The obvious parallel is to the tens of thousands of Muslim-Americans CAIR enlists to bolster crowds condemning “Islamophobia” and any discussion of Islamic terrorism, but offer at best anemic support for pro forma denunciations of terrorism. As The Federalist’s Sean Davis has noted, the analogue between the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Italian American Civil Rights League is so close that, reading the latter’s public statements from the early 1970s and replacing “Italian” with “Muslim,” you’d be hard-pressed to spot the incongruence.
The way Sciorra described “the mobbed-up League” and its efforts could be an apt descriptor for CAIR, a group founded and run by ex-Islamic Association for Palestine staffers that has had more than one of its employees convicted of terror-related criminal activity. As Sciorra explained, while the crowd at the league’s rallies wore pins discussing their Italian pride, the leadership had more strategic concerns. They focused on attacking federal law enforcement and purposefully conflating all investigation of Mafia criminal activities with discrimination against the large Italian-American community.
The only way to end this perceived “discrimination,” the league insisted, was for the government and media to change its ways; not only must it stop using the word “Mafia,” it must deny that any such criminal conspiracy existed. And they did. The Department of Justice adhered to federal regulations, which prohibited use of the word. “There is nothing to be gained by using these terms,” U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell wrote, “except to give gratuitous offense” to “many good Americans of Italian-American descent.” The New York State Police had a similar rule. The word “Mafia” was deleted from the script of “The Godfather” at the behest of Colombo’s league.
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