Ibrahim Hooper

Ibrahim Hooper (born Doug Hooper) is the National Communications Director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington D.C.-based Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hooper worked as a news producer at KSTP-TV, the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis.

He holds a bachelor's degree in history, and a master's of art in journalism and mass communications.

Views

"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future. But I'm not going to do anything violent to promote that. I'm going to do it through intimidation."

Ibrahim Hooper has said that in 20 years worth of trips to mosques, "I've never heard violence preached; I've never heard anti-Semitism or anti-Americanism preached." When asked in a subsequent interview if this statement also holds true for any Muslim events, conferences and rallies he said, "in fact, if I had heard that I would have called them on the carpet and asked them why they're saying such hate-filled, divisive things." In a follow-up conversation, however, Mr. Hooper said he did "not include rallies."

On Tucker Carlson's MSNBC show, Hooper stated that "to my knowledge we [CAIR] don't take money from the government of Saudi Arabia." However, critics have argued that despite never having directly taken money from the Saudi government, CAIR and CAIR-championed projects in the United States have accepted considerable sums of money from "Saudi Wahhabis".

Controversy

In late 2003, Hooper threatened "Muslim punk" writer Michael Muhammad Knight with legal action for satirizing him in articles. In response, Knight challenged Hooper to a wrestling match. In 2006, Knight staged the match at a taqwacore punk show in Lexington, Massachusetts, with a friend portraying Hooper. During the match, "Hooper" used a Saudi Arabian flag to choke Knight and attempted to staple it to his arm. Knight defeated Hooper with the "camel clutch" and then Delivered a monologue in which he said that at one time, he could have had Hooper's role in the Muslim community, and that by defeating Hooper, he had destroyed the better part of himself (an allusion to their shared background as white converts to Islam). Video of the match was posted at MuslimWakeUp, a progressive Islamic website.