Obama administration pulls references to Islam from terror training
materials, official says
Kenneth Timmerman ("The Daily Caller," October 21, 2011)
Washington DC, USA - Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole confirmed on
Wednesday that the Obama administration was pulling back all training
materials used for the law enforcement and national security communities, in
order to eliminate all references to Islam that some Muslim groups have
claimed
are offensive.
“I recently directed all components of the Department of Justice to
re-evaluate their training efforts in a range of areas, from community outreach
to national security,” Cole told a panel at the George Washington University
law school.
The move comes after complaints from advocacy organizations including the
Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and others identified as Muslim
Brotherhood front groups in the 2004 Holy Land Foundation terror
fundraising trial.
In a Wednesday Los Angeles Times op-ed, Muslim Public Affairs Council
(MPAC) president Salam al-Marayati threatened the FBI with a total cutoff of
cooperation between American Muslims and law enforcement if the agency failed
to revise its law enforcement training materials.
Maintaining the training materials in their current state “will undermine
the relationship between law enforcement and the Muslim American community,”
al-Marayati wrote.
Multiple online sources detail MPAC’s close alignment with CAIR.
In his op-ed, Al-Marayati demanded that the Justice Department and the FBI
“issue a clear and unequivocal apology to the Muslim American community”
and “establish a thorough and transparent vetting process in selecting its
trainers and materials.”
Specifically, al-Marayati called for a new “interagency task force” to
review the training materials — a task force including representatives of the
Islamist organizations the FBI is tasked with monitoring.
Some believe the Obama administration’s Justice Department will go even
further.
“The Attorney General has announced what sounds like reprogramming if they
find people who have actually received training” that Islamist groups find
objectionable, Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney told The
Daily Caller. Gaffney is co-author of a report, published by the Center,
titled “Sharia: The Threat to America.”
Dwight C. Holton, the U.S. Attorney in Oregon said he had spoken with
Holder directly about the issue of the terror training materials. Holton is
the
federal prosecutor who announced the arrest of so-called “Christmas tree
bomber” Mohamed Osman Mohamud in 2010. That announcement made no mention of
Mohamud’s Muslim faith.
“I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray
Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are
wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this
president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for,” Holton
said Wednesday. “They will not be tolerated.”
Such training materials “pose a significant threat to national security,
because they play into the false narrative propagated by terrorists that the
United States is at war with Islam,” he added.
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