A prominent Muslim civil rights group is calling on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to cancel his scheduled appearance this week alongside a man widely decried as a bigot.
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Tuesday said the newly-announced Republican presidential candidate risks doing damage to his reputation by speaking alongside Robert Spencer, an author and director of the blog “Jihad Watch.”
“If Senator Cruz believes that he can campaign for president while sharing center stage with a professional hate monger like Robert Spencer, I seriously doubt his ability to win the US minority vote or unite the country as president,” said CAIR government affairs manager Robert McCaw.
“Senator Cruz will need more than just the evangelical bloc and Tea Party votes if he wants to rise past the Republican primary,” McCaw added.
The Senator is billed to speak alongside Spencer at the New England Freedom Conference–a conservative forum being put on in Nashua, N.H. by Young America’s Foundation.
“If you are interested in public policy, free speech, less government, and a strong national defense, this conference is for you,” YAF said on its website. “Along with Senator Ted Cruz, you will hear from Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer about Islamic terrorism and jihad.”
YAF was also described by CAIR as having “ties to white supremacists,” having merged in 2011 with Young Americans for Freedom. In 2011, the latter, according to CAIR, feted a prominent member of the British far-right with a Neo-Nazi as master of ceremonies.
Spencer’s writings and opinions on Islam have long been known. In August 2011, the left-leaning Center for American Progress described him as one of the five leading “misinformation experts” in the think tank’s report on Islamophobia, “Fear, Inc.”
In one choice excerpt from the 127-page investigation, Spencer is quoted as saying Islam is “the only religion in the world that has a developed doctrine, theology and legal system that mandates violence against unbelievers.” His work, according the study, was also cited 162 times in the manifesto of Islamophobic Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.”
One month before the report was published, US law enforcement officials had to publicly distance themselves from Spencer. Wired revealed that a crude January 2009 FBI training program recommended that newly-signed up agents read, among other controversial works, Spencer’s book, The Truth About Mohammed: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion. By the time the article was published, in July 2011, an FBI spokesman told Wired that “Spencer’s book is no longer on the reading list but was not sure about the others.”
Spencer responded to “Fear, Inc.” by saying it was “designed to portray Muslims as victims and demonize all those who stand in the way of the misogynistic and unjust agenda of the Islamic jihad, whether advanced by violent or non-violent means.”
“As such, it is simply an instrument of that jihad,” he wrote in a blogpost replete with the words Islamophobia and Islamophobe in scare quotes.
Indeed, he seems to consistently deny that prejudice toward Muslims even exists. In June 2013, for example, after he and like-minded author Pamela Geller were both barred from entering Britain, the pair stated that their writings on Islam were “true and accurate” and said that “the British government is behaving like a de facto Islamic state.” Earlier this month in a blog post, he sarcastically hit out at critics, saying that “Islam is just great, and only bigoted, racist ‘Islamophobes’ think otherwise.”
Sen. Cruz announced just after midnight on Monday that he will be running for President in 2016.
