Leftist Press Frets: Jihad Truth-Tellers ‘Still Popular’

A smear campaign of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recently failed to get former FBI agent John Guandolo’s training course for law enforcement officers canceled in Culpeper County, Virginia. Religion News Service ran an editorial masquerading as a news story that the Washington Post picked up, attempting to ensure that this effrontery would not be repeated.

The fiercely smiling author, Omar Sacirbey, has refused to retract demonstrable falsehoods he has published about me in the past. In his hit piece on Guandolo he is no less magnificently unimpressed with the truth, as he assembles an impressive tissue of smears, half-truths, innuendos and lies about various foes of jihad terror, and wraps them up nicely into a “news story” that the WaPo, eager as ever to run defamation in the service of Islamic supremacists and jihadists, then presents to its hapless readers.

“Law enforcement officers in Virginia,” Sacirbey began, “will no longer receive credit for a counterterrorism course taught by a former FBI agent and anti-Muslim activist after the academy where the course was taught canceled its accreditation the day it was scheduled to begin.”

Sacirbey uses “anti-Muslim” throughout this piece for foes of jihad terror, which — as I have said before when pseudo-journalistic ideologues like Sacirbey have used this term in the past — is like calling foes of Nazism “anti-German.” It shows Sacirbey’s bias and sympathy for jihadists, and should never be acceptable practice in what are supposedly respectable journalistic outlets like RNS and the WaPo. But standards go out the window when it comes to journalists covering for jihad terrorism; they do it so unanimously, zealously and unflinchingly that they must either be true believers or paid off, or both.

But as far as Sacirbey was concerned, the only one paid off was Guandolo, whose seminar, “Understanding and Investigating Jihadi Networks in America,” he noted was “advertised as $225 per trainee.”

This emphasis on the fee is straight out of the Leftist/Islamic supremacist playbook. Leftist allies of Islamic supremacism such as the Center for American Progress and the Southern Poverty Law Center have millions upon millions of dollars — far more than any counter-jihad organization or individual has ever had. But it is a staple of these smear pieces that the so-called “Islamophobia industry” is a well-heeled machine in which people are just in it for the money, as if getting regular death threats and constant vilification is worth any amount of money. Anyway, $225 is a perfectly reasonable charge for a seminar like this one — indeed, far lower than what other organizations charge for programs of similar duration.

But Sacirbey is following his marching orders: Imply that it’s all about the money. Thus he claims that after 9/11, “anti-Muslim speakers began offering their courses to local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, which paid for them with taxpayer-funded government grants. Nearly 13 years later, these speakers continue to win lucrative fees to train law enforcement officers despite a history of rhetoric that seems to undermine their credibility.”

I would have told Omar Sacirbey if he had asked me, but of course he didn’t, because he didn’t want the truth: when I was flying around the country in order to help give training seminars for the FBI, CIA, JTTF, and military groups, I didn’t get paid. Not a penny. Not even for expenses. I paid my own way, bought my own hotel rooms, etc. On a few occasions a Colonel who had me speak several times on military bases told me about a form I could fill out for reimbursement of my travel expenses. I never filled out the form. I did the training out of a sense of duty to my country, not for personal gain. If Omar Sacirbey were a journalist rather than a smear merchant, he might have asked me and some others what we were paid, whether we were paid, etc. But quite obviously he is not a journalist.

He goes on to applaud the smear campaigns of which this claim is a part, while bemoaning their occasional lack of success: “While Muslim-American activists and media reports have raised awareness about anti-Muslim trainers, occasionally resulting in curriculum reviews and canceled classes, many say the problem persists because there are too few police administrators to properly vet courses and instructors.”

What Sacirbey means is: “The problem persists because there are too few Leftists and Islamic supremacists putting pressure on police administrators so that they don’t dare host a course that tells the truth about Islam and jihad.”

But he claims that training such as Guandolo’s is actually dangerous: “The consequences, critics add, go beyond political incorrectness and include undermining public safety and obscuring real dangers as police officers chase bad leads based on profiling.”

What’s behind this absolutely baseless charge (for which Sacirbey offers no evidence, because there is none) is the ongoing effort by Hamas-linked CAIR and other groups like it to end all surveillance of Muslim communities, including the NYPD’s program which just withstood a Leftist/Islamic supremacist challenge in court.

That’s just the beginning of Sacirbey’s baseless charges and sly smears:

Note again the identifier intended to demean: I’m an “anti-Muslim blogger.” Not, say, “bestselling author and former FBI trainer.” Daniel Martin Varisco, another “Islamophobia” smear merchant, has a blog and was recently whining about how it was less popular than Jihad Watch. But you can be sure that Sacirbey would never, ever refer to Varisco as a “blogger.”

Anyway, Sacirbey presents Guandolo’s charge that Brennan is a Muslim as if it were self-evidently false. On what basis? Has Brennan ever denied this? No. Is it widely known that there is a top intelligence official in the Obama Administration’s CIA who has converted to Islam? Yes. It was reported in none other than the Washington Post in 2012. Why couldn’t it be Brennan? Did Sacirbey speak to Brennan? If he did, he doesn’t mention it in the article. What is much more likely is that Sacirbey didn’t speak to Brennan, and has no idea whether or not he is a Muslim, but since Brennan hasn’t said anything one way or the other about the charge, he uses it to portray Guandolo as crazy. (You can see the video of my interview with Guandolo here.)

