Watching: Muflehun gets a CVE lipstick budget
The money for terrorism soothsaying just won't stop
Note: “Watching” posts are not reviews of Muslim nonprofits. They simply provide news and context related to nonprofits on our radar.
What is Muflehun?
Muflehun is a 501(c)(3) committed to “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) exclusively within the Muslim community. Adnan Ansari acts as the organization’s Executive Director while Humera Khan serves as President. She and the Chairman Imam Mohamed Magid of ADAMS Center (formerly President of ISNA) are the most public faces of the group. A fourth person on the board, Suhail Khan, is well established in Republican politics.
Muflehun has been around since the early days of “Countering Violent Extremism,” when it became a focus of the Obama Administration (2010). Imam Magid in particular has also served the UAE through his participation in its Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, a public diplomacy project that makes use of scholars. The UAE regarded him as “clean” and “vetted.” Further, Imam Magid has also acted as a commissioner of the CVE Commission co-chaired by former British Prime Minister and war criminal Tony Blair and US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. This commission, which I have previously examined, focused exclusively on Muslims as a threat.
Mufehun has previously claimed that it did not take government grants. It appeared to be a passion project led by people who may have genuinely believed in CVE. The high point financially for the organization was 2016, when it raised $136,679 and took in program fees of $4,375. In 2018, it generated a paltry $20,012 with no program revenue. In 2019, it raised a total of $219 with $40,523 in program service revenue. Most of this ($36,000) was paid to an unknown consultant for strategic planning.
Much of what changed had something to do with Muflehun’s relationship with the Trump administration. In 2017, Muflehun (with revenue that year of less than $25,000 and no paid staff) secretly met with the incoming Trump administration, ostensibly as a representative of the Muslim community. Imam Magid publicly prayed at Trump’s inauguration, disregarding the advice of many who were concerned about the Trump campaign’s dehumanization of Muslims. Many will recall, for example, that Trump spoke approvingly of shooting Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood. For these reasons among others, other Muslim leaders considered clerical solemnization of Trump to be an act of debasement for a Muslim. Turns out, ingratiating itself with the Trump administration was worth it.
In 2020, the final year of Trump’s Presidency, Muflehun hit paydirt, as I describe below.
What happened to CVE?
The Obama Administration’s CVE program was based on the scientifically unproven notion that it is possible to predict who might become a future terrorist. In short: it was a government soothsaying program. Governments have since attempted to rebrand the program, repeatedly lathering more lipstick on an increasingly ugly pig; this fooled nobody.
When Trump came to office, Muslims abandoned CVE en masse and Muslim CVE grantees rejected money again and again. The major Muslim organization most bullish on CVE, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), doggedly stuck with CVE for years until finally admitting it was wrong in late 2020. I wrote about this here.
What Happened?
The Department of Homeland Security website shows Muflehun was awarded two 2020 grants for the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) grant program, the current rebranding of CVE.
The grants are substantial. The 2020 numbers exceed all the money raised and spent by the organization over its entire decade-long history. The grants are for $77,025 and $748,250. Under the terms of one of the grants, Muflehun will be working with the Zionist organization American Jewish Committee (AJC), which has a long history of Islamophobia.
Both the Chair and President of Muflehun have previously collaborated with AJC in a project called the Muslim Jewish Advisory Council (MJAC). MJAC was started by ISNA staff partnered with AJC, with both organizations listed as “co-conveners”—though this was not authorized by ISNA’s leadership at the time. ISNA repudiated its participation in MJAC completely in a June 2021 e-mail to its members.
Muflehun was also named as a partner in a grant application by the organization Life After Hate, which received $749,996; Muflehun’s role is to to focus on Muslims as a threat.
What does this mean?
According to the Brennan Center, which has been tracking these grants, the inclusion of Muflehun suggests a “focus on terrorism associated with Islam.” They continue:
Muflehun...has been described in the press as an “Islamic deradicalization group.” DHS documents have characterized it as “a think tank, which focuses on confronting violent extremist thought...within a religious paradigm.” Further, at least two of Muflehun’s leaders, Imam Mohamed Magid and Humera Khan, have advised federal law enforcement on CVE matters.
The program for the grant does not reflect Muflehun’s consistent preoccupation with the alleged threat posed by Muslims. Instead it identifies even more vague factors as terror predictors, e.g. “feelings of hopelessness” or “overreaction.” This is noteworthy because Imam Magid’s 2016 CVE Commission emphatically dismissed the idea that violent extremism by non-Muslims was a phenomenon anyone needed to worry about. Further, Brennan Center notes that Muflehun is using training materials that “were developed by an Illinois CVE program plagued by controversy for surreptitious entanglement with law enforcement and mismanagement, including a failure to bring on board community-based partners as represented in the grant application.”
CVE is fraudulent pseudoscience and should have been dead in our community by now. Unfortunately, because Muflehun now has a large lipstick budget, many Muslims may not see the pig the organization is selling.
Subscribe to this newsletter for more updates on Muslim nonprofits.