CounterterrorismSuburban Chicago police cancels anti-terrorism training course after complaints

The police at the city of Lombard, Illinois, has cancelled a class on counterterrorism after the Chicago branch of a Muslim advocacy group complained that the Florida-based instructor and his teachings were blatantly anti-Muslim.

The Northwest Herald reports that the instructor, Sam Kharoba of the Cape Coral, Florida-based Counter Terrorism Operations Center (CTOCUS), has faced similar scrutiny in other places where he was hired to teach his course.

Note that the CTOCUS Web site cannot be accessed from computers secured by Norton products. Trying to open the site brings a security warning to the monitor: “This Web page at www.ctocus.com has been reported as an attack page and has been blocked based on your security preferences. Attack pages try to install programs that steal private information, use your computer to attack others, or damage your system.”

The class in Lombard, a small town located twenty miles west of Chicago, was cancelled after complaints from the Chicago branch of the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) (see CAIR Chicago statement).

The Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board later said it was reviewing the course – titled “Islamic Awareness as a Counter-Terrorist Strategy” – and the materials used in it. The board said that Kharoba’s qualifications will also be reviewed.

Kharoba dismissed the criticism of his work and raised questions about CAIR’s history.

The group’s “statements are manufactured distractions designed to shift blame onto the law enforcement agencies that are protecting the American people,” Kharoba said in a statement he e-mailed the Herald.

The course was to be taught through the North East Multi-Regional Training group, which trains Illinois police and corrections employees.

CAIR’s Chicago last week protested the course, pointing to a detailed Washington Monthly investigative report from March-April 2011 which concluded that Kharoba, and several other instructors like him who claimed to be terrorism experts, were, in fact, charlatans who found a way to make money by exploiting the hunger of law enforcement departments for information on and analysis of terrorism.

“Counterterrorism is much too important to be confounded with anti-Islam dribble from a biased and unqualified trainer whose record of false and problematic anti-Islam generalizations has long been exposed,” Ahmed Rehab, CAIR-Chicago’s executive director, said in a statement.

The Herald reports that last year in Florida, Kharoba, who has conducted many training sessions for police departments around the country, found himself facing the same criticism. Dozens of mosques and Islamic centers wrote the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to remove Kharoba from teaching courses to law enforcement.

In Illinois, Lombard Village president Keith Giagnorio and Police Chief Ray Byrne pointed to the Florida controversy as the reason for cancelling Kharoba’s session. Kharoba was scheduled to teach his class to police officers in the Chicago suburbs of Highland Park and Elmhurst, but officials there said the courses were can canceled because of low enrollment.

Lombard has a sizeable Muslim population with several mosques and an Islamic college preparatory school.

Kevin McClain, director of the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, said that the board would need to investigate Kharoba’s teachings before he could teach in Illinois.

“I would rather err on the side of caution,” he told Chicago’s WBBM radio.

Kharoba, who grew up in Jordan, has an engineering background, including software development. His bio says he also took “Advanced Level General Certificate of Education in Arabic Culture” at the University of London. The degree, known as a GCE A-Level, is a one- to two-year academic program studied by U.K. upper classmen and high school students in preparation for university coursework.

The closest U.S. equivalent would be an Associate Degree in a community college.

Kharoba’s CTOCUS is a one-man operation run out of Kharoba’s Cape Coral home. The center describes itself as a “Data Processing School” offering software and computer training.

Kharoba told the Herald he has taught tens of thousands of law enforcement officers, including Muslims, and received only positive feedback. He said CAIR was unqualified to determine who was an anti-terrorism expert, and raised questions about the organization’s history.

CAIR was among hundreds of Muslim individuals and groups named in 2008 as unindicted co-conspirators in a terrorism-financing trial in which a Texas charity was accused of helping fund Hamas.

CAIR has strongly denied any links to terrorism or ties to any groups involved in helping Hamas.

— Read more in Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze, “How We Train Our Cops to Fear Islam: There aren’t nearly enough counterterrorism experts to instruct all of America’s police. So we got these guys instead,” Washington Monthly (March-April 2011)