About 50 law enforcement personnel on Tuesday began an anti-Muslim seminar in rural Virginia headlined by controversial figure John Guandolo and hosted by the sheriff’s department.
“Everything went smoothly,” Sheriff Scott Jenkins told The Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Va., of the event entitled “Understanding and Investigating Jihadi Networks in America.”
The three-day seminar is being held at Daniel Technology Center of Germanna Community College, which rented the space to the sheriff’s department for the event.
The newspaper also noted, “Calls and email protests had been made not only to Jenkins, but also to members of the Culpeper County Board of Supervisors, asking that funding to the Sheriff’s Office be pulled, and to Germanna officials, asking that the community college revoke use of its rented conference hall.”
Ahead of the event, Virginia’s Department of Criminal Justice Services withdrew its accreditation for the training program, due to the controversy surrounding the seminar and at the urging of several organizations, including the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations.
An official with the community college, who refused to give his name, claimed that no one at the institution knew the details of the seminar. He said they only “knew the Culpeper Sheriff’s Department was going to be giving an anti-terrorism training on the campus.”
Guandolo, vice president of Strategic Engagement Group, a tiny security organization, describes his consultancy as the “only company in the United States aimed at identifying potential threats to homeland security,” according to his resume.
“He raised eyebrows — and was widely mocked — a year ago with wild claims about John Brennan, who was later confirmed as director of the Central Intelligence Agency,” according to an article on Salon.com.
He claimed that Brennan had “interwoven his life professionally and personally with individuals that we know are terrorist” and “brought known Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood leaders into the government and into advisory positions.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been monitoring Guandolo for quite some time.
Corey Saylor, a spokesperson for CAIR, said Guandolo’s goal was to undermine the rights of Muslim Americans, reported The Guardian,
“Counter-terrorism training is important,” Saylor told The Guardian. “Bad counter-terrorism training is damaging. Guandolo provides bad counter-terrorism training.”
In the wake of 9/11, demand for counter-terrorism training exploded across the United States. Large portions of taxpayer money were devoted to the problem, “with the federal government providing $1.7bn in grants in 2010” alone, The Guardian reported.
“Far-right groups have spotted an opportunity in this rapidly growing new industry to disseminate Islamophobic theories posing as legitimate counter-terrorism strategy,” The Guardian report said. “A report by the progressive think tank Political Research Associates in 2011 found that an influential sub-group of the counter-terrorism training industry ‘markets conspiracy theories about secret jihadi campaigns to replace the U.S. constitution with sharia law, and effectively impugns all of Islam.’”
The sub-group reportedly includes the Thin Blue Line Project, a campaign by Act! for America that Guandolo is closely connected to. The project disseminates the concept of a Muslim Brotherhood jihadi takeover of the United States among law enforcement personnel.
Given Guandolo’s reputation, it remains unclear why Sheriff Jenkins would invite him to speak at the conference.
The Culpeper Sheriff’s Office did not immediately return a call for comment on Wednesday.