Imam Mohamed Magid’s War

How a Prominent Religious Leader Uses Interfaith Work and Government Contracts to Enable State Violence

Ahmed Shaikh

Jul 14, 2025

Article voiceover

1×

0:00

-42:13

And when it is said to them: “Make not mischief on the earth,” they say: “We are only peace makers.” Verily! They are the ones who make mischief, but they perceive not.
— Qur’an 2:11-12

From NATO to ISNA

Mohamed Magid is the Executive Imam at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center in Virginia, and the former President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). He is scheduled to headline ISNA’s convention over Labor Day weekend. I first met Magid around 2016, when I served on what was then called ISNA’s Executive Council. Magid had just returned from a trip with Sherman Jackson to address the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—a US-led military alliance—in a meeting on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs.

That such a meeting took place under NATO’s auspices is telling: this is the same coalition that led the so-called International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, responsible for night raids that killed civilians and the rendition of prisoners for torture. Involvement in the CVE ecosystem is also troubling in its own right; CVE has been a pathway for American Muslims eager to secure government positions (or government grants) to profit off of the state’s perception of Muslims as inherently dangerous.

I wrote about CVE extensively at the time and had the opportunity to discuss my objections with Magid. In the years since, the view that CVE was harmful to the Muslim community became widely accepted. Various nonprofits that had initially participated in CVE programs, including the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), eventually withdrew from this work. MPAC later acknowledged that its involvement was a harmful mistake (though this admission has since been removed from their website; an archived version can be found here). The leader of another prominent Muslim CVE organization, WORDE, eventually shut down the organization and left Islam to become a Christian minister.

A number of Muslim organizations eventually withdrew from CVE work after facing community opposition (even the city of Los Angeles turned down CVE). However, Magid doubled down on the programs, now rebranded by the government as Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP). Magid’s organization Muflehun has secured significant government contracts in this space. This success can be traced to his interfaith relationships and positions within ISNA.

The Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council

Allah only forbids you from befriending those who have fought you for your faith, driven you out of your homes, or supported others in doing so. And whoever takes them as friends, then it is they who are the true wrongdoers.
— Qur’an 60:9

In 2016, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) announced the creation of the Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council (MJAC) in partnership with ISNA. Although the new organization was presented as an alliance with ISNA, the entire process of forging this ‘partnership’ was kept secret from most ISNA leadership until it was a done deal.

As a member of ISNA’s Executive Council at the time, I was aware that the creation of MJAC was a sensitive issue within ISNA. This is because the AJC was well known for being both anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian. Then and now, it has focused on limiting free speech rights in the United States related to criticism of Israel—its atrocities, apartheid system, ongoing expulsion of Palestinians, seizure of land, and reliance on US taxpayer dollars. AJC is not a Jewish organization in that it is interested in the Jewish faith; it is an organization dedicated to the interests of a foreign apartheid government. For these reasons, many Muslims strongly objected to the creation of MJAC and ISNA’s involvement in it. But MJAC also had supporters within ISNA leadership: Mohamed Magid was a founding MJAC member, as were other ISNA insiders.

Some in ISNA leadership at the time (myself included) were concerned that ISNA’s name was being used for projects outside of our control and ultimately detrimental to the Muslim community. Leaving aside the morality of the matter, the association was also bad for ISNA’s ‘brand’ and its standing within the Muslim community. Thus ISNA eventually had its logo removed from the project. However, early members of MJAC, like Magid, stuck with MJAC.

No Compulsion in Religion, Except Zionism

...And do not conceal testimony, for whoever conceals it—his heart is indeed sinful, and Allah is Knowing of what you do.
— Qur’an 2:283

Interfaith engagement is generally quite harmonious by nature. When a representative of a masjid, for example, goes to a garden variety local interfaith gathering, Christians do not expect him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior. Muslims do not expect Hindus to smash their idols as a precondition for visiting an interfaith iftar. And Jews do not expect anyone of other faith traditions not to drive Friday nights. However, when it comes to so-called “interfaith” with Zionists, the rules are different.

Meetings with Zionist organizations come with an expectation of censorship, not just for Muslims but for other Jews as well. The Biden Administration learned this, for example, when major Zionist groups pulled out of a meeting at the White House because Jewish groups who opposed the IHRA definition of antisemitism were included in the meeting. The IHRA definition of antisemitism classifies most criticism of ‘Israel’ as antisemitic, particularly when such criticism involves a refusal to recognize the settler-colony’s “right to exist.”

