The US government is being accused of pumping millions of dollars into unregulated training schemes for local police officers and other law enforcers that give a distorted, dangerous and inflammatory picture of the Muslim faith.

Political Research Associates, a Massachusetts-based progressive thinktank, spent nine months investigating the burgeoning industry of counter-terrorism training. It concluded that in seminars and conferences across America, police, transit and other law-enforcement officers were being given an ideologically skewed impression of Islam that impugned the entire religion, presenting it as inherently violent and sympathetic to terrorism.

One training conference, which PRA investigators attended, was held last October by the International Counter-Terrorism Officers Association, a body formed by New York police officers in the wake of 9/11. The conference was addressed by Walid Shoebat, a speaker used by several of the private training outfits.

Shoebat is a convert to Christianity, having formerly been a Muslim with links to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. In his presentation, called The Jihad Mindset and How to Defeat It: Why We Want to Kill You, he accused Muslim men of raping women, children and young boys. “They are paedophiles!” he shouted.

According to the report, Shoebat went on: “The Muslim beheads with a smile. You can see it on YouTube, on TV; the Afghan child trained to execute Christians. You say that Islam is a peaceful religion? Why? It hates the west.” He also said: “Islam is a revolution and is intent to destroy all other systems. They want to expand, like Nazism.”

Guardian, 10 March 2011

See also Tarso Ramos, “The anti-Muslim fearmongering we can’t see”, Comment is Free, 9 March 2011

Read the Political Research Associates report Manufacturing the Muslim Menace here

Update:  See also Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, 11 March 2011

The New York Times profiles Brigitte Gabriel of ACT! for America.

See also “Radical Islamophobe activist advising Rep. Peter King explains his ‘Muslim messenger’ strategy”, Think Progress, 8 March 2011

And “Rep. King asked to clarify support from anti-Islam hate group”, CAIR press release, 8 March 2011

Proclaiming “Today I am a Muslim too,” about 1,000 protesters gathered Sunday in Times Square to decry Rep. Pete King’s upcoming hearings into homegrown radical Islam.

“Today, they’re targeting Muslims. Tomorrow, it will be Jews. Tomorrow, they’ll close a synagogue,” said Abu Abdullah, 57, a perfumer from Bay Shore, L.I., who stood in the rain at the interfaith rally. “Peter King is trying to divide us – to make it like shark eat shark,” he said of the Long Island Republican, who heads the House Homeland Security Committee. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

Christians, Jews and Muslims branded the hearings a witch hunt, waved signs and chanted, “Shame, shame Pete King!”

Celebrities from boxing legend Mike Tyson to reality show darling Kim Kardashian added their support online. “We are bigger than Charlie Sheen – we are the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter,” hip-hop icon Russell Simmons told the rain-drenched crowd.

Magdy Salama, 50, a limo company owner from Astoria, Queens, who held a small American flag on a stick, said he worried his three Muslim kids will grow up facing religious bigotry. “We’re a free country. There should be freedom of religion,” Salama said.

New York Daily News, 7 March 2011

See also Associated Press, 6 March 2011

And “Congressman King defends himself against criticism over hearings on radical Islam”, Washington Post, 7 March 2011

As a Republican congressman prepares to open hearings on the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser visited a mosque here on Sunday to reassure Muslims that “we will not stigmatize or demonize entire communities because of the actions of a few.”

The White House billed the speech by the adviser, Denis McDonough, as a chance for the administration to lay out its strategy for preventing violent extremism. But the timing was no accident; Mr. McDonough was in effect an emissary from the White House to pre-empt Representative Peter King of New York, the Homeland Security Committee chairman, who has promised a series of hearings beginning Thursday on the radicalization of American Muslims.

“In the United States of America, we don’t practice guilt by association,” Mr. McDonough told an interfaith but mostly Muslim audience of about 200 here at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, known as the Adams Center. “And let’s remember that just as violence and extremism are not unique to any one faith, the responsibility to oppose ignorance and violence rests with us all.”

Mr. McDonough made no explicit mention of the hearings or Mr. King. But his speech came on a day when the back-and-forth over Mr. King’s plans crescendoed, from the airwaves of Washington’s Sunday morning talk shows to the streets of Manhattan to this northern Virginia suburb, an area packed with Muslim professionals, many of whom are extremely wary of Mr. King and his plans.

New York Times, 6 March 2011

“Let us call this what it is: bigotry draped in the American flag – nothing more than a fear-mongering attempt, drenched in political theatrics, laced with reactionary hatred, and deceptively packaged in an incredulous label of national security.”

Seema Jilani addresses an open letter to the chairman of the homeland security committee over the House hearings on “homegrown Muslim terrorism”.

Last month a crowd of right-wing anti-Muslim bigots demonstrated outside a charity fundraiser organised by the Islamic Circle of North America in the city of Yorba Linda in Orange County, California. The Council on American-Islamic relations have released a video of these events. American Muslims, including families with young children, are subjected to shouts of “go back home” and chants of “Mohammed was a child molester”, while Republican politicians give speeches in support of the protest.

A local councillor named Deborah Pauly, referring to the ICNA meeting, states: “What’s going on over there right now, make no bones about it, that is pure unadulterated evil….  I know quite a few Marines who would be very happy to help these terrorists to an early meeting in Paradise.”