On the eve of Super Tuesday, the Council on Islamic-American relations (CAIR) urged American Muslims to get to the polls. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organization that belongs on everyone’s reading list, is paying attention:

CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad: The Muslims Can Be the Swing Vote in Major States in the 2016 Presidential Elections; ‘Our Number Is Growing As American Muslims; We Can… Register 1 Million Voters’

Awad warned that “life for American Muslims will be difficult” if “those attacking Muslims today will be in the White House,” and said that the number of Muslims was growing in the seven predicted swing states of the 2016 presidential elections – Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. He continued:

If you don’t like Islamophobia, if you don’t like what Donald Trump says, what Ben Carson said, get busy in 2016. Get busy in 2016, register to vote, and register other people to vote, if you don’t know how to do it, Google it. Turn your centers, Islamic centers, mosques into registration centers for voters, into polling stations during the election time. This is the time to tell our narrative and to show our presence. Train and get yourself trained in how to be involved in the political process. 2016 is a decisive year for us as American Muslims, but also for America. What kind of year are we going to have? Depends on you, depends on you.

Studio Matters is not a political weblog. It is a very personal one. But anything relating to Islamic ambition is intensely personal to me now that my polite, comfortable little town is scheduled to have a 25,000+ square foot mosque and cultural center in the near by-and-by. Acreage has been purchased, environmental impact statements cleared. The project has been joyfully endorsed by the local interfaith crowd. Awad’s words resonate with me. Islam is not just one more venerable monotheism, like Presbyterianism but with head scarves. The more of those scarves I see in the neighborhood, the more seriously I take McCarthy’s statement that CAIR is a stalking horse for the eventual imposition of sharia in these disunited states.

Awad again:

Brothers and sisters, no party should take us for granted. Yes we know where the conversation is leading, we know what the politicians are saying, we know, who is attacking the Muslim community, and who is defending the Muslim community. And as I always say, in 2016, in November, we will remember. We will know who we will vote for, but let’s not be emotional. What if those who are attacking Muslims today will be in the White House? America will be a different country.

Permit me to hope that it is a different country than the complacent, gullible one it increasingly appears. This is a good day to re-read Andrew McCarthy’s essay that appeared two years ago in National Review (April 12, 2014). It begins:

This week, capitulating to Islamic-supremacist agitation led by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Brandeis University reneged on its announced plan to present an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the heroic human-rights activist. In my 2010 book, The Grand Jihad, I devoted a chapter to the origins and purposes of CAIR, its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas-support network, and its aim to silence critics of Islamic supremacism. In light of the continuing success of this campaign — despite a federal terrorism-financing prosecution that exposed CAIR’s unsavory background — it is worth revisiting that history.

McCarthy follows with an excerpt adapted from the chapter he cites. One of several money quotes:

Despite its Hamas roots and terror ties, the most disturbing aspect of CAIR is its accomplishment of the Muslim Brotherhood’s precise aspiration for it. Thanks to its media savvy and the credulousness of government officials and press outlets, which have treated it as the “civil rights” group it purports to be rather than the Islamist spearhead that it is, CAIR has been a constant thorn in the side of American national defense.

Read the entire essay here. We will see if a legitimately frustrated electorate pulls back from elevating campaign rhetoric—designed to “make a deal” with you for your vote—over proven substance. Those for whom CAIR speaks are not so sentimental.

On a related note, the valuable Center for Immigration Studies issued a press release on February 23rd that went largely unnoticed in the press. The Obama administration has lifted the entry ban on three more sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). This is a policy change that comes with costs, both monetary and in terms of public health.

Just as Obama lifted an entry ban on foreigners with HIV in 2009, he has now removed chancroid, granuloma inguinale, and lymphogranuloma venerum from the short list of “communicable diseased of public health signficance” that make an alien ineligible for admission to the United States.

Jon Feere, the Center’s legal policy analyst and author of the report, said, “This change in policy illustrates, once again, that increased immigration is the main goal of the Obama administration, no matter the costs. The administration itself estimates that more people will become infected and that there will be increased health costs as a result of these changes. But obviously these are consideration that have little relevance for those with an open-border perspective.”