Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) sent a letter on Tuesday alerting U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon about what he said are efforts by the Council of American-Islamic Relations “to influence K-12 schools.”
The letter came after CAIR announced plans in August to partner with schools in Pennsylvania and Delaware to help make them “more inclusive.”
“It is well documented that CAIR has deep ties to pro-Hamas terrorist organizations and publicly supports Hamas’s terrorist activities,” Cotton wrote. He added that the U.S. Department of Justice has listed the council as a “member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee.”
“Such an organization should never have access to our nation’s children,” the senator wrote. “While details of their alleged partnerships are unclear, CAIR’s history makes it clear that its influence will be detrimental and possibly illegal.”
“The U.S. Department of Education must ensure that CAIR is not given an opportunity to push its radical, pro-terrorist, anti-Israel ideology on American schoolchildren,” the senator wrote.
In August, Cotton sent a letter to Bill Long, then-commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, asking the IRS to investigate CAIR’s nonprofit status due to what the senator said were its ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
