Intervening to Fire Non-Muslim Staff at Independent CAIR Chapters

Awad directly intervened to block the hiring of a chapter leader solely based on her religious beliefs, and political opinions.

In her response to CAIR’s defamation complaint, former senior CAIR executive Lori Saroya revealed that Awad had personally intervened to prevent the hiring of Karen Leslie Hernandez, a Latina theologian and an interfaith activist, because of her writing on domestic abuse. 

CAIR National forced its Dallas chapter into rescinding a job offer made to a Christian woman, who was hired and had announced her new role as Executive Director of CAIR’s Dallas chapter. Mr. Awad asked Ms. Saroya to “research” the new employee, which was not done for other chapter executive directors recently hired. Mr. Awad was upset that the new Dallas employee spoke openly online about being a survivor of domestic violence. CAIR National’s attorney came up with an “alternate” story of the events and told the local chapter to offer the woman a payoff using an NDA in exchange for her silence on the religious and gender discrimination she faced.

In the correspondence (in which Awad was CC’ed), we can clearly see that Ms. Hernandez had bought the “alternate” story involving the CAIR-Dallas donors being upset about hiring a non-Muslim. Little did she know that Awad hismelf from the national office had objected to her employment: