Ahmed Rehab is the Executive Director of CAIR Chicago: the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He said the President sugar-coats the US demands on Israel. “Would you please do this, pretty please do that? That’s not the message the United States should have. We need to be a lot more courageous and bold and demanding of the right thing.”

“I think the President realizes that this is a historic opportunity for us to shift our foreign policy towards the Arab world, towards acknowledging the fact that it is the millions in the street calling for democracy and freedom, that are the real voice of that part of the world – and not the sporadic, peripheral, marginal, militant radical groups,” said Ahmed Rehab.

CAIR-Chicago Executive Director Ahmed Rehab comments on a hateful posting directed at Muslims that was found on an online forum for the Chicago White Sox.

“The difference between us and those that we fight, in the form of Al-Qaeda and other militant radical groups is that we are a nation of values. We’re a nation of laws. In the fight to maintain the upper hand we can’t loose our souls. We can’t loose our principles and our values that make us worth fighting for. At the end of the day torture is torture,” said Rehab.

“Bin Laden was a major figure, and his death was a major world event. You need to address that in a public manner with evidence and not just hearsay. It’s all about the DNA,” said Rehab.

Bin Laden’s death marks a key historical juncture, in that it offers us an opportunity to break away from the polarizing, divisive atmosphere he helped ignite and the paranoia and fear-mongering we unfortunately allowed to ensue in our culture as a result of it. For almost a decade, we have played into bin Laden’s hands by allowing him and his outfit to dominate our national discourse on Islam and Muslims.

“It [Bin Ladens' death] brings closure for the families of 9/11, and all Americans, and hopefully brings closure on an era,” said Rehab. “I hope now we can usher in a new era that focuses more on the Arab Spring which is the reality now, and less on the so-called War on Terror.”

“The relevance of bin Laden should be overshadowed by the wave of pro-democracy movements in the Middle East,” said Yaser Tabbara, a Chicago attorney and member of the board of directors of the Council on American Islamic Relations. “Bin Laden was already marginalized, I’m someone who goes to the Middle East quite a bit and I haven’t heard his name in a very long time.”

“It is a double-edged sword and it has to be balanced out against the conspiracy theories that are likely to come out if there is no evidence provided by the government that this was Osama bin Laden,” says Rehab.

“I think Obama should issue proof to the public that this was indeed bin Laden. We don’t need to see gory photos. We don’t need to put ourselves in a worse spot in terms of our national security, and so the DNA report, rather than the photos, can accomplish that,” said Ahmed Rehab.