Twenty-five years ago, 19 hijackers carried out the most devastating attack on American soil. In the weeks after September 11, the United States pledged to understand, disrupt and dismantle the networks behind it.
A quarter-century later, HuffPost has obtained a copy of a research database kept by the Middle East Forum and has told us it intends to publish a story about it. Its questions describe the file as a secret database that “predominantly tracks Muslim American individuals, schools and organizations.”
A quarter-century later, HuffPost has obtained a copy of a research database kept by the Middle East Forum and has told us it intends to publish a story about it.
It is nothing of the kind. It is a research archive built from four million public data points: tax returns, corporate registrations, property records, public statements and public appearances. And today, on the eve of the anniversary, we are opening it to researchers. Scholars, journalists, national security analysts and Muslim reformers may apply. So may our critics.
Mapping ideological networks is an ordinary practice in American civil society. The Anti-Defamation League tracks antisemitic actors. The University of Maryland maintains profiles of more than 3,500 American extremists and gives researchers access by application. Good-government groups publish indexes of donors and lobbyists. We apply the same method to American Islamism.
Our archive does not rely on wiretaps or surveillance. It uses public tax returns, corporate registrations, property records and public event appearances. It connects records that federal agencies and most reporters never connect.
We do this because our guiding principle has not changed: radical Islam is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution.
Moderate Muslims cannot build institutions when radical organizations, backed by foreign money and practiced public relations, monopolize the microphone, capture the civil rights label and absorb millions in taxpayer grants. To lift the moderates, one has to document the radicals. That is why the archive records reformist organizations alongside Islamist ones: when a university, a company or an agency asks whom it can work with, that is where the answer comes from.
Our research is not theory. When federal agencies sent nearly $80 million from HHS and about $25 million from DHS to organizations tied to designated terrorist groups and foreign extremist movements, it was our public-record mapping that found it. Thirteen members of Congress wrote letters, and HHS opened a debarment investigation of CAIR. When Badar Khan Suri broadcast his admiration for Hamas, our research laid out the public record. The government acted on its own authority, and the courts are reviewing what it did, as they should.
We do this because our guiding principle has not changed: radical Islam is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution.
We also document the fellow travelers: the politicians, academics and activists who legitimize and platform these networks. By tracking who shares a stage with whom and who signs which declaration, we show how a movement is mainstreamed.
Our critics keep files on us. Georgetown’s Bridge Initiative publishes a “factsheet” on the Middle East Forum. CAIR sorts its critics into an “inner core” and an “outer core.” We do not object. We object to the pretense that research is legitimate in one direction only.
The scandal is not that a think tank uses public records to document a political movement. It would be a scandal if, 25 years after 9/11, no one did. We will keep doing the work, and from today anyone who does research can check it.
