President Obama delivering his 2014 State of the Union address. Photo: White House.

As many as 25 House Democrats are expected to have Muslim guests during Tuesday night’s State of the Union speech. They are doing so in response to a call from Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim voted into Congress, to counter an “alarming rise in hateful rhetoric against Muslim Americans and people of the Islamic faith worldwide.”

The gesture might not generate much more than a shrug, except that in at least two cases, Democrats invited officials from a group that the FBI formally avoids due to historic ties to a Hamas support network. Rep. Alcee Hastings invited Nezar Hamze, regional operations director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Florida. And Rep. Zoe Lofgren invited Sameena Usman, a 10-year veteran government relations official with CAIR’s San Francisco chapter, the Investigative Project on Terrorism has learned.

CAIR officials routinely accuse Federal law enforcement agencies of entrapping otherwise innocent and peaceful Muslims in order to gin up terrorism prosecutions. Hamze’s colleagues in CAIR-Florida are helping a family sue the FBI over the 2013 fatal shooting of a terror suspect who attacked agents after extensive questioning.

Usman’s office published a notorious poster urging Muslims to “Build a Wall of Resistance [and] Don’t Talk to the FBI.” In 2008, the FBI cut off contact with CAIR, except in investigations, based on evidence its agents uncovered that placed CAIR in a Hamas-support network in the United States. Until it can be shown that those connections no longer exist, an FBI official explained in 2009, CAIR is not “an appropriate liaison partner.”

In addition, several CAIR officials have compared Israel to ISIS.

Calls to press contacts in Lofgren and Hastings’ offices were not returned Monday.

Last month, the IPT provided exclusive details from eyewitness accounts about CAIR’s creation, including an account of how a co-founder sought approval from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood for CAIR’s bylaws, and how Executive Director Nihad Awad’s move to Washington was “in order to represent Hamas.”

Hastings and Lofgren either failed to check out their guests’ employer or they don’t care. These connections have nothing to do with the faith of CAIR officials. But the organization has a record that elected officials stubbornly insist should be ignored.

Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern of House Democrats working towards “outreach” by seeking out the wrong people. Last month, CAIR-Florida’s Hassan Shibly was invited to the White House for a discussion about religious discrimination. Then, as with the State of the Union speech, no one was invited from the new Muslim Reform Movement — which issued a declaration clearly rejecting “interpretations of Islam that call for any violence, social injustice and politicized Islam” and standing for “peace, human rights and secular governance.”

In 2012, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sat with Awad, the only CAIR executive director in the organization’s history, at a fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

A seat in the House chamber for the State of the Union bestows undeserved clout to the CAIR officials. And, in trying to show the public that American Muslims are not a monolithic group of radicalized Islamists, Hastings and Lofgren are doing their cause more harm than good.

Steven Emerson is the Executive Director the Investigative Project on Terrorism (www.investigativeproject.org) where this article first appeared.