Yesterday, I erroneously reported that Anisa Abd el Fattah — the woman who filed a complaint with the Justice Department about supposed malfeasance by (among others) “the ‘Jewish lobby'” — was a board member of CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations. It turns out that she is a former board member, not a current board member. My apologies to readers, and to CAIR and Anisa Abd el Fattah, for the error. I had posted an update at the start of the original post last night, but I thought I’d also post a full correction for those who won’t have occasion to reread the post (see item 2 here.
My assertion in the original post relied on this page, which describes her as “a member of the Board of Directors for (CAIR), Council on American Islamic Relations.” But I of course should have recognized that, even if the description was accurate, it could only be relied on to describe matters at the description was posted, which was (I now realize) in 2003. Both Anisa Abd el Fattah herself and Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR report that she is no longer a CAIR board of directors member.
The precise time that she was a board member is not clear. Both Anisa Abd el Fattah and Ibrahim Hooper report that she hasn’t been one since 1995 or so, which would mean she was there at or near the founding (this speaker bio of Anisa Abd el Fattah reports that she was “a member of the founding Board of Directors for CAIR”). On the other hand, the Oct. 3, 2001 issue of The Hill reported that she “serves on the board of CAIR”; this page, from mid-2001 or later likewise reports her as a then-current CAIR board member.
Still, I suspect that it’s often pretty easy to lose track of the precise status of a nonprofit organization’s passive board member, and to recycle people’s old bios that were never properly updated. Suffice it to say that she was a CAIR board member, but is not one any longer; my apologies for the mistake, and let that be a lesson to me to check closely the dates as of which certain things are claimed to be true.