Spencer Ackerman at Wired.com's Danger Room defense blog has a big story breaking tonight. It's a very upsetting read. If you had any doubt that racism against Muslim-Americans was institutionalized at the highest levels of our government, this should take care of that misunderstanding.
The FBI is teaching its counterterrorism agents that "main stream"
[sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers; that
the Prophet Mohammed was a "cult leader"; and that the Islamic
practice of giving charity is no more than a "funding mechanism for
combat."At the Bureau's training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are
shown a chart contending that the more "devout" a Muslim, the more
likely he is to be "violent." Those destructive tendencies cannot be
reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: "Any war against
non-believers is justified" under Muslim law; a "moderating process
cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable
word of Allah."These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training
material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the
Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is
portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity."There may not be a 'radical' threat as much as it is simply a normal
assertion of the orthodox ideology," one FBI presentation notes. "The
strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they
are main stream."The FBI isn't just treading on thin legal ice by portraying ordinary,
observant Americans as terrorists-in-waiting, former counterterrorism
agents say. It's also playing into al-Qaida's hands.
