Religion Group vows to drive Muslims out of U.S.
Roy White wants to inform as many Americans as possible about the terrorists he sees in their midst. The lean, 62-year-old Air Force veteran strode into the Texas State Capitol in late January wearing a charcoal-gray pinstripe suit and an American flag tie, with the mission of warning all 181 lawmakers about a Muslim group sponsoring a gathering of Texas Muslims at the Capitol the following day. Although the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations (CAIR) works to promote Muslim civil rights across America, White wanted to convince lawmakers that it is actually working to infiltrate the U.S. government and destroy American society from within.
“They’re jihadists wearing suits,” White said of CAIR and other Muslim organizations. “That’s a tough thing for us to wrap our heads around because we don’t feel threatened.”
White is the San Antonio chapter president of ACT for America, an organization that brands itself as “the nation’s largest grass-roots national security advocacy organization” and attacks what it sees as the creeping threat of sharia, or Islamic law, in the form of Muslim organizations, mosques, refugees and sympathetic politicians.
The group has found allies among a coterie of anti-Muslim organizations, speakers and Christian fundamentalists, as well as with some state lawmakers.
Bill Zedler, a Texas Republican state representative, said during a recent forum supported by ACT that he fears political correctness is masking the real problem: “Regardless of whether it’s al-Qaida, or CAIR, or the Islamic State, they just have different methodology for the destruction of Western civilization.”
ACT, which has been a vocal advocate for President Donald Trump and his administration, says it now has “a direct line” to the president and an ability to influence the direction of the nation.
“We are on the verge of playing the most pivotal role in reversing the significant damage that has been done to our nation’s security and well-being over the past eight years,” ACT’s founder, Brigitte Gabriel, wrote in a December solicitation for donations.
Stephen K. Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart who has described Muslim American groups as “cultural jihadists” bent on destroying American society, is Trump’s chief strategist.
Breitbart has published several articles Gabriel has written.
Trump’s CIA director, Mike Pompeo, has spoken at ACT’s conferences and sponsored an ACT meeting at the Capitol last year.
Retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who sits on ACT’s board of advisers, served as the president’s national security adviser before stepping down after revelations that he might have violated the law in communications with a Russian diplomat.
In the first days of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order temporarily banning travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries – and all refugees – from entering the United States, an order that has been put on hold as it faces court challenges.
Ahmed Bedier, former executive director of CAIR’s Tampa chapter, said ACT distorts Islam and works to present it as a belief that doesn’t deserve religious protection in the United States. He considers that a very dangerous proposition for the American Muslim population.
“These guys are the fringe of the fringe, and now they have people on the inside of the most powerful government in the world,” said Bedier, who has frequently sparred publicly with ACT. “They’re fascists. They don’t want any presence of Muslims in America. And the only Muslim that is acceptable to them is a former Muslim.”
ACT, based in Virginia Beach, Virginia, has nearly 17,500 volunteers and 17 staff members, according to tax records. Gabriel says ACT has 500,000 “relentless grass-roots warriors,” such as White, who are “ready to do whatever it takes to achieve our goal of a safer America.”
A safer America, to ACT, means a nation free of all Islamic influence, a goal that has led some civil rights activists to call it a hate group akin to white supremacists.
It wants groups that practice or advocate sharia – the guiding principles of Islam – to be forced to disband, supports President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban travelers from several Muslim-majority countries, and opposes the resettlement of Muslim refugees in the United States. It supports preserving the Constitution and its concept of American culture, which ACT says on its website means “recognizing that we are the greatest nation on Earth and that if you are an American you must be an American first.”
Since it began its work a decade ago, ACT claims 22 legislative victories in Republican-controlled statehouses, many of them laws that stiffen criminal penalties for terrorism, keep Islamic or foreign influence out of U.S. courts, or aim to protect free speech.
ACT also led a successful campaign to get “errors” removed from Texas school textbooks, including what leaders consider pro-Islamic, anti-Christian, antiWestern statements.
In recent weeks, ACT has lobbied on behalf of Trump’s travel ban. On Wednesday, it circulated a message to its followers claiming that Flynn’s fall was the work of “rogue weasels” and “shadow warriors” within the U.S. government trying to destroy Trump.
Much of ACT’s philosophy is rooted in the belief that America is the target of a vast international conspiracy. But, White says, he’s not a conspiracy theorist: his conviction is grounded in facts and in spiritual conviction. White, a devout Christian, believes that sharia, the guiding laws and principles of Islam, are the embodiment of that evil; that the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamic movement that is a force in Middle Eastern politics, is working to spread sharia throughout America.
“It’s a spiritual battle of good and evil, and a lot of folks on the left have a difficult time thinking that there is actually good and evil,” he said. “I’m never going to stop telling the truth for fear of the consequences of telling the truth to people.”
— Ahmed Bedier