OVERVIEW:
Brigitte Gabriel, born Hanan Qahwaji, claims ACT was launched as a response to the 9/11 attacks and “educates citizens and elected officials to impact policy involving national security and defeating terrorism.” ACT has stayed true to its mission by working to advance anti-Muslim legislation at the local and federal level while flooding the American public with hate speech demonizing Muslims. ACT for America is listed as an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because it pushes wild anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, denigrates American Muslims and deliberately conflates mainstream and radical Islam. ACT also ran an online database allegedly for law enforcement called the ‘Thin Blue Line’. This McCarthyite project lists the names and addresses of prominent Muslim American leaders and Muslim Student Association (MSA) chapters alongside individuals who have been arrested on terrorism charges, referring to the MSAs as “radical organizations” and the individuals as “persons of interest.”
HISTORY:
ACT first took shape in the form of a group called American Congress for Truth, which had three unpaid officers including Gabriel in 2004, according to Politico. American Congress for Truth was replaced with ACT for America in 2007.
In 2008, a year after forming ACT, Gabriel published her second book, They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It. “In the Muslim world, extreme is mainstream,” Gabriel wrote in the introduction and later “It is not yet politically correct to talk about a religious war. But this is exactly what we are facing: a religious war declared by devout Muslims.”
Even before she created ACT, Gabriel, a Lebanese Christian who became an American citizen, was vocally critical of Islam and Muslims and repeatedly made statements conflating all Muslims with terrorists. In 2004, she angered a Jewish audience during a speech in which she reportedly referred to Arabs as “barbarians,” prompting a public apology from her hosts. In 2006 Gabriel released Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America. In it she wrote, “Islamic terrorists the world over, whom we characterize as fanatics, are really just very devout followers of Muhammad. They are following his example and doing exactly what the Koran teaches and their mullahs exhort them to do.”
Gabriel often recounts her story of growing up in Lebanon during the civil war in overly simplistic terms, describing it as a conflict between Muslims and Christians. She adds that Muslims started the war. Scholars and historians have disputed Gabriel’s account, including Yvonne Haddad, a Syrian Arab-Christian and Georgetown University historian who has lived in Lebanon. In an interview with Buzzfeed in 2016, Haddad said, “her narrative is not historically accurate.” Nathan Lean, author of The Islamophobia Industry points out that Gabriel blames Hezbollah for declaring war on Lebanon’s Christians in 1975, but the organization was not founded until seven years later in 1982.
Despite this record, Gabriel is billed as a “terrorism expert.” In 2007, the same year ACT was formed, Gabriel gave a lecture to the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College as part of a course on Islam. She reportedly told U.S. military and national security personnel that Muslims should be prohibited from serving in public office on the basis of their faith, stating, “If a Muslim who has — who is — a practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Koran to be the word of Allah, who abides by Islam, who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day — this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America.”
The fledgling ACT appointed Guy Rodgers as its first executive director in 2007. The move was part of a strategy by Gabriel to tap into the American Christian Right.
Rodgers was a former national field director with Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. Robertson, a rabidly anti-gay activist has a particular distaste for Islam, repeatedly claiming that it is not a religion (Gabriel once worked for Robertson’s Christian television network). Rodgers claims credit for increasing ACT’s base, boasting on his LinkedIn account that he achieved 50 percent growth for the organization in the first four years.
In 2010, as the number of ACT chapters and members increased, the organization announced its first “National Conference and Legislative Briefing” which took place in Washington, D.C. The conference brought together anti-Muslim leaders, ACT chapter activists, and national politicians to discuss concerns with Islam and Muslims under the guise of protecting national security.
The legislative briefing segment of the conference was another indication of ACT’s budding ties with elected officials, with many of them taking time out of their schedules to talk to ACT members about pressing national security topics. At the 2010 conference, ACT presented its “Patriot Award” to U.S. Rep. Peter King of New York. King once said that there were “ too many mosques in this country ” and later questioned the loyalty of Muslim Americans in the time of war.
When presenting Rep. King with the award, Gabriel indicated how much ACT prizes its relationships with elected officials and how critical they are to advancing ACT’s agenda. Gabriel told King, “I cannot tell you how much we appreciate you and how much we are dedicated to make your work on Capitol Hill easier by mobilizing the people and the public, especially in your state, to support you.” King responded, “I want you to know, as I said before, how much I appreciate the work that ACT for America does for our country. Because we are engaged in a brutal war against a brutal enemy, the enemy of Islamic terrorism and so many people in our country choose to look the other way, so many people in our country choose to ignore it, so many people choose to be politically correct.”
At the federal level, like its membership base, ACT’s national conferences continued to swell in attendance and stature. In 2013, for example, one of the speakers at ACT’s conference was John Guandolo , a disgraced former FBI agent who reinvented himself as a counterterrorism expert and founded the anti-Muslim group Understanding the Threat (UTT), which provides law enforcement training.
Guandolo’s presentation at ACT’s 2013 national conference unveiled one of ACT’s most disturbing endeavors to date: the Thin Blue Line project, billed as a “one-stop internet resource for information concerning the perceived threat of Muslim infiltration and terrorism in the country.” Its key component is a “ Radicalization Map Locator,” listing the addresses of almost every Muslim Student Association (MSA) in the country as well as a number of mosques and Islamic institutions — all listed as suspected national security concerns. In 2015, Guandolo told a crowd in South Carolina that the sole purpose of MSAs is to “recruit jihadis.” The Thin Blue Line project was designed specifically for law enforcement, though it is unclear how many agencies are utilizing it currently.
Throughout 2016 and early 2017, Guandolo traveled to a number of states to train law enforcement, buoyed by an official endorsement from the head of the National Sheriffs Association (NSA). But at the NSA conference in Reno, Nevada, in June of 2017, Guandolo was arrested after punching Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek. The Center for New Community broke the story after obtaining court records relating to the incident. Since then, Guandolo’s NSA endorsement has been pulled, and he has resorted to doing presentations for anti-Muslim groups instead of law enforcement.
In February 2017, shortly after Wired published an exposé titled “ This Hate Group is Teaching Cops to Track Muslims,” the Thin Blue Line site was taken down.
One of ACT’s main tactics is to push anti-Muslim legislation both at the federal and local levels. In 2008, ACT began a campaign called Stop Shariah Now. According to the now defunct Stop Shariah Now website, the project aimed “to inform and educate the public about what Shariah is, how it is creeping into American society and compromising our constitutional freedom of speech, press, religion and equality what we can do to stop it.” In an interview with the Center for American Progress (CAP), then ACT staffer Chris Slick detailed how ACT worked closely with Frank Gaffney, head of the anti-Muslim think tank Center for Security Policy (CSP), to push anti-Sharia legislation at the state level.
The “anti-Sharia” laws were drafted by CSP’s general counsel, David Yerushalmi, who equates Sharia with Islamic extremism and advocates criminalizing virtually any practice compliant with Sharia. (In reality, sharia is a set of religious principles and practices akin to halakha for many religiously observant Jews.) In his view, only a religiously non-observant Muslim can be considered socially tolerable.
In early 2012, together with Robert Muise of the Thomas More Law Center, Yerushalmi formed the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC) and began pushing an “American Laws for American Courts” initiative to push a model anti-Sharia law, written primarily by Yerushalmi, in legislatures across the country. The bill argued that America has “unique values of liberty and freedom” that do not exist in foreign legal systems like Sharia law.
Board of Directors: Bridgette Gabriel
Staff: Unknown
Funders: Grassroots Funding
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Address: 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Suite 190, #614, Washington D.C., 20004 USA
Website: https://www.actforamerica.org/
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