An investigative journalism center is passing off as fact a report by the Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations that hate crimes against American mosques jumped sharply in 2015 and continue to occur at historically high rates — about once every three days.

ProPublica is a New York City-based nonprofit journalism center partially funded by billionaire George Soros that shares data-driven investigative stories with newspapers of all sizes and local TV stations across the United States.

See list of more than 100 U.S. newspapers, websites and TV stations that "partner" with the Soros-backed ProPublica.

But ProPublica's newest project on hate crimes is raising eyebrows because of its reliance on a questionable source for its data. The report says more than 370 "hate incidents" directed at U.S. mosques and Islamic centers have been catalogued by CAIR since April 2013.

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"Most of the incidents are threats to worshippers' lives or acts of vandalism," according to the report, which depends solely on CAIR for its list of anti-Muslim hate crimes.

CAIR, which ProPublica refers to as simply "a civil rights group," has been tied to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood and the terrorist organization Hamas. Federal prosecutors named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial that was prosecuted during the Bush administration, and nearly a dozen of CAIR's leaders and former leaders have been charged and/or convicted of terror-related crimes.

See WND's Rogues' Gallery of terror-tied CAIR officials.

The ProPublica reporting contains an interactive map that shows where and when hate crimes and incidents allegedly occurred. In Washington State, for example, three incidents were logged:

Jan 2017 - Man charged with hate crime in alleged assassination threats against Bellevue mosque.

Sept. 2014 - Burbank, CA man protests outside the Islamic Center in West Richland, WA.

July 2015 - Hate message scrawled on Spokane Muslim center.

The report quotes Zainab Arain, a coordinator at CAIR who oversees the reports, as saying the organization saw a spike in hate incidents against mosques "during election years and after news coverage of major terrorist attacks."

One revealing statement in the article says: "Note: ProPublica has not researched whether any updates or follow-ups to these articles exist."

In other words, ProPublica did very little of its own independent research to confirm CAIR's findings, or to determine whether there were any updates or changes in the original stories, notes Philip Haney, a former Homeland Security officer who co-authored the whistleblower book "See Something Say Nothing."

Haney said many supposed anti-Muslim "hate crimes" reported in the wake of President Donald Trump's election were reported as fact but later turned out to be fake reports. CAIR, however, never followed up to inform its followers on Twitter and Facebook that many of these initial complaints of "Islamophobia" were in fact pure fiction.

"Can we trust an organization that was proven by the Department of Justice to be directly involved in the support of Hamas? That to me is the fundamental question," Haney said. "We should have never moved away from that fundamental question. Whether or not CAIR has any legitimate place in the social, political and law enforcement arenas of our country when that organization has already been proven by the DOJ to be affiliated with the known terror group Hamas should have been addressed a long time ago, and the fact that it has not been addressed from either a political or law-enforcement perspective means that nothing they say should be trusted because we have never resolved the issue of their relationship with Hamas."

Clare Lopez, vice president of research and analysis for the Center for Security Policy, said CAIR has no conscience in its brazen attempt to make Muslims the victims, even as dozens were mowed down in Barcelona Thursday, innocent victims of yet another Islam-inspired terror attack.

"Hundreds of people are lying dead and grievously injured in actual deadly attacks by Islamic terrorists all over Western Europe, Israel, and the U.S. as well. The Islamic State, a jihadist would-be caliphate, claims responsibility for some of them – but the inspiration in every case comes from the doctrine, law and scripture of Islam. That CAIR, a HAMAS front group, could even think to whine about some graffiti and a few protests at a time like this seems to me obscene."

The media and government ambivalence toward CAIR is similar to what is now happening with Antifa, the radical left-wing group that goes around the country adding violent fuel to peaceful protests, Haney said.

