Thursday, March 10, 2011

Report Charges Anti-Islamic Bias In Training of Law Enforcement and Security Personnel

Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank, on Tuesday released a report (executive summary ) titled  Manufacturing the Muslim Menace: Private Firms, Public Servants and the Threat to Rights and Security ( full text).  The lengthy report charges that local, state and federal government agencies fail to adequately monitor the quality of preparedness training provided to their law enforcement and domestic security employees by private vendors.  Focusing on three private organizations that offer anti-terrorism training, the report charges:
public servants are regularly presented with misleading, inflammatory, and dangerous information about the nature of the terror threat through highly politicized seminars, industry conferences, trade publications, and electronic media. In place of sound skills training and intelligence briefings, a vocal and influential sub-group of the private counterterrorism training industry markets conspiracy theories about secret jihadi campaigns to replace the U.S. Constitution with Sharia law, and effectively impugns all of Islam—a world religion with 1.3 billion adherents—as inherently violent and even terroristic.
The report also offers seven recommendations to improve the situation in the future.