Most Muslim leaders will not shy away from rebuking Zionist aggression in Gaza. They are also not afraid of using the word “genocide.” Magid, however, consistently uses obfuscatory language and the passive voice when discussing violence towards Palestinians. A Malaysian podcast on which he appeared, for example, is a good introduction to his rhetorical quiver and to the kind of ‘advocacy’ characteristic of Muslim leaders who become weapons of Zionist ‘interfaith.’ Although the podcast targeted a Muslim audience, Magid’s language is shaped by the quiet rules of interfaith with Zionists, in which silence on Palestine is expected unless in line with US foreign policy, and clarity is punished

In the podcast, Magid’s vague moral lamentations suggest that something bad is happening to Palestinians. However, it remains unclear who is doing these things. He seems unable to name the perpetrator, although he does bring up antisemitism unprompted multiple times and uses the term “genocide” only to describe historical events like the Holocaust. He also asserts that young people should be free to speak their minds, while failing to describe the nature of speech under threat or name the actors seeking to suppress such speech.

This hesitancy in the name of interfaith understanding (if that is what is going on) is entirely one-sided. Muslims engaged in Zionist interfaith tend to speak like Magid—carefully, evasively, and with calculated ambiguity. Non-Muslim Zionists, however, rarely hesitate to offend their Muslim ‘interfaith’ partners by their support for the apartheid state. These ‘interfaith partners’ openly support ongoing arms shipments to support genocide and advocate for Israeli aid policies that result in wanton violence. The Anti-Defamation League (an important partner for Magid) even compared the Palestinian kufiyyeh to a Nazi swastika.

MJAC was never created in the interests of bringing people of different faiths to work together towards peace and justice. And it was always about much more than making Muslim leaders speak using approved terminology. Zionism is a war and interfaith is simply one of its battlefronts. Interfaith married to so-called Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) only dials this war up.

Magid Embracing the Security State: The Case of the CVE Commission

“If you see a scholar often at the doors of rulers, then know he is a thief.”

— Sufyan al-Thawri

Most Muslims familiar with CVE know of it as a pseudo-scientific strategy based on theories concocted by police and national security contractor academics. In CVE land, behaviors like giving up smoking, disagreeing with US foreign policy, or growing/shrinking a beard can indicate a Muslim is on a terrorism conveyor belt. Notably, CVE was the heir to COINTELPRO, the 1960s program that helped destroy the Black Panther Party. CVE continues to live on today in the form of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP).

There are two major CVE projects with which Magid has been involved. The first was the Center for Security and International Studies’ (CSIS) CVE Commission, on which Magid served as a commissioner. Co-chairs of the Commission included Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom best known for lying his country into a war with Iraq, and Leon Panetta, a former Director of Central Intelligence and Secretary of Defense. Panetta is one of the architects of the drone extrajudicial killing program and personally approved “kill lists” marking people for death without trial (as well as those who may be in close proximity, like their families). The drone killing program often targeted people whose identities were unknown to the US government and focused on “behavioral” surveillance. It would be difficult to find two people more committed to violence against Muslims worldwide to head the Commission.

Supporting the Global War on Terror

As part of his work on the CVE Commission, Magid was a co-signatory of the 2016 report “Turning Point.” The report is useful for understanding how Magid represents a class of Muslim religious leaders who function as moral cover for state violence and ideological policing. “Turning Point” made it plain that the purpose of CVE was to “build on existing military and intelligence frameworks developed post‑9/11” (p. 7). In other words, CVE was never about stopping violence; it was about forging a narrative about some victims of violence being acceptable targets. The War on Terror, particularly the endless state violence it entailed, was always the foundation of the project. Magid and his fellow commissioners readily acknowledged this:

While the Commission believes that CVE must be kept separate from counterterrorism in terms of the tactics, agencies, and actors involved, an effective strategy will require soft and hard power operating at scale and in tandem (p. 49, emphasis added)

Here the authors (which includes Magid) attempt to have it both ways: calling for a separation between CVE and counterterrorism while openly acknowledging that CVE is entangled with the hard power of mass violence. The word “tandem” is especially clarifying. It most frequently refers to tandem bicycles, in which two people peddle at once. The person in the front steers, while the person peddling in the back (in this case, CVE) adds substantially more power to the joint effort. Coordination of “hard” and “soft” power is the key strategic insight of the CVE report. In other words: Soft power initiatives like CVE power state violence overseas.

