Ryan Mauro (born 1986) is an American national security analyst. He has worked for the Clarion Project and frequently appeared on Fox News providing commentary on Islamic extremism. [1] [2] [3] He is currently an investigative researcher for Capital Research Center. [4]
Mauro has been a contributor to FrontPage Magazine , the Middle East Forum's Islamist Watch, and to the Center for Security Policy's Secure Freedom Radio. [1] He has also been listed as a team member of the Christian Action Network, and collaborated with ACT for America. [1]
As a national security analyst for the Clarion Project, he has held presentations for Tactical Officers law enforcement conferences in New York and in California, [1] [2] [3] and for the Homeland Security Professionals Conference in Florida. [5] His presentations have been protested by groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). [6] Mauro in turn claims that CAIR has ties to terrorism. [2]
More recently, Mauro has been the founding director of the Afghan Liberty Project, which provided safe houses to Afghans at risk until it was announced it would shut down in 2022 due to lack of funding. [7]
Mauro has been accused of promoting policies that criminalize Muslims and Muslim communities, and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories such as no-go zones in the United States. [1] He has also "long warned about active Muslim terror training camps in the United States, and has argued that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the Republican Party." [3]
He rejects that he is anti-Muslim, and has claimed that "if anyone comes away from my presentations feeling anti-Muslim, they aren't listening" and that "significant portions of each presentation are about the danger of anti-Muslim sentiment and the wonderful work of Muslims in America and abroad." [2]
He has been described as a part of the counter-jihad movement. [8]
In 2018, Mauro produced a viral video on YouTube with The Doubting Thomas Research Foundation, claiming that the biblical Mount Sinai is actually the modern-day Jebel al-Lawz in Saudi Arabia. Supporting his view, he claims that the shallow underwater land bridge called the "Nuweiba Land Bridge" could have been used by Moses and the Hebrews to cross from Egypt into the Arabian Peninsula when the Red Sea parted during the Exodus. [9] [10]
The Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group. It is headquartered on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., with regional offices nationwide. Through civil rights actions, media relations, civic engagement, and education, CAIR works to promote social, legal and political activism among Muslims in America.
Omar Ahmad was the founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington D.C.–based Muslim civil rights organization. He also worked for the Islamic Association of Palestine, a precursor to CAIR.
Nonie Darwish is an Egyptian-American author, writer, founder of the Arabs for Israel movement, and director of Former Muslims United. Darwish is an outspoken critic of Islam.
Muhammad Hisham Kabbani was a Lebanese-American Sunni Sufi Muslim scholar belonging to the Naqshbandi Sufi Order. Kabbani has counseled and advised Muslim leaders to build community resilience against violent extremism. In 2012, the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre named him on The 500 Most Influential Muslims. His notable students include the world-famous boxer Muhammad Ali and former Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Mount Sinai is the mountain at which the Ten Commandments were given to Moses by God, according to the Book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible. In the Book of Deuteronomy, these events are described as having transpired at Mount Horeb. "Sinai" and "Horeb" are generally considered by scholars to refer to the same place.
The post-9/11 period is the time after the September 11 attacks, characterized by heightened suspicion of non-Americans in the United States, increased government efforts to address terrorism, and a more aggressive American foreign policy.
Khaleel Mohammed was a Guyanese-born professor of Religion at San Diego State University (SDSU), in San Diego, California, a member of Homeland Security Master's Program, and, as of January 2021, Director of SDSU's Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies.
Quilliam was a British think tank co-founded in 2008 by Maajid Nawaz that focused on counter-extremism, specifically against Islamism, which it argued represents a desire to impose a given interpretation of Islam on society. Founded as The Quilliam Foundation and based in London, it claimed to lobby government and public institutions for more nuanced policies regarding Islam and on the need for greater democracy in the Muslim world whilst empowering "moderate Muslim" voices. The organisation opposed any Islamist ideology and championed freedom of expression. The critique of Islamist ideology by its founders―Nawaz, Rashad Zaman Ali and Ed Husain―was based, in part, on their personal experiences. Quilliam went into liquidation in 2021.
