Nihad Awad

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Nihad Awad (with beard and black suit) stands to President Bush's left, when Bush said "Like the good folks standing with me, the American people were appalled and outraged at last Tuesday's attacks [on Sept. 11, 2001]."^[1]

Nihad Awad is the Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington D.C.-based American Muslim political and civil rights group.

After studying civil engineering at the University of Minnesota in the 1990s,[1][2] he worked at the University of Minnesota Medical Center.[3]

After the Gulf war, he was Public Relations Director for the anti-Israel Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). In 1994 IAP president Omar Ahmad and Awad founded CAIR.

A few days after September 11, 2001, Awad was one of a select group American Muslim leaders invited by the White House to join President Bush in a press conference condemning the attacks and acts anti-Muslim intolerance that followed. [4]

Awad attracted criticism when he wrote in the IAP's Muslim World Monitor that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial was "a travesty of justice," and suggested that "there is ample evidence indicating that both the Mossad and the Egyptian Intelligence played a role in the explosion.'" [5] However, during a 2002 interview with an Australian news radio reporter, Awad denied those reports, calling them a "total fabrication" and saying he had been misquoted.^[2]