And that violence has been both far-reaching and devastating. From 2009-2016, between 380 to 801 civilians were murdered by American drone strikes in countries with which the United States was not technically at war—places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The dead included children playing and people attending weddings. Depending on how you count those killings, nearly one million people were killed either in direct violence or as a result of the broader impacts of war.

A reasonable question for the reader might be: Why did the Commission need a Muslim cleric like Magid? “Turning Point” contains a ready explanation for this as well. According to the report, a “war of ideas demands a war of arms as well as a war of words… Narrative dominance is essential.” Not shying away from the point that the objective of this enterprise is to kill large numbers of people, the term “narrative dominance” was always an important part of CVE. Having people like Magid be the face of that narrative as a religious leader is helpful to the cause.

“Turning Point” itself acknowledges: “Public–private partnerships will be key—NGOs, faith groups, digital platforms, academia” (pp. 16–18). This focus on securing community buy-in highlights a symbiotic relationship between faith leadership, governments, and contractors. ‘Partner’ organizations may obtain lucrative government contracts as well as benefits beyond money (e.g., White House invitations, travel opportunities). And nonprofits, police, professors and even imams can all become partners, as long as the ships of war (armed and unarmed) are all sailing in the same direction.

The Moral Abdication Method

The CSIS report contains a footnote acknowledging that “[s]ome commissioners felt that discussions regarding military strategies were outside their areas of expertise, and accordingly did not participate in deliberations or recommendations on this topic.” While the footnote does not explicitly name Magid, Sherman Jackson, or other moral and religious leaders brought into the Commission, it raises eyebrows for a number of reasons.

Magid (and several others on the Commission, including Jackson) were brought on as faith and moral leaders—that was the specific expertise they brought to the Commission. Lending their name helped grant the project moral authority. Faith leaders asked to participate in a blue ribbon panel like the CVE Commission had three options. They could have said:

Option A: “The government of the United States has been committing war crimes and crimes against humanity and should stop. Unjust detention should stop. Renditions should stop.”

Option B: “I agree the war on terrorism since 2001 has been glorious. We have done a great job and need to keep doing it, but we also need to deploy soft power to make it work even better.”

Option C: “Since I did not go to war college, I will neither comment on nor participate in discussions regarding how violence is conducted by the state. However, I agree everything else should be in tandem with the thing I have no knowledge of and refuse to discuss.”

We know that nobody picked option A. CSIS would not select anyone with a discernable moral compass as a moral leader, and if they inadvertently did, such a person would not play in such a farce and add their name to this report. What did Magid pick between Options B and C?

Option B, while monstrous, is still better than Option C since it is honest. Let’s assume Magid picked Option C, moral abdication. That appears to be a moral “out” designed for people like him since he is offering his moral imprimatur to a report (his job) that endorses mass state violence, without directly doing so since he is saying he lacks expertise on military tactics. How then, can he be an expert on ISIS or other terrorist groups and the violent strategies they deploy while not being an expert on the violent strategies deployed by the state to defeat these groups?

Religious leaders were supposedly included to bring moral guidance to the Commission. However, if they were not able to evaluate the state violence working in tandem with the strategies they are meant to promote and implement, exactly what was their purpose?

Magid’s Embrace of the Security State: The Case of Muflehun

O believers! Avoid many suspicions, for indeed, some suspicions are sinful. And do not spy, nor backbite one another. Would any of you like to eat the flesh of their dead brother? You would despise that! And fear Allah. Surely Allah is the Accepter of Repentance, Most Merciful.
— Qur’an 49:12

Magid’s second, ongoing CVE project is through Muflehun, an organization for which he serves as chairman. Muflehun’s Tackle! Upstander Training Program was developed in collaboration with the American Jewish Committee (through MJAC) and funded by both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Russell Berrie Foundation (a philanthropic group with deep ties to Israel). In fact, the program description itself seems crafted using off-the-shelf DHS materials—specifically its “Community Assistance Briefing” and “Communities Acting to Refer and Engage”—but with content added about “archetypes and tropes” related to antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism.

Despite relying so heavily on freely available DHS content, the Muflehun training was billed at over $500 per participant. Any organization can request a “Community Assistance Briefing” for free. Just call DHS. One can also access “Communities Acting to Refer and Engage” (CARE) slides and notes online for free. Aside from the added material on discriminatory tropes, Muflehun essentially repackaged public resources. Here, a CVE grant enabled an organization to turn free government materials into a profitable product.

