Sam Kharoba is the founder of the Counter Terrorism Operatinos Center. He has no formal academic degrees in Islamic studies and no experience in law enforcement. His only claim of any qualification is that he has a pre-university level certificate in Arabic culture, but Arabic culture is not Islam; in fact, only 20 percent of the world’s Muslims are Arabs.
In his training manual, Kharoba posits that Islam itself is the problem; he claims it is inherently violent and aggressive, making it the root cause of radicalization and that therefore Muslims can’t be trusted partners with law enforcement.
Upon review, it was found that large sections of Kharoba’s manual were word-for-word identical to unreliable web-based sources. The investigation found his most common source was Wikipedia. Fifteen out of the manual’s 19 chapters were analyzed and 79% had sections of text that were nearly word-for-word identical to a Wikipedia article. In at least one notable case, Chapter 14 (Dar-al-Harb/Dar-al-Islam), nearly the entire chapter was identical to a Wikipedia article dated November 18, 2007.
In a major investigative article published by Washington Monthly in its March/April 2011 edition, investigators Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze reported Kharoba telling audiences, “When I look at the life of Muhammad, I get a very nasty image. … I am talking about a pedophile, a serial killer, a rapist. And that is just to start off with. Anyone who says that Islam is a religion of peace is either ignorant or flat out lying.”
