Excerpt:
Omar Ahmad's picture and bio have been removed from CAIR's national website, but his likeness has turned up on another CAIR site, a local chapter's one in California. Given CAIR's publicly known history linking the group to Hamas and given the fallout from the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trials, one would think that CAIR would wish to shed its troubling past. With regards to Ahmad and some others, though, it seems the group has embraced it, proving that CAIR is willing to either sink or swim with its radicals.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR was founded in June 1994 by three individuals, Omar Ahmad, Nihad Awad and Rafeeq Jaber. At the time, all three were involved with the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), what was then the American propaganda wing of the terrorist organization Hamas.
According to Awad, Ahmad (a.k.a. Omar Yahya) was the driving force behind CAIR. In a February 2000 article, entitled 'Muslim-Americans in Mainstream Media,' Awad wrote, "Omar suggested to me that we leave the IAP and concentrate on combating anti-Muslim discrimination nationwide. He proposed that I move to Washington, D.C., where any effective national effort would have to be based, while he tried to raise the seed money for the project."