terrorist groups without ever even charging them with wrongdoing.”

Texas’s designation bars the groups from acquiring property in the state and authorizes the attorney general, Ken Paxton, to “sue to shut them down”, while Florida’s order prohibits the groups, and “any person known to have provided material support or resources” to them, from receiving any state contracts, employment or funding.

While the orders are limited to the two states, national conservatives have long agitated against both groups, and Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has said that similar orders at the federal level are “in the works”.

The Washington-based non-profit organization, which was founded in 1994, has called the orders “unconstitutional and defamatory” adding that they have “no basis in law or fact”. Cair has sued in both states in response to the orders.

The Texas directive accuses Cair of having ties to Hamas, which has been designated as a terrorist group by the US government, while the Florida order claims that Cair was founded by “persons connected to the Muslim Brotherhood” and connects the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas. Cair has repeatedly denied ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mitchell believes that Cair’s “advocacy for the Palestinian people” is what has “driven Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott and other Israel-first politicians absolutely crazy”.

“Let’s be very clear: the facts are clear, Cair is an independent organization,” he said. “It has never been an offshoot or subsidiary or partner of the Muslim Brotherhood or any other foreign entity, much less a foreign terrorist group.”

Mitchell noted that “we condemn terrorism so often that Isis quite literally called for the assassination of our national executive director. We still have the publication they issued with a bull’s-eye on his head. And so that’s what real terrorists think of us.” (In 2016, Isis included a photo of Cair’s director, Nihad Awad, on a hit list of American Muslims.)

So far, he said, the designations have not disrupted Cair’s daily operations. “Cair Texas is open for business and continues to protect the community and so is Cair Florida,” Mitchell said.

He dismissed the proclamations as “publicity stunts” that he says are “meant to smear our organization and satisfy the anti-Muslim, pro-Israel crowd in their base”.

Still, Mitchell said, the designations and orders carry consequences, such as the restrictions on land purchases and state contracts, which, he argues, are “obviously unconstitutional”.

To Mitchell, the actions against Cair echo the attacks against the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1950s and 60s.

“Alabama shut down the NAACP in their state for eight years, until the supreme court intervened and allowed the NAACP to resume its work,” he said. “Texas tried to shut down the NAACP chapters in Houston and other cities.”

“To me, I see a very clear historical parallel between the targeting of our organization today and the target of Black civil rights groups in the 1960s even down to the crazy accusation that Black rights leaders and organizations were part of a communist plot to take over America,” he said.

He believes that the erosion of support for Israel in the US is motivating its supporters to fuel anti-Muslim hatred.

“It is very evident to us that pro Israel lobby groups and anti-Muslim hate groups are deliberately stirring up anti-Muslim hysteria to try to distract the American public from their Israel-first agenda,” he said.

Mitchell noted that in the US, anti-Muslim bigotry and hate incidents soared after 9/11, then declined, before rising again “dramatically” amid conspiracy theories about Barack Obama during his presidency, Donald Trump’s call during his first presidential campaign for a ban on all Muslims entering the US and high-profile attacks linked to Isis.

Around 2021, reports of anti-Muslim hate finally started to go down, he said. But since the fallout from the Hamas attacks of October 2023 and Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza, Mitchell said, “anti Muslim bigotry” has “spiked up to a level that it had not been ever, as far as our records”.

The incidents of hate that Cair has documented have ranged from discrimination in education and employment, to verbal harassment, vandalism and violent attacks.

And while Cair’s data for 2025 is not yet available, Mitchell said that, anecdotally, the anti-Muslim rhetoric this year “is dramatically worse this year than it was last year”.