Manufacturing the Muslim Menace - Political Research Associates

Manufacturing the Muslim Menace
Stephen Coughlin – CI Centre Faculty
CI Centre faculty member
Stephen Coughlin holds a
Masters degree in Strategic
Intelligence, with a focus on global
terrorism and Jihadist movements,
and a law degree from
William Mitchell School of Law.
He worked as a Joint Chiefs of
Staff intelligence analyst; he left the Pentagon in
2008 after superiors did not renew his contract. 154 In
2007, Coughlin wrote a thesis for the National
Defense Intelligence College entitled “To Our Great
Detriment: Ignoring what Extremists Say about
Jihad.” This thesis, which analyzes the role of Islamic
law in violent terrorist ideology and strategy, informs
the CI Centre’s curriculum on “Jihadist Threat
Doctrine.”
In his thesis, Coughlin took issue with President
George W. Bush’s assertion that “the terrorists are
traitors to their own faith.” According to Coughlin,
Bush, Rice, and other Administration officials were
wrong to declare Islam a religion of peace that had
been hijacked by a few violent extremists for an agenda
that has nothing to do with Islam. To Coughlin,
these officials ignored all evidence that Islamic law
obligates Muslims to use violence in the name of
spreading or defending the faith.
Coughlin has asserted that top foreign policy
strategists and the White House pander to Islamic
sensitivities in an effort to demonstrate tolerance and
respect. Statements, such as, “holding Islam harmless,”
says Coughlin, have a chilling effect on “unconstrained
threat analysis.” 155 Speaking alongside
Park51 Islamic Center opponents Pam Geller and
Robert Spencer at the 2010 Conservative Political
Action Conference, Coughlin cited Islamic law texts
to construct a profile of the “enemy mind,” implying
that moderate Muslims are not good Muslims. 156
Nonie Darwish – CI Centre Faculty
CI Centre faculty member Nonie
Darwish is the founder of Arabs
For Israel and the director of
Former Muslims United. The
daughter of an Egyptian intelligence
officer who was assassinated
by the Israeli Defense Force
while supporting the Palestinian
fedayeen in Gaza, Darwish eventually immigrated to
the United States, converted to Christianity, and
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began to publicly denounce Islamic values in her
published works and frequent lectures. Although CI
Centre lists Darwish as a staff member, her precise
role as an instructor is not known to PRA.
She is the author of the bestselling Now They Call
Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel
and the War on Terror as well as Cruel and Unusual
Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of
Islamic Law. Darwish has stated that, contrary to the
assertions of Muslim feminists such as Dr. Laleh
Bakhtiar, “Sharia law does not protect women. It’s the
stumbling block, it’s what’s making Islam impossible
to change.” 157 Speaking of the political situation in
Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence is
likely to expand, Darwish shares Coughlin’s position
that violent jihad is a core tenet of mainstream Islam:
“The Brotherhood’s basic ideology is equal to basic
Muslim ideology, where Jihad is a centerpiece duty of
the Muslim head of state.” 158 Darwish wrote in
February 2011 that the uprising in Egypt demonstrated
President Obama’s empowerment of Islamists
overseas and within the domestic security apparatus.
This situation, Darwish says, means, “Whoever takes
office after Obama will have to weed out from our
government the Sharia loving Islamists who refuse to
call Hamas a terrorist organization and who sympathize
with the Brotherhood. This must be done if we
are to protect ourselves from getting sucked into
Islam’s orbit of no return.” 159
Her criticism of Islam as an inherently violent
ideology, as well as her call for hard line action,
reflects one of CI Centre’s emphases: employing
experts who reject treatments of Islam as a mainstream
religion that should not routinely be subjected
to heightened scrutiny by policymakers and law
enforcement agencies.
Det. Ebrahim Ashabi – SSI Trainer
Detective Ebrahim Ashabi is SSI’s expert on matters
related to violent terrorism. He left Iran in 1982 and
joined the Long Beach, CA Police Department in
1997. Ashabi holds a Bachelor’s degree in Public
Administration from the University of La Verne and
is working toward a Masters degree at California
State University. SSI calls him “one of America’s foremost
experts on radical Islam and anti-terror security
practices.” 160 Ashabi and Henry Morgenstern lead
SSI’s training course on “The Threat of Islamic
Jihadists to the World,” which SSI bills as “a unique
training course that has been expertly designed to
bring world-class counter-terrorism training to First