Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze report on the cottage industry of "Islamic experts" training law enforcement agencies all over the country, and how the training they offer is steeped in broad, erroneous stereotyping about Islam and Muslims. The piece is too important, and too well reported to summarize, so I'll just stick to this point here:
Despite their different backgrounds, the counterterrorism trainers we interviewed have a remarkably similar worldview. It is one of total, civilizational war—a conflict against Islam that involves everyone, without distinction between combatant and noncombatant, law enforcement and military. “Being politically correct inhibits you,” Hughbank said. “I know Islam better than my own religion. Some things need to be called a spade.”
That worldview is identical to the one espoused by al-Qaeda, and the one both the Bush and Obama administrations have been trying to dismantle by decoupling terrorism from Islam as a religion. Both administrations have tried to prevent the fight against al-Qaeda from becoming a civilizational conflict. The kind of "training" being given to police all over the country undermines the entire aspect of the fight against terrorism devoted to the "war of ideas," turning the enemy from a few thousand extremists to more than a billion people across the planet, which is exactly what the terrorists want.
The problem isn't just with faux terrorism experts, but with training materials as well. Rep. Peter King's Muslim HUAC hearings have been postponed until March 10, but the only witness so far on his list is Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, who is on the advisory board of the Clarion Fund, an organization that has produced several "documentaries" framing the U.S. as being in a civilizational conflict with Islam. The Democrats have said they will call Rep. Keith Ellison and Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca.
As first reported by the Village Voice, one of those films, The Third Jihad, was shown to the NYPD for "training" on Islam. Deputy Comissioner Paul Browne told the Voice the film was a "wacky movie" that shouldn't have been screened and wouldn't be shown again. The film, which warns that "Americans are being told that most of the mainstream Muslim groups are moderate...when in fact if you look a little closer you'll see a very different reality. One of their primary tactics is deception," is narrated by Jasser.
Now, King has already removed two witnesses from his hearings for being controversial. The first, AEI Scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has suggested amending the U.S. Constitution to give fewer rights to Muslims. The other, Walid Phares, (who is also on the Clarion Fund advisory board) is a Lebanese Christian who was removed after CAIR accused him of ties to Christian militias implicated in civilian massacres in Lebanon.
These witnesses may have been "controversial," but I suspect part of the reason they were removed is that King may have not realized when he chose them that neither of them identify as Muslims. After the Investigative Project's Steve Emerson wrote King an angry letter saying he felt rejected by King's decision not to call him as a witness, King emphasized that "the lead witnesses would be Muslims who believe their community is being radicalized." Hirsi Ali was raised a Muslim but is an atheist, and Phares is a Christian.
As it stands, King has one witness, tied to the industry of Islamophobic distortion that is undermining the war of ideas against al-Qaeda by relaying misinformation to law enforcement. There just isn't a very deep bench of Muslims willing to testify before Congress that most Muslims are enemies of the state.