The Clarion Project is an American nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. that was founded in 2006. The organization has been involved in the production and distribution of the films Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, The Third Jihad: Radical Islam's Vision For America and Iranium. These films have been criticized by some for allegedly falsifying information and described as anti-Muslim propaganda. The organization publishes a weekly "Extremism Roundup" newsletter.
Rashad Hussain is an American attorney, diplomat, and professor, who currently serves as the United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. He previously served as associate White House counsel, as U.S. Special Envoy of President Barack Obama to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and the U.S. Special Envoy for strategic counterterrorism communications. Hussain has also served on the United States National Security Council and in the Department of Justice as a trial attorney and a criminal and national security prosecutor.
Mohamed Zuhdi Jasser is an American religious and political commentator and physician specializing in internal medicine and nuclear cardiology in Phoenix, Arizona. Jasser is a former lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, where he served as staff internist in the Office of the Attending Physician of the United States Congress. In 2003, with a group of American Muslims, Jasser founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) based in Phoenix, Arizona, and in 2004 he was one of the founders of the Center for Islamic Pluralism.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) is a non-profit research group founded by Steven Emerson in 1995. IPT has been called a prominent part of the "Islamophobia network" within the United States and a "leading source of anti-Muslim racism" and noted for its record of selective reporting and poor scholarship.
Islamic extremism in the United States comprises all forms of Islamic extremism occurring within the United States. Islamic extremism is an adherence to fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, potentially including the promotion of violence to achieve political goals. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, Islamic extremism became a prioritized national security concern of the U.S. government and a focus of many subsidiary security and law enforcement entities. Initially, the focus of concern was on foreign Islamic terrorist organizations, particularly al-Qaeda, but in the course of the years since the September 11 terror attacks, the focus has shifted more towards Islamic extremist radicalized individuals and jihadist networks within the United States.
Gatestone Institute is an American conservative think tank based in New York City, known for publishing articles pertaining to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, specifically with regard to Islamic extremism. It was founded in 2012 by Nina Rosenwald, who serves as its president.John R. Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and former National Security Advisor, was its chairman from 2013 until March 2018. Its current chairman is Amir Taheri. The organization has attracted attention for publishing false or inaccurate articles, some of which were shared widely.
Nina Rosenwald is an American political activist and philanthropist. An heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune, Rosenwald is vice president of the William Rosenwald Family Fund and co-chair of the board of American Securities Management. She is the founder and president of Gatestone Institute, a New York-based right-wing anti-Muslim think tank.
Anti-Sunnism is hatred of, prejudice against, discrimination against, persecution of, and violence against Sunni Muslims. It has also been described as "Anti-Sunni sentiment" "Sunniphobia", the "fear or hatred of Sunnism and Sunnites".
American Muslims often face Islamophobia and racialization due to stereotypes and generalizations ascribed to them. Due to this, Islamophobia is both a product of and a contributor to the United States' racial ideology, which is founded on socially constructed categories of profiled features, or how people seem.
John D. Guandolo is an American former Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent and counterterrorism activist who has provided training seminars for law enforcement and local elected officials across the United States. Having been described as an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist, his seminars have been controversial and protested against by advocacy groups. He ran the seminars with the organization Understanding the Threat until the group closed down in 2023.
Clare M. Lopez is an American former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer who has served as Vice President for Research and Analysis at the Center for Security Policy. She has been described as an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist by HuffPost and other media outlets.
Chris Allen Gaubatz is an American national security consultant who is known for posing as an intern for the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) in order to gather information on the group's inner workings, which were published in the 2009 book Muslim Mafia by his father Paul David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry. The Southern Poverty Law Center and The Intercept have described Gaubatz as a conspiracy theorist.