It’s not like CAIR has ties to Hamas and other Islamic radicals… no, wait?

Via The Hill:

One of two Muslims in Congress had harsh words on Wednesday on government agents’ targeting of a handful of prominent American Muslims.

“An American’s faith does not give law enforcement reasonable suspicion to violate their constitutional rights,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the first Muslim elected to Congress, said in a statement.

“Suspicious behavior indicating criminal behavior should be the basis for attracting law enforcement surveillance — not a person’s religion,” he added. “Profiling based on religion breeds distrust and resentment in communities that are potential partners in the fight against crime.”

Ellison said a report on Wednesday that the National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI were tracking the email communications of five American Muslims, and included a racial slur in their training materials, “is particularly troubling because it suggests that Americans were targeted because of their faith and civic engagement.”

Previous revelations about FBI training materials instructing agents to be suspicious of all Muslims and a New York Police Department program to map Muslim communities, he added, “makes this concern legitimate.”

A months-long analysis by the Intercept of documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed that five top lawyers and advocates who were Muslim were targeted for surveillance from 2002 to 2008 under a program meant to root out terrorists and foreign agents.

The news evoked swift condemnation from civil liberties advocates, who compared it to FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr. and other top civil rights icons.

“The bigger story is that, again, American minorities are being targeted with a broad brush by the government when we had hoped that this lesson had been learned back in the Civil Rights era that that’s not the way to go about things,” said Corey Saylor, head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’s (CAIR) office combating Islamophobia. CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, was one of the people reportedly targeted by the NSA and FBI.