"They did not have a permit to protest at Charlottesville and yet all the focus has been on the white supremacists and Nazis. The whole equation is incomplete and our whole country is on a course that's going to run us right off a cliff because we're not addressing these challenges to our constitutional republic with courage and honesty," Haney said. "We're allowing groups like CAIR and Antifa and Southern Poverty Law Center to set the agenda."

Dr. Mark Christian, founder of the Global Faith Institute, said Islam is not only attacking the West but also abusing the freedoms it finds here, "using it all for their own good and own agenda." This is part of what the Muslim Brotherhood terms "civilization jihad."

"Unfortunately it is working," said Christian, formerly Mohamed Abdullah, who grew up in Cairo, Egypt, the son of a prominent Muslim Brotherhood father before converting to Christianity in his late 20s and later moving to America.

"You are a bigot, a racist, anti-American, anti-Constitution, anti-First Amendment and Bill of Rights if you dare say one thing critical about Islam," Christian said.

Many prominent politicians in the U.S. and Europe have fallen for this line, Dr. Christian says. It started with President Bush saying Islam is a "religion of peace," and it gained more adherents during the Obama administration.

"Hillary Clinton said terrorism has nothing to do with Islam and people blaming Islam for terrorism leads to more terrorist attacks and putting us all in harm's way," he said.

"All of the above is false and based on nothing other than Muslim Brotherhood front groups engaging in their civilization jihad by using the American media as their own private propaganda machine.

"The Muslim Brotherhood, aka CAIR, is basically abusing our own system to cripple us and make us all more susceptible and vulnerable, soft targets for their jihadists," Christian added. "The end result is simple – they, the Islamists, win and get their agenda of supremacy accomplished and we lose everything, our freedom included."

All of the freedom-snatching policies will be implemented under the guise of hate speech, he said.

"The events of last week play right into their propaganda narrative and I would not be surprised if we learn down the road that the Islamists' hands were somehow involved in what took place in Charlottesville," Christian said. "I would also not be surprised to see more events like last weekend's organized and exploited in the future."

By accusing its critics, and implying that all criticism of Islam amounts to hate-speech, groups like CAIR are able to silence their opponents and implement de facto blasphemy laws against Western citizens. Islamic blasphemy laws make up the cornerstone of Shariah in Muslim countries.

Dr. Christian said he ran into this pro-Islamic censorship Friday on Twitter, following the Barcelona terror attack.

"At that exact same time the top-trending tweet on Twitter was someone saying 'I hope Trump is assassinated.' That was in the same minute that my tweet was removed where I was saying nothing other than 'this carnage and hate of Islam has to be defeated.'

"Twitter removed my tweet and I received a notice saying it had to be removed because it violated their rules against hate speech."

"So, are they going to be pushing for blasphemy laws in the West? Absolutely, and they will do it under the guise of hate speech."

Lopez said efforts by CAIR and by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which is the Brotherhood's water boys at the United Nations and among Western courts, seek to silence all criticism of Islam. This not only violates the U.S. First Amendment, but serves to advance the objectives of Islamic law (Shariah), under which the capital "crime" of slander is defined as essentially "anything that a Shariah-compliant Muslim would dislike."

"That sweepingly subjective definition, of course, includes speaking truth about Islam and those who wage jihad in its name," she said.

ProPublica has received funding from the Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corp., Hewlett Foundation, Sandler Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies. In 2010, it received a two-year contribution of $125,000 each year from Soros's Open Society Foundations.

"CAIR is Hamas, they were founded by two former Hamas agents, Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad," Haney said. "They, along with the whole Islamic Shura Council of North America, were wiretapped by the feds in 1993 in Philadelphia talking about forming a Hamas-type organization that would defend the interests of Islam in America called the Islamic Association for Palestine, which later became CAIR.

"We have known who these people were for 25 years. Why are we still listening to them and giving them positions of influence within American culture?" he added. "Until we resolve that, it's just going to get worse. They were just invited to the State Department last week to meet with [Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson's boys and present their grievances about the situation in Jerusalem and the mosque there."