Islamic Education Goes to Alt-Right Country

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News

15 August 17

grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania. New Castle was a terrific place to be a kid. I made lifelong friends there and I have warm memories of my childhood. The area was known as a conservative Democratic stronghold: pro-labor, pro-life, and pro-gun. All the local officeholders were Democrats, but in national elections, New Castle and the surrounding Lawrence County went solidly for Nixon and Reagan. Most recently, they went big for Trump.

The city is typical of what happened to towns all across the Rust Belt in the 1970s and 1980s. As the mills and mines closed, the city shut down too. New Castle had a population of about 50,000 in the census of 1950. Today it has about 21,000 people. The largest employers in town now are the school district, the local hospital, and Walmart. The downtown is virtually out of business, with most buildings boarded up. Crime is high. Arson is rampant. And when the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms have to open a field office in the city, you know there are problems.

Just about everybody I’ve ever known who moved away from New Castle still wished the best for the city. We all hoped for an economic comeback and we followed news in the local paper indicating that this or that company was interested in relocating there or that a group of investors wanted to open a racetrack.

You would think, then, that it would be good news that the now-closed Youth Development Center (YDC), a detention center for juveniles, found a bidder for its abandoned site. Hira Educational Services bid $400,000 to buy the YDC’s 143 acres and 13 buildings, and announced that it would turn the facility into “an alternative reform center aimed at turning troubled youth around by community service, therapy, and education.” Sounds great, right? The only problem is that Hira is an “Islamic educational consultancy,” and its president, Asif Kunwar, is a Muslim.

In the highly-educated, progressive bubbles that many of us live in on the east and west coasts, this is a total non-issue. But in a small, rural, Red America town like New Castle, the property may as well have been purchased by Osama bin Laden. Asif Kunwar has received death threats. The local newspaper’s message board has lit up with anti-Muslim and xenophobic rants, and even local Democratic politicians have introduced measures in the state assembly to nullify the sale. They seem to still have hope that they can win the white supremacist vote in the coming election. As an aside, there was no such outrage when a Christian fundraising company purchased an abandoned building downtown to use as its own headquarters.

There are some legitimate reasons for people to complain about Hira’s bid, none of which have anything to do with xenophobia. First, there is some circumstantial evidence that Kunwar colluded with another bidder in violation of the terms of the purchase. Second, nobody seems to be certain of exactly what Hira is. The corporate phone number listed on its incorporation documents rings in a private apartment in Newark, New Jersey. Third, its poorly-written website says that its corporate mission is to “give protection to the people who join us and of-course [sic] teach them well.” Protection from what goes unexplained. The website also says that Hira “will arrange the occassionals [sic] events for students and provides the best environment for the studnts [sic].” That’s not a ringing endorsement of the organization’s professionalism.

Accusations of bidding collusion, misdirected phone numbers, and ugly websites are not the issue, though. The issue is xenophobia and irrational anti-Muslim sentiment in small-town America. New Castle is a microcosm of the country – or at least of the part of the country that used to be Democratic and now shouts Trump’s name at the top of its collective lungs. It’s indicative of where so many Americans stand on these issues. It’s indicative of how emboldened people have become to espouse their hate in public since Trump’s election.

New Castle will host a Charlottesville-like pro-white-supremacist demonstration in September. Elected officials and private citizens have to stand up against hate. The politicians have to grow some cojones. Now is the time for leadership, whether it’s popular or not. We have a lot of work to do as a nation. And as things stand now, it’ll be generations before we can sing Kumbaya.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.

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