United West leader Tom Trento says the Florida-based group works, “to unite western countries, western civilizations, about 23, 24, 25 western countries, against the Ummah. Who knows what the Umaah is? The Ummah is the term for the family, the family of nations of Islam.” The United West is part of the inner core of the U.S. Islamophobia network.
According to the group’s website, “TheUnitedWest.org is a Non-Profit 501(c)(3) Tax Exempt Organization.” However, no organization named “The United West” appears in Florida legal records or the IRS’s database of tax-exempt organizations.
The address that United West offers to potential donors is, however, the same as Security Research Associates, Inc. a registered non-profit headed by Tom Trento.
In 2007, Trento renamed his Colorado-based Christian Research Associates as Security Research Associates, Inc. in Florida. For a time, Trento publicly said his organization was the Florida Security Council and more recently changed it to United West.
The purpose of the frequent name changes is obscure. In Security Research Associates tax-forms filed between 2010-2012 and signed by Trento the “doing business as” space is left blank.
However, given that Trento clearly violated 501(c)(3) restrictions on endorsing candidates for public office during an April 10, 2012 presentation to a Tea Party group in Florida, it may simply be an effort to end-run the laws governing non-profit organizations.
Key Individuals
Tom Trento (Founder)
Trento’s biography on the United West website identifies him as “one of the leading academic activists in the United States.” Trento is also listed as one of the “associates” on the Center for Security Policy’s “Sharia: the Threat to America,” report.
In text accompanying a video distributed on October 12, 2014, Trento asserts that, “mosques are NOT primarily ‘houses of worship’ but more so, bases of operation to launch a ‘Cultural Jihad’ against America!”
In his June 17, 2014 newsletter, Trento wrote a mocking letter to Muslims living in areas affected by ISIS. He said “Dear Muslims of the Levant, We Americans know you enjoy your oil-drenched lives of crass debauchery and fake religiosity.” The newsletter also asks that Muslims “…agree that Jerusalem… has nothing to do with Islam” and “divest ownership in American gas stations, or at least clean the bathrooms.”
During a 9/11 memorial in 2013, Trento spewed Islamophobic rhetoric in the presence of law enforcement authorities, public officials and schoolchildren. He told the audience: “I’m not talking about radical Islam or moderate Islam. I’m talking about all Islam. Their goal is to get every single one of us to convert to Islam. And they won’t stop until we do.”
In a clear example of fear mongering prior to the 2012 presidential election, Trento insinuated that if Barack Obama was re-elected to the presidency, “The West—western Europe, Israel, those countries—will probably all start to tumble, morally, economically and militarily and Islam and its irresistible force and its control of oil worldwide within ten years will indeed control the world.”
Presenting a “half-a-day briefing that we do for law enforcement, military intelligence people” Trento also alleged:
- “The family of Islam is obligated to destroy the west, the infidel, the Jew and the Christian.”
- “The caliphate, if it’s established in America, that branch will be most likely in Chicago. The home of whom by the way? [Crowd answers: Obama] It’s a huge Black Panther, Nation of Islam and Islamic community there interestingly enough.”
- One of the first slides of the “national security briefing” is an image of President Obama with the text “The most dangerous man FOR the world?” below it.
The Canadian Broadcasting Service in 2012 concluded that Trento “considers himself a soldier battling the Muslim menace in the U.S.” and that his group “opposes any project to build new mosques or expand existing ones.” Trento believes eighty percent of the mosques in the United States are teaching “sedition.”
In a 2011 blog post, Trento asserted that the Occupy Orlando movement was being controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood
