Hoping to prevent yet another “Steve Scalise moment,” a Muslim advocacy group is calling on the FBI to renege on plans to send an official to an “anti-Muslim hate group” event featuring a notorious Islamophobic guest speaker.
The event, which is set to be held on Feb. 13 at St. Mary University’s Center for Terrorism, is scheduled to feature a man who thinks that the head of the CIA is a secret Muslim extremist.
The symposium is being founded by Brigitte Gabriel, a woman who has bolstered her career making incendiary statement about Islam, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) warned.
Despite the inflammatory associations, the FBI is planning to join the conference, which has been billed as dealing with “Domestic Jihad & ISIS.”
An agent from Quantico is slated to offer the keynote address. According to Corey Saylor, the Director of CAIR’s Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia, “the FBI should not legitimize their Islamophobia by sending a representative to this event.”
The man who CAIR most focused on is John Guandolo, a man who has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “notorious Muslim-basher and conspiracy theorist.”
Guandolo, who is scheduled to give a talk titled “Understanding Shariah & Jihad,” once said, CIA Director John Brennan is a secret Muslim agent, in an online interview unearthed by CAIR.
In the video, Guandolo says he has “direct sources” who can confirm that Brennan was under the employ of the Saudi government, and that ”as the culmination of this relationship, he converted to Islam while serving as the senior US intelligence representative for the United States.”
Despite his ravings, Guandolo has made a lucrative career providing training to law enforcement officials. Up until 2014, officers could receive credits for his classes in “understanding and investigating jihadi networks in America,” which Guandolo taught at a Community College in Culpepper, Va.
In September of 2014, the ACLU protested against another publicly endorsed event featuring Guandolo. The organization wrote a letter condemning a gathering hosted by the Maricopa County Attorney’s office in Arizona, where Guandolo’s unparalleled wisdom was scheduled to be on display.
Bill Montgomery, the county attorney defended the event. He said the training was “being mischaracterized.”
“The important thing here is that I want our law enforcement to be able to distinguish between extremist groups and movements from the community that we have here within the Maricopa County area,” He added. It was a lesson police learned from a man who thinks the leader of the CIA is a Saudi agent.
