The Tampa office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations — better known as CAIR — taped an orange notice to its doors Thursday and ceased operations, making sure to take a parting shot at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis while invoking the Constitutional right to free speech.
CAIR’s prickliness with Florida’s conservative governor is unsurprising. He’s been a massive thorn in the organization’s side for almost a year. Back in December of 2025, DeSantis, following in the footsteps of Texas and, interestingly, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) before them, issued an executive order that designated CAIR a terrorist organization, making it susceptible to executive action in the state. CAIR and its Florida affiliate immediately sued on the grounds that the order violated free speech and due process protections, something they claimed as a U.S.-based organization.
By the spring of 2026, a federal judge had attempted to block the order, but Florida’s legislature quickly passed legislation that codified DeSantis’ right to make such designations. CAIR sued again. But by October 2026, DeSantis had reaffirmed the terrorist designation, CAIR’s lawsuit had been dismissed, and, a day ago, the designation took effect.
CAIR, defeated, shut its doors and signaled it planned to appeal. For now, however, the controversial Muslim group is done in the state of Florida.
Lest anyone feel inclined toward sympathy for CAIR, believing it to be the innocuous civil rights group it vociferously claims to be, there’s plenty of evidence the organization has never operated completely transparently, and, more concerning, that its ties to known terror organizations are more than ephemeral or simply partisan.
At issue is the organization’s ties to known terror networks like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. These ties, according to testimony presented to the U.S. Senate in 2026, Lara Burns, senior research fellow on extremism at George Washington University, present as nearly incontrovertible.
In that testimony, Burns describes the now-infamous “1993 Philadelphia Meeting” in which the FBI recorded a group of people affiliated with the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation (HLF) (which would later be convicted in Texas of providing material support to Hamas), and the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) discussing how to continue supporting Hamas broadly, but also within the United States.
According to Burns, the attendees of that meeting were interested in setting up a front group that would primarily defend other front groups from scrutiny by the U.S. government and American media. Documents revealed in the HLF trial, says Burns, showed that the new organization would turn out to be CAIR and would ultimately be established by two IAP leaders in attendance in Philadelphia.
Those individuals were Omar Ahmad (IAP, CAIR) and Nihad Awad (IAP, CAIR). CAIR purports to be the largest Muslim civil rights/advocacy organization in America, and Nihad Awad remains CAIR’s Executive Director today. … Ahmad also discussed opening the new ostensibly independent organization in Washington D.C. (that would become CAIR) and identified a problem of staffing it with unexposed people and the difficulty in hiding their true agenda.
Cut to 2014 when, with Obama still in office, the UAE designated CAIR a terror group, putting the organization in league, in their eyes, with al-Qaida and the Islamic State. “While CAIR has previously been linked to Hamas, it has held hundreds of meetings with White House officials on a wide range of community issues and has sought to present itself as a mainstream Muslim organization,” Fox News reported at the time.
Then in November 2025, shortly before DeSantis made his move, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott named CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood “foreign terrorist organizations and transnational criminal organizations” and restricted their ability to buy property in the state.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,’” Abbott said at the time. The nod to CAIR’s goal of “mastership of the world” is compelling given that CAIR explicitly states a goal of electing more Muslims to office in the U.S.
The property restriction is especially interesting given reporting that CAIR, which has always claimed to eschew foreign funding of any kind, was found in July of 2026 to have been the beneficiary of $7.7 million from the Islamic Development Bank (ISDB) — long accused, as the Middle East Forum (MEF) reported, “of serving as a vehicle for the financing of Islamism around the world.”
The funding was part of a $30 million dollar project dating back to 2013 for “CAIR Plaza” in Washington, DC. The project is intended to “…provide income for the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to support its activities in the field of defending the civil rights and liberties of American Muslims and disseminating a true image of Islam and its principles of tolerance.”
As MEF noted, The Foundation for Defense of Democracies calls ISDB a “multilateral bank in which Iran (a U.S.-designated state sponsor of terrorism) has a seven percent voting share” and one that is credibly thought to have “engaged in corruption, covered up money laundering operations, assisted Iran and its proxy Hezbollah to avoid U.S. sanctions, and supported Islamist terrorist organizations.”
These revelations, taken with concerns about what CAIR is planning next — one of George Washington University’s latest extremist studies is called “The Long Game” and details CAIR’s plan to infiltrate and influence K-12 schools in the U.S. — suggest that CAIR’s agenda has always been about more than simple civil and constitutional rights protections for American Muslims.
DeSantis’ moves in Florida, at the least, exposed an organization that hasn’t been totally honest about its funding and goals. And, at best, the actions have opened the door for other states to feel free to examine whether CAIR is representing the American Muslim community in good faith or whether its ultimate agenda portends something much darker and much more international.
