Hussein Ibish has an incredibly funny and depressing post about several of the Islamophobic hucksters bilking taxpayers by providing nonsense "training" to law enforcement to the tune of thousands of dollars a pop, a phenomenon currently being looked into by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
My favorite paragraph:
“[Walid] Shoebat” frequently partners with Zak Anani, another purveyor of particularly gigantic tales. In the most extraordinary "coincidence," this self-described “former terrorist” and former mass-murderer, claims to have killed no less than 223 people during the Lebanese civil war, “two-thirds of them by daggers.” (Exactly the same claim, word-for-word, attributed to “Walid Shoebat,” as cited in my last blog posting.) How and why they claim to have killed exactly the same number of people, in exactly the same way, at around the same time, in two different places, and two separate wars, has never been explained. It would be interesting to know who the ghostwriter or coach behind these laughable fabrications is, since they clearly got it from the same set of fantastical talking points. I will not bother to dwell on how ridiculous these claims are, even considered in isolation from each other, in the first place.
The irony is that their success evokes the degree to which government officials really do require further training in matters related to Islam and the history of the Middle East. The problem is that they're frequently being inundated with the distorted perspective of professional liars.
