CAIR Orders U.S. Air Force to Ditch “Anti-Muslim” Counterterrorism Instructor

The Islamic terrorist front group that transformed the way U.S. law enforcement agencies conduct anti-terrorism training is ordering the Air Force to sever ties with an instructor it considers to be anti-Muslim. The question is will the Trump administration cave into its demands? Under Barack Obama, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group that reportedly raises money for Hamas, wielded tremendous power and managed to bully law enforcement agencies at the local, state and federal level to alter counterterrorism training materials deemed by the group to discriminate against Muslims.

This includes getting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to purge anti-terrorism training curricula of material determined to be “offensive” to Muslims. Judicial Watch uncovered that scandal and obtained the FBI records. Based on troves of government documents, Judicial Watch subsequently published a special, in-depth report on the scandal. CAIR is not specifically named but the records show that an undisclosed group of “Subject Matter Experts” (SME) determined the federal training material was offensive to Muslims. CAIR also got police departments in Illinois to eliminate anti-terrorism training materials and instructors deemed anti-Muslim. As an example, CAIR asserted that an instructor for the Lombard, Illinois police force wrote an article years earlier that included disparaging comments about the Prophet Muhammad. The course was called “Islamic Awareness as a Counter-Terrorist Strategy” and departments in Lombard, Elmhurst and Highland Park caved into CAIR’s demands.

Keep in mind that CAIR is a terrorist front group with extensive links to foreign and domestic Islamists. It was founded in 1994 by three Middle Eastern extremists (Omar Ahmad, Nihad Awad and Rafeeq Jaber) who ran the American propaganda wing of Hamas, known then as the Islamic Association for Palestine. In 2008 CAIR was a co-conspirator in a federal terror-finance case involving the Hamas front group Holy Land Foundation. Read more in a Judicial Watch special report that focuses on Muslim charities. Judicial Watch also tried to find out if CAIR got the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overhaul its anti-terrorism training but the spy agency said it could “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records” involving meetings or communications with the Muslim rights group. The CIA asserted that the information is classified intelligence protected from disclosure. The response goes on to cite the statutes—such as the CIA Act of 1949 and National Security Act of 1947—that allow the agency to hide even the most benign information from the American public. It’s likely that the CIA met with CAIR during the Obama years—or at least had communication with the extremist group—and doesn’t want the public to know about it.

Time will tell if CAIR’s cozy relationship with the Obama administration will carry over into the new one. Regardless, the group was emboldened in the last eight years and continues making demands in the name of Muslim rights. This week it called on the military to get rid of a top counterterrorism instructor at the United States Air Force Special Operations School (USSAFSOS) in Florida. The instructor, Patrick Dunleavy, teaches a course called “The Dynamics of International Terrorism” designed to provide awareness and appreciation of the organization, motivation, operational capabilities and threat posed by terrorists on an international, national, and regional basis. It was designed for individuals with no previous antiterrorism training and focuses on protective measures that government personnel and their families can employ to minimize threats.

Dunleavy, the course instructor, is a former deputy inspector general for the New York State Department of Corrections and has testified before Congress as an expert witness on the threat of Islamic radicalization in the nation’s prison system. Dunleavy is also a senior fellow at a decades-old nonprofit dedicated to investigating the operations, funding, activities and front groups of Islamic extremists worldwide. The think-tank, Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), is recognized as a comprehensive data center on radical Islamic terrorist cells and its founder is a terrorism and national security expert who has advised Congress, the president, FBI and National Security Council. After 9/11 he published a best-selling book documenting how one of the world’s most notorious terrorist groups plotted the worst terrorist attack on American soil without detection or scrutiny by American authorities.

CAIR uses Dunleavy’s association with IPT to call for his ouster as a military antiterrorism instructor, asserting that the research center is an “anti-Muslim propaganda mouthpiece, and has made a number of false statements betraying a personal prejudice against Islam and Muslims.” IPT’s founder, Steven Emerson, has a history of making “Islamophobic” statements, CAIR says, involving terrorist attacks that date back to the 1990s. The Islamic group reminds the commander of the U.S. Airforce Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field in Florida (Lieutenant General Marshall B. Webb), that under Obama the military caved into its demands. “As you may recall in 2012, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey ordered the U.S. military to ‘scour its training material to ensure it doesn’t contain anti-Islamic content,” CAIR writes in a letter to Lieutenant General Webb. Judicial Watch will monitor this situation to see how the Trump Department of Defense (DOD) handles these preposterous requests.