According to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has produced and is distributing a sensitivity training video about Muslim American cultures for “200,000 DHS employees across America.”* This news comes on the heels of a DHS-sponsored sensitivity training program involving Muslim-Americans traveling to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj — or religious pilgrimage. In that December 2006 program, 45,000 Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees and an unconfirmed number of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees were trained.

Programs in the newly released DVD — which has been two-years in the making – include “a 50-minute panel discussion covering: the basic tenets of Islam; demographics; cultural norms and more; and history of Arabs and Muslims, both abroad and in the United States.” Why the sudden abundance of federally funded sensitivity training programs?

Perhaps one answer be found on the website of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League (ADC).


ADC Files Lawsuit Against DHS and ICE Concerning the “October Plan”

Washington, DC | October 17, 2006 | Today, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its component U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The lawsuit…seeks information that would either validate or dispel the widespread perception that DHS and ICE have been misusing information from the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) to impermissibly target, or “profile,” Arab-Americans and Muslims for general law enforcement purposes.

Tony Kutayli, communications coordinator for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, disagrees that the organization’s recent lawsuit and the DVD are at all related. “The training video is separate from any other issue we have with DHS,” Kutayli told The Aviation Nation in an interview. “The training video is not sensitivity training, it is educational training. The video helps DHS employees to learn things about who Arabs are.”

Profiling in airports is rapidly taking center stage in Congress, with an Associated Press article on the subject appearing in newspapers across the country yesterday.

Congress Pressured to Ban Racial Profiling
By FREDERIC J. FROMMER
Assoiated Press

WASHINGTON (Jan. 28) - The repercussions of an airline’s decision to remove a group of imams from a commercial flight in Minneapolis could be heard in Congress this year, with civil rights groups pushing Democratic lawmakers to ban racial profiling.

The article does not contain any new information but indicates that the issue is gathering momentum. In an interview on the subject, a Federal Air Marshal — speaking to The Aviation Nation on the condition of anonymity — weighed in:

“As a United States Federal Air Marshal, racial profiling in airports is not something I do — and it’s not something any other federal law enforcement agents I have worked with do. What I do, what I have been trained to do, is to profile for criminal indicators in airports and on airplanes. If one of those indicators is someone’s weight or their height or their race or religion, than that is one indicator I might be looking for.”

The Aviation Nation has requested a viewing copy of the training video from The Department of Homeland Security.

*The number of DHS employees is 180,000, not 200,000; DHS spokesman Jarrod Agen confirmed this figure with The Aviation Nation. ADC spokesman Kutayli says that DHS “okay-ed their press release” which contains the 200,000 employee figure.

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