American Muslim Organizations Pen Letter Against Surveillance of Islamist Groups

Fresh off the successful elimination of the highly respected NYPD intelligence program, the Islamist-left alliance which seeks to utterly neuter American intelligence and law enforcement has set its sights on the last line of defense: your local law enforcement.

Federal Law enforcement has already faced a complete purge of training materials, aiming to eliminate any vestige of information regarding how Jihadi terror groups draw their threat doctrine from Islamic sources. Long established specialists on political Islam, counterterrorism, asymmetrical warfare and counterinsurgency have lost their jobs, been publicly ridiculed, or, if they wish to continue to instruct, suffer through turning over their intellectual work products to a faceless committee to determine what can and cannot be said about America’s enemies. This review committee is so secretive that even Congressional staffers on the relevant committees have been denied information about their identities.

That purge was kicked off by a letter sent by 57 organizations, including multiple organizations with known ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, including the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

Now, another letter has been sent featuring 75 organizations, including many of the same Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups.  As in the first purge, the letter writers claim to be responding to a news story featuring leaked classified information. In 2012, it was a Wired.com story by Spencer Ackerman. This time around it’s Glenn Greenwald (of Snowden fame)’s piece on the -completely legal- electronic surveillance of several individuals with known Islamic extremism and terror ties.

In the letter, the organizations call for an auditing of all intelligence and law enforcement training materials, and mandatory retraining for any federal, state or local law enforcement official who has ever received the training the group finds objectionable. They also seek to extend the training purge to any federal, state or local law enforcement organization which has receives federal money.

This reeducation program, if enacted by the Obama Administration, will represent a final victory for Islamists seeking to control U.S. policy on dealing with the jihadist threats.

Tellingly, the day prior to the letter’s official unveiling, Mohammed Elibiary, himself instrumental in the first training purge, essentially declared “checkmate” on twitter saying, “With my 22+ yrs in @GOP, friends thru out 100s US security/policing agencies & academia; no future presidency will reverse reforms underway.”

Sadly, Elibiary may be correct. If the pattern from the 2012 purge experience holds, we can expect a rapid response from the Obama administration in support of this letter, and equally rapid implementation of its demands. If so, at the very time respected Middle East analysts like Ali Khedary are saying that the Obama Administration “doesn’t take the threat of transnational jihad seriously,” we may find that no one, from the FBI, CIA and DOD analysts, to the small town sheriff’s deputies, will be so much as permitted to say the word jihad in their training.

Kyle Shideler is the Director of the Threat Information Office at the Center for Security Policy