OnIslam.net

WASHINGTON – A leading Muslim advocacy group called on the head of the Homeland Security to investigate the use of outside trainers who offer hostile, stereotypical and inaccurate information about Muslims and Islam to the nation's security personnel.

"Well, let's cover all the stereotypical bases," Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said, the Star Tribune website reported on Monday, May 23.

"It's not surprising in the least that [federal authorities] would resort to anti-Muslim stereotypes."

CAIR has renewed concerns after a man, who appeared to be of Middle East descent, was used in a recent security drill at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

According to information released Monday by MSP airport police, the May 12 security test included a device in a shaving kit made to look like a bomb.

The device was brought to a passenger security checkpoint, according to airport Police Sgt. Mark Ledbetter, one of the responding officers.

"Upon arriving [at the checkpoint]," Ledbetter wrote in his report, "TSA [Transportation Security Administration] screeners were out with a male who appeared to be Middle Eastern in descent or Indian/Pakistani."

Calling on Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to investigate the use of Islamophobe trainers, Hooper confirmed that he has no problem with such security tests.

But "when you resort to ethnic and religious stereotypes in these types of drills, it sends the message to watch out for these people, and that leads to profiling."

TSA officials denied CAIR’s accusations, saying that the agency conducts thousands of training tests for individuals from different ethnicities.

TSA conducts "thousands of training tests each year, and the individuals carrying out the testing are [of] various ethnicities, ages and appearances, just like the traveling public," TSA spokesman Greg Soule said.

The new complains echo earlier calls by CAIR for the Obama administration, the Department of Defense and Congress to provide oversight for widespread anti-Muslim bias in the training of law enforcement and security and military personnel nationwide.

Trainers for American military personnel have included Islamophobes such as Robert Spencer, co-founder of Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA), a group designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Funding Islamophobia

CAIR waned that the use and funding of Islamophobic trainers undermines President Barack Obama’s efforts to improve relations with the Muslim world.

"The use and funding of Islamophobic private trainers harms our nation's safety and security and contradicts both DHS policy and your public statements on improving relations with the American Muslim community,” Nihad Awad, CAIR National Executive Director, wrote in a letter sent to In a letter sent to Secretary Napolitano.

“Promoting anti-Muslim hostility only serves to tear down hard-won trust and spread unjustified fear and suspicion.

"The fact that repeated calls for government investigations of this disturbing trend have gone unanswered sends a very negative message to American Muslims and to the larger society,” Awad added.

"Islamophobic trainers are undercutting your efforts and those of President Obama, who repeatedly states that our nation is not at war with Islam or Muslims."
CAIR's renewed request for oversight comes following the release of an 80-page report, titled

"Manufacturing the Muslim Menace: Private Firms, Public Servants, & the Threat to Rights and Security," by Political Research Associates (PRA).

The report details a systemic failure to regulate content in counterterrorism training.

Since 9/11, US Muslims, estimated between six to seven million, have become sensitized to an erosion of their civil rights, with a prevailing belief that America was stigmatizing their faith.

Anti-Muslim frenzy has grown sharply in the US in recent months over plans to build a mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York, resulting in attacks on Muslims and their property.

A Republican Senator stirred uproar last month over holding a probe into what he called “radicalization” of American Muslims.

Peter King, the chairman of the US House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee, claims that US Muslims are being radicalized by Al-Qaeda operatives, accusing Muslim leaders of not cooperating with law enforcement authorities in fighting terrorism.

Worse still, lawmakers in at least 13 states have introduced proposals to ban Shari`ah.