CAIR Washington co-organized an April 17 event sending letters to imprisoned terrorists and violent criminals, according to promotional materials and a video published by event cosponsor Nidal Seattle, as the CAIR branch’s executive director was in the midst of running for state legislature.
A video published of the Palestinian Prisoners Day event by Nidal Seattle on Saturday showed CAIR’s logo projected on a wall during a presentation, and one CAIR Washington representative appeared to be a guest speaker.
The logo had appeared on an April 13 Telegram advertisement for the event, and Nidal’s Instagram posts advertised CAIR’s involvement on Saturday and April 17.
CAIR Washington and the representative who appeared to have spoken at the event did not respond to multiple queries about participation and event content and did not share the promotional materials on its social media accounts.
Nidal explained, in a promotional image bearing both the CAIR Washington logo and a picture of Palestinian terrorists released as part of a ransom for the October 7 massacre hostages, that the event was geared toward supporting Palestinian prisoners and isolating Israel so that they could advance “the victory of the Resistance and the revolutionary forces of Palestine and the region.”
Letters sent to ‘prisoners of Palestine’
“Victory to the resistance,” said one speaker during the event, according to a Nidal video. Nidal claimed that 50 letters had been sent to Palestinian students and Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails and to “prisoners of Palestine detained in the US.”
In relation to prisoners in the US, Nidal tagged a campaign to free Salah Sarsour, who was arrested by ICE on April 2 under suspicion of funding terrorist organizations and lying on immigration forms about his conviction for throwing Molotov cocktails in Israel.
Another campaign called to free the Holy Land Five – officers of the Holy Land Foundation convicted for funneling funds to Hamas.
In the April 17 advertisement, Nidal also profiled Tarek Bazrouk, who was described as “unjustly imprisoned for his support for Palestinian liberation.”
Bazrouk was sentenced to 17 months of prison in October for hate crime assaults against Jewish students and activists. He kicked a Jewish student in the stomach, stole another student’s Israel flag and punched him in the face, and punched a third pro-Israel activist in the nose in three separate incidents.
According to text messages, Bazrouk was a self-identified “Jew hater,” was happy to learn that family members were in Hamas, and prayed to Allah to “get us rid of [Jews].”
Nidal also expanded on the Lebanese prisoners it sought to support with the event, claiming that Israeli forces had arrested “workers, fishers, shepherds, and freedom fighters.”
One of these supposed “freedom fighters” was Imad Amhaz, who was allegedly a senior Hezbollah naval officer and was captured by the IDF in a 2024 raid.
A video of the event showed that the subjects of the letters included Yaman Dweikat and Jihad Ahmed.
According to the Free Palestinian students campaign, Dweikat was the Hamas Islamic Bloc student movement spokesperson and had been arrested in Israel under administrative detention.
According to Law for Palestine, Ahmed said he was detained because he was a member of the same Hamas student organization.
“Like the Zionist entity fears the Palestinian resistance, so do the imperialist powers fear the Palestinian diaspora and their supporters that have been rising up again and again, especially since the start of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood (October 7 massacre) and the Zionist Genocide,” Nidal wrote about the event on April 17.
“We must take this fight to them. Our support for these prisoners cannot be in condemnation alone. These are the individuals that have sacrificed and struggled against the most barbaric powers, all in the name of liberation.”
CAIR Washington had previously cosponsored events with Nidal, which is run by the former head of Samidoun Seattle, a branch of a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-affiliated group sanctioned by the US in October.
CAIR backed and promoted a March 13 al-Quds Day event, according to a March 11 promotional Instagram post that bore its logo.
The advertisement also featured the symbols of Tariq El-Tahrir and Students United for Palestinian Equality & Return, University of Washington (SUPER UW), groups that were part of the same Samidoun-affiliated organization network as Nidal.
SUPER UW and Nidal hosted another event in Seattle on Saturday featuring al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades terrorist Raed Abduljalil as the keynote speaker. SUPER UW caused controversy on April 15 when it called for supporters to “materially support” the “Lebanese resistance.”
CAIR Washington’s involvement with the radical groups and the letter-writing event comes as its executive director, Imraan Siddiqi, is running for state legislature.
