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.
