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Bomb threat made to Muslim civil rights organization in Anaheim
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(File photo) Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations joins other community religious and political leaders at a news conference to address recent issues involving the New Jersey Muslim community on December 3, 2015 in Jersey City, New Jersey.
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A female caller threatened to blow up the Anaheim headquarters of the Council on American Islamic Relations, also known as ‘CAIR.’
"We’re grateful no one was harmed, other than the fear that people have," said CAIR-LA spokesman Eugene Fields.
The group received a similar threat last month, when Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar came to speak at CAIR’s fundraiser in Woodland Hills.
President Trump posted a snippet from that very speech on Twitter, edited together with footage of the 9/11 attack. A “CAIR California” logo is clearly visible in the widely-shared video.
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While there’s no evidence the tweet prompted the bomb threat, Fields said it did rattle local Muslims.
"10.5 million people have seen that tweet," Fields said. "It’s not hard to connect the dots and say that someone saw this tweet that the president put out, saw that we’re CAIR and said, ‘hey, you know what? I’m going to make a threat against these people."
Fields said threats like this are a problem they’ve been monitoring. Anti-Muslim incidents in L.A. were up 8 percent in 2017, according to records kept by the organization.
This is an archive post of a story that aired on the radio on April 19.
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