Regarding a previous iteration of a nearly identical CVE program to Tackle!, Junaid Afeef, who worked for a federally funded state CVE program, wrote in an email (cited by American Friends Service Committee and STOPCVE in Chicago) that he was unable to find “non-law enforcement entities” willing to partner with him. Meaning, no Muslim organizational leaders were willing to sit through the bystander training program.

Afeef has since resigned. However, it should be no surprise that communities are not interested in what some DHS grantee has to say in briefings, and it is unlikely that anyone who is not paid to sit through a lecture on vague “concerning behaviors” would do so. Such briefings have long been viewed as unproductive theatre by law enforcement. A RAND study found that police were not interested and were often pressured to attend.

It appears from the close-out report that many attendees of Muflehun’s similar briefings were government employees. It is unknown who attended because a list of attendees was not provided, nor did Muflehun provide testimonials (understandable). However, what Muflehun did was “interfaith launder” their bystander training program, a CVE initiative nearly identical to the kind for which Afeef said he could not establish community buy-in.

Who does this charade hurt? This was a misuse of taxpayer dollars but to a degree, that is expected in the War on Terror, at least among those who are familiar with the history of waste in that sector. People make money for offering no value all of the time in government contracting. However such wasteful government contracts are more harmful than the government paying someone to dig a hole in the ground then cover it up, over and over again for years.

Muflehun’s Tackle! is genuinely harmful as it legitimizes the premise that people should monitor their own community members for signs of extremism, normalizes CVE concepts (thereby legitimizing the funding stream), and manufactures the appearance of grassroots support.

Surveillance Laundering through CREWS

Muflehen also secured a much larger grant under Community Resilience Early Warning System (CREWS), a surveillance ‘terrorism prevention’ program in collaboration with national security contractors in the United States and Poland. Just as the Tackle! program enabled interfaith laundering, the CREWS contract amounts to surveillance laundering, creating academic and nonprofit tools that make law enforcement surveillance appear benign. The name of the program (“Early Warning System”) as well as the grant description suggest Muflehun’s project is an attempt at soothsaying on future terrorism. A DHS-funded study, however, conceded many years before that such predictions are not feasible or desirable.

The $748,250 contract is for an algorithmic tool that assesses risk of extremism in local areas, to the block level. While it claims that it is not a law enforcement surveillance tool, the application’s doublespeak confirms that it absolutely is: it is designed to be used by “state, local and tribal governments” (all of which include law enforcement agencies). The program enables surveillance based on political and religious expression, using algorithms to flag communities as “vulnerable to extremism.” It was put together in collaboration with a prominent security contractor (with extensive DHS and Department of Defense contracts), Cambridge Global Advisors, and a Polish company Appsilon Data Science.

The CREWS contract claims to “prevent targeted violence and domestic terrorism, by utilizing data sciences and statistical analyses to map emerging vulnerabilities in selected geographies.” However, the sources of data that power this tool reveal the project’s dangers.

The data sources used by Muflehun’s CREWS system (the above list is from Muflehun’s project description) are not neutral—they are politically charged indicators that transform dissent, identity, and political expression into inputs for predictive terrorism surveillance. For example, one data source in the list, the Southern Poverty Law Center, is an entity that ranks organizations with which it has political disagreements as “hate groups”—including organizations that oppose same-sex marriage.

TEVUS and PIRUS are academically laundered law enforcement databases that can be used for predictive policing and political surveillance. The PIRUS platform, which is a surveillance dataset of individual “extremists,” defines as “Islamic Extremist” a menu of various options that can apply to many ordinary Muslims. It includes those who have “local, national, and international grievances affecting Muslims, which are aired in an overtly religious context.” The TEVUS program is a similar set of “extremism” databases.

Striking also is the so-called “social media and online hate activities” data obtained from Sprinklr Listen. This is a company that works with a variety of law enforcement agencies around the world, including that of the UAE (for whose interests Imam Mohamed Magid has also worked).

According to Sprinklr’s website, the head of the Dubai Police’s “Social Media Section” said:

with Sprinklr’s AI-powered listening products, we’ve identified and prevented hundreds of potentially criminal activities that would have otherwise gone undetected. It’s as if the Dubai police force has eyes and ears in all the digital channels we need to be in.

What are “potentially criminal activities”? Is that really a problem in need of solving?