And not just crazy, but depraved: “In addition, federal court papers claim that as an undercover FBI agent, Guandolo had a sexual affair with a witness that could have interfered with an investigation into corruption by former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, a Democrat from New Orleans.”

“Could have.” Anyway, what does this have to do with whether or not John Guandolo is qualified to speak about the jihad terror threat? Why, nothing. Nothing at all. But it’s a stick that Sacirbey can use to beat Guandolo, and that’s good enough for him.

As if all this weren’t enough, Sacirbey then turns to Hamas-linked CAIR for an expert opinion:

It is no surprise at all that Sacirbey doesn’t bother to mention that CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements. Its California chapter distributed a poster telling Muslims not to talk to the FBI. CAIR has opposed every anti-terror measure that has ever been proposed or implemented.

If one unsavory Leftist group is good, two is better: “The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Guandolo ‘a notorious Muslim-basher and conspiracy theorist.’”

It is also no surprise that Sacirbey doesn’t bother to note that although the SPLC lists hundreds of groups as “hate groups,” they lump legitimate conservative groups in with neo-Nazis and racist groups, and include few, if any, Leftist and Muslim groups on the list. Nor does he mention that the SPLC’s “hate group” designation against the Family Research Council led one of its followers to storm the FRC offices with a gun, determined to murder the chief of the FRC. This shows that these kinds of charges shouldn’t be thrown around frivolously, as tools to demonize and marginalize those whose politics the SPLC dislikes. But that is exactly what they do. Its hard-Left leanings are well known and well documented. This Weekly Standard article sums up much of what is wrong with the SPLC.

Sacirbey breezes by the questionable aspects of these groups: “Guandolo did not agree to be interviewed but instead provided a reporter with a list of associations between founding members of CAIR and people alleged to be connected with Hamas.”

Note that Sacirbey provides no examples, and implies that CAIR’s connection to Hamas is a matter of association, and that Guandolo or one of his fellow “Islamophobes” originated it, rather than noting that it comes from the Justice Department.

“All Islamic organizations in America should be the No. 1 enemy. All of them,” he said.

I don’t know Kharoba, but I doubt he said that “a Muslim wearing a headband signifies he wants to be a martyr.” Sacirbey isn’t a trustworthy source. Meanwhile, by simply heaping scorn on the assertions that “Islam is inherently violent” and that “terrorism and Islam are inseparable,” Sacirbey hinders the public discussion that needs to be had about how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism. Anyone who is honest and observant can see that there is a unique problem with Islam and violence; consigning the entire question to “anti-Muslim bigotry” only actually reinforces suspicion of Islam and Muslims that non-Muslims do have.

You’d think Sacirbey would be ashamed to play the Breivik card after Breivik himself has publicly stated that he associated himself with the counter-jihad movement in order to discredit that movement. Of course, maybe Breivik was a convinced counter-jihadist and then tried to throw people off the scent with his recent claim; even if that were true, Sacirbey is trying to associate me with Breivik’s murders while not bothering to mention that Breivik actually criticized me for not calling for violence, saying of me, Bat Ye’or and other critics of jihad terror: “If these authors are to [sic] scared to propagate a conservative revolution and armed resistance then other authors will have to.” (Breivik, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, p. 743) Breivik explains in his manifesto that he was “radicalized” by his experiences with Muslim immigrants in the early 1990s, before I had published anything about Islam (See Breivik, p. 1348). That Sacirbey omits all this is nothing short of libelous, and shows yet again his propagandistic agenda.

It’s funny also how Sacirbey attributes those items from my resume to CAIR, as if they investigated me and ferreted all that out. Actually they only had to search as far as my bio on this site. If Sacirbey wants proof that I did this training, I have plenty, including certificates of appreciation from Central Command and the Asymmetric Warfare Group. But of course, he didn’t ask.

Criticized by whom, exactly, and for what agenda? Sacirbey doesn’t say. What in either of them is factually inaccurate? Sacirbey doesn’t say, because he can’t, because the books are accurate. Actually they did it after 57 Muslim groups, including many with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote to John Brennan demanding that I be removed as an FBI trainer and that counter-terror materials be scrubbed of references to Islam and jihad. Brennan immediately agreed, without any apparent thought to the associations and allegiances of the groups that were making their demand, or to their goal in all this. This is how those Islamic supremacist liars and smear artists at Hamas-linked CAIR get a foot in the door. Jenkins, had he been informed enough, would have done better to tell Saylor that no group with ties to Hamas was going to make any presentation. This is how groups like Hamas-linked CAIR and their “journalist” allies like Sacirbey operate: they pile up false charges and half-truths, creating the appearance of “professional and bias issues,” so that officials who are busy and harried and careless (i.e., most officials) simply don’t want the controversy, and shy away from the speakers CAIR targets. It’s insidious and dishonest, but all too often it works. The possibility that a group with associations and positions like CAIR’s might want to silence foes of jihad terror simply because they are foes of jihad terror doesn’t enter into the mind of too many people. They should also look long and hard at who is doing the complaining, and ponder what their agenda might be. And what Omar Sacirbey’s is, quite obviously.