The Council on American-Islamic Relations is a mendacious, malevolent and anti-American organization. An Oct. 14 letter published in The Washington Times by Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s national communications director, is a case in point.

Mr. Hooper took issue with my Oct. 11 column, “Silencing Savage,” which ran in The Times. He falsely asserted that I claimed CAIR supports “the ban on controversial radio talk show host Michael Savage entering Britain.” Mr. Hooper added that CAIR has never called for Mr. Savage to be “’yanked off the air.’”

Mr. Hooper is a smear merchant, whose penchant for double-talk and hypocrisy is legendary in Washington. Not once in my piece did I state that CAIR supported Britain's ban on Mr. Savage. If that was the case, Mr. Hooper would have pointed to a specific sentence or clause. But he didn’t for one reason: He could not. He simply asserted it. The reason: to deflect attention away from CAIR’s long, well-documented and sordid history of ties to Islamic extremists. What I did write is that CAIR organized an advertising boycott against the fiery conservative’s show—in effect, seeking to starve it of ad revenues and thereby hoping to force it off the airwaves. In other words, CAIR has been on a campaign to have Mr. Savage "yanked off the air." For Mr. Hooper to suggest otherwise was disingenuous and deceitful.

Recently, the conservative news site World Net Daily (WND), which is edited by Joseph Farah, published an in-depth story revealing how CAIR spent over $160,000 in an effort to run Mr. Savage off the air. The WND piece is based on an explosive new book by David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry, “Muslim Mafia,” which quotes CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad as saying the boycott campaign was “worth every penny” even though it was unsuccessful. This is because it resulted in the radio star losing at least $1 million in advertising.

For years, CAIR has sought to muzzle and censor Mr. Savage. Mr. Hooper, however, is now trying to portray himself as a paladin of the First Amendment. Mr. Savage rightly does not buy it.

“Really? So you believe Farah's investigation is false? CAIR wants me on the air to expose the Islamists amongst us?” the radio host told The Washington Times. “Where does CAIR stand with regard to Islamists who want to impose Sharia law in the U.S.?”

CAIR has slandered Mr. Savage by falsely—and repeatedly—calling him a religious bigot and an anti-Muslim hater. The British government and so-called “Muslim advocacy” groups in Britain have picked up and repeated the charge. It was such smears that laid the basis for Britain's ban.

The ban on Mr. Savage represents a fundamental assault on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. He has been put on a British government blacklist alongside Hamas terrorists, Russian skinheads responsible for murdering 10 immigrants and neo-Nazi white supremacists. It is a shameful abrogation of an American citizen’s right to freedom of expression. It seeks to accomplish by governmental dictate what CAIR has attempted to do through boycotts and public intimidation.

Moreover, CAIR has consistently defended Islamists and suspected Muslim terrorists: the record is clear and irrefutable. For example, a report by the highly respected Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a Washington-based, non-profit research group that tracks radical Islamic terrorist activities, documents CAIR’s close ties to Hamas. The Palestinian terror group has not only committed countless atrocities against Israeli civilians, but calls for the destruction of the Jewish state—actions that CAIR has never disavowed.

"CAIR was designed to give a political cover and political front for Hamas in the United States and then it branched out to do other things," said IPT’s Executive Director Steven Emerson. "Its raison d'etre is really to influence policy on the Middle East and lobby for Hamas. They are the political lobbying arm for Hamas.”

In other words, CAIR is not—and never has been—a Muslim “civil rights” organization. It does not speak for most Muslim-Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom reject its virulently anti-Israel, anti-American ideology. Rather, CAIR is a Saudi-financed public relations operation designed to do one thing: weaken America’s resolve to confront the rising global tide of radical Islam.

In the eyes of the British government and the United Kingdom’s pro-Islamist lobby, Mr. Savage’s real sin is that he has the courage to speak out against the slow but relentless expansion of Sharia law—in Europe, Canada and across the Middle East and Asia. As I pointed out in my Times column, England already has more than 85 courts that adhere to Sharia. Anjem Choudary, a Muslim fundamentalist preacher and leader of the Islamist organization al-Muhajiroun, told a cheering crowd in June 2009 in London's Red Lion Square that Britain’s “destiny” is to become an Islamic country ruled by a theocracy. Mr. Choudary has openly called for the murder of Pope Benedict XVI, as well as American and coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, according to Britain’s perverse liberal elite, the problem is not Mr. Choudary. He is not on any government blacklist. Instead, it is Mr. Savage, who allegedly poses a “threat” to public safety “and inter-community” harmony. This is the logic of appeasement and moral cowardice.

As a media commentator, I have had the privilege of guest-hosting for Mr. Savage on numerous occasions. Contrary to the lies of Mr. Hooper and his Islamist fellow travelers, Mr. Savage and his audience are not primitive hate-mongers bent on destroying Muslim civilization. If anything they are the opposite: principled conservative nationalists, who believe in moral traditionalism and an America First foreign policy. Globalist interventionism repulses them. Islam’s opposition to abortion, gay marriage, drugs, pornography and family breakdown are values they welcome and embrace. What they do not respect—and should not respect—is the support for jihad and hatred of Western democracy by countless Islamic fundamentalists. This more than anything else explains CAIR’s systematic campaign to vilify Mr. Savage and destroy his career.

CAIR’s record as an apologist for Islamist radicals is obvious. What is less obvious is why it continues to enjoy any kind of credibility in American public discourse. For Mr. Hooper and his ilk, Sharia always trumps the U.S. Constitution. Otherwise, he would denounce the likes of Mr. Choudary who call for its destruction—and not Mr. Savage.

CAIR’s goal is to cynically use American freedoms to advance a pro-Islamist agenda. Whenever someone exposes this—Mr. Savage, Mr. Emerson, me—it resorts to lies, character assassination and distortions. This may work for awhile. But it is immoral, cowardly and unAmerican.