The decision by the Culpeper County (Va.) Sheriff’s Office to ask former FBI agent John Guandolo to attend a counterterrorism symposium has ruffled the feathers of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a liberal activist organization that monitors so-called “hate groups.”
Guandolo, who authored the book “Raising a Jihadi Generation,” describes himself as a “counterterrorism expert.” He is scheduled to be a presenter at the Feb. 25-27 seminar at the Culpeper campus of Germanna Community College.
But CAIR sees Guandolo differently, branding him a ”notorious anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist.” The group has urged Culpeper Sheriff Scott Jenkins to disinvite Guandolo and distance his department from the “Jihadi Networks in America” program, which is billed as “Advanced Counterterrorism Training.”
Corey Saylor, director of Washington, D.C.-based CAIR’s Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia, states:
Mr. Guandolo has a lengthy record of anti-Muslim extremism and unprofessional behavior. His views on Islam are the equivalent of historical anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic falsehoods. Guandolo offers only his own prejudiced and inaccurate conspiratorial views, not solid counterterrorism training.
SPLC spokesman Josh Glasstetter is also critical of Sheriff Jenkins’s decision:
It’s hard to believe that the Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office would knowingly associate itself with such a disreputable character.
Glasstetter further alleges that Guandolo “regularly attacks the U.S. government, claims that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency is a secret Muslim agent for the Saudi government and says that American Muslims ‘do not have a First Amendment right to do anything.’”
Read more by Kenric Ward at Watchdog.com.