The ADL Heat Map

Perhaps the most revealing component of Muflehun’s work is its incorporation of the notoriously Zionist ADL’s HEAT Map—a platform that claims to track Hate, Extremism, Antisemitism, and Terrorism. In reality, the map has always served as a political narrative engine, designed to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitic violence and dissent with danger. It is a key input in how Muflehun’s CREWS algorithm determines whether a community is “vulnerable to extremism.”

The ADL reports that antisemitism has surged by more than 80% in the past year. But as Jewish Currents has documented, much of this spike reflects public opposition to Israeli military violence in Gaza. Peaceful protests, kuffiyehs, and phrases like “from the river to the sea” are treated as indicators of hate. These classifications are not just rhetorical—they are geolocated, quantified, and fed into algorithmic models to flag entire neighborhoods as “hot zones” of potential extremism.

Muflehun’s reliance on this data is not about safety or hate prevention. It is the embedding of a Zionist framework into counterterrorism infrastructure. By using the HEAT map as an input, Magid’s organization legitimizes the idea that political resistance to apartheid is itself a precursor to terrorism. This is not an accidental misuse, it is the CVE Commission’s logic brought to life: narrative dominance through soft power and data laundering.

The War Comes Home

In 2024, an ADAMS Center employee was fired, according to the reporting, “for her pro-Palestine advocacy.” If we are now in a world where masjid employees must self-censor on Palestine while in the masjid, what does that say?

Much of the purpose of the war ‘at home’ is to limit discussion of Palestine and blunt the political effectiveness of the Muslim community so the war abroad can continue. The Muslim community in the United States now appears incapable of stopping genocide, by design. Imam Mohamed Magid is part of that design. But so are the people around him, the ones who defend his conduct or assume he is a good faith actor.

A night raid in Afghanistan, the NYPD spying on halal restaurants with UAE funds, an apartment building in Gaza being destroyed with American bombs, the building of algorithms to tag protests as antisemitic, and the firing of a masjid employee are all things that happened in different years and in different places. However, they are all part of the same war.

We know this not because it is a unique insight from this newsletter. We know this because that is exactly what Magid told us when he co-signed the CSIS CVE Commission report. Defense contractors that make bombs that kill children in Gaza do not fund CSIS because of their boundless philanthropic generosity. Soft power helps bomb sales. Both sets of actors work in tandem.

What is Imam Mohamed Magid?

Here’s the odd thing about Mohamed Magid: I don’t know that he was ever directly paid by the UAE, NATO, or any defense contractor or Zionist organization. As best as I can tell, he has only ever been compensated by the Muslims who donate to the ADAMS Center in Virginia. However, this hardly matters.

The primary motivation was likely not money when Rwandan Priest Serumba advised a bulldozer driver to destroy his own church, killing 1,500 people taking shelter inside. Money was probably not a motivation for the then Mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa, when he spiritually guided Egyptian police to shoot unarmed protestors in the heart. Sometimes, professed holy men act in evil ways for no financial remuneration at all.

I wrote this article to solve a puzzle that remains incomplete: What is Imam Mohamed Magid from the standpoint of the Muslim umma, national security state, UAE government, Zionist project, and Palestinian freedom? That whole question may have been a red herring.

The real question continues to be the state of Muslim leadership, and how an entire ecosystem within the Muslim community—board members, donors, imams, and scholars—continue to support, even laud and celebrate leaders that actively contribute to the oppression of the umma of Muhammad ﷺ. How is it that we have so many figures in the Muslim community who vilify dissenters when they speak the truth but honor those who openly collaborate with mass murderers and torturers?

That is the question I am unable to answer.

A note to readers: Thank you for engaging with this newsletter. Comprehensive investigative articles require substantial research and editing. I've been fortunate to work with an editor who has done amazing work for years for free. However, given the significant time investment required for articles of this depth, I've begun compensating her for this essential work. To help support this kind of reporting on Muslim institutional leadership and nonprofit accountability, I'm now offering paid subscriptions. The fact that you are interested in this subject makes you part of a small but crucial audience. Without readers who care about institutional accountability, this work simply wouldn't be sustainable. All investigative articles will remain free and accessible to everyone—paid subscriptions help cover costs for those who wish to support this work. Articles like this will not be published at a regular cadence since these things take time. However, I hope to add more content for subscribers (paid or not) in the future.

Working Towards Ehsan Newsletter

Discussion about this post