The organization is convinced that Islam is really a conspiracy involved in a stealthy jihad to destroy the United States from the inside out, replacing the Constitution with the Islamic legal code known as Sharia.
Based in Virginia Beach, Virginia, ACT! For America claims 150,000 members and spreads its message through books, websites, radio ads, cable television and the work of local chapters.
Its largest local chapter is in Nashville, Tennessee, where members have opposed new mosques and lobbied for laws limiting Islamic influence.
Members point to the 2009 case of Carlos Bledsoe, a Muslim convert and former Tennessee State University student who confessed to murdering a US Army recruiter in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Critics say ACT distorts the nature of Islam and labels law-abiding Muslims as terrorists.
Local Muslims say they will stand up for their rights to religious freedom. “We are not afraid of this ACT group,” Rashed Fakhruddin, a member of the Islamic Center of Nashville, told The Tennessean, the largest daily in Tennessee. “But we are concerned about the climate of fear they are trying to create.”
Daniel Bregman, a Nashville eye surgeon, leads the Middle Tennessee chapter. Bregman’s wife, Joanne, an attorney, has been one of the group’s chief lobbyists at the state Capitol.
Bregman repeats the claim that Muslims in the US want to impose Sharia law in place of the US Constitution and are threatening non-Muslims.
“The imposition of Sharia law, which is the objective of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists in this country, is that I become a second-class citizen—if I don’t get killed first.”
ACT members see themselves as warriors in a clash between Western civilization and Islam. That belief is reinforced at local chapter meetings, which feature speakers from other national anti-Islam groups.
They include Frank Gaffney of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy and a star witness for opponents of the new Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. He has argued on ACT! for America’s cable show that Muslims should be arrested and tried as traitors if they follow any part of Sharia law.
That message appeals to ACT supporters such as J. Lee Douglas, a Brentwood dentist. Douglas said he usually takes a live-and-let-live approach when it comes to religion. But he doesn’t believe Islam shows the same respect to other faiths.
“I think with Islam, there is an effort to not just leave people alone,” he said. “There is a compulsion to force people to join that faith.”
Douglas was one of 100 or so people who attended a workshop sponsored by the local chapter of ACT! for America and titled “Persuading the Near Enemy.” According to the workshop leader, Bill French, a “near enemy” is anyone who thinks Islam has good points.
“The near enemy is the apologist for Islam, who, I have found, doesn’t know anything about Islam,” French said.
French is a former Tennessee State University physics professor who writes under the pseudonym Bill Warner and runs the Center for the Study of Political Islam. He has no formal training in Islamic studies.
French’s books—with titles such as “Sharia Law for Non Muslims”—and talks are based on counting verses in the Qoran and other Islamic texts. He says that more verses in those texts are about politics and violence than religion.
Therefore, he argues, Islam isn’t a religion. Instead, he sees it as a political system bent on world domination, disguised with a thin veneer of religion. Real Muslims who follow the true Islam want to spread their religion by force.
Page Brooks, assistant professor of theology and Islamic studies at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, said ACT! For America confuses radical Islam with the more moderate mainstream version of the faith.
Brooks, who is a chaplain in the Army National Guard, spent 2010 in Iraq. He said the Muslims he met there were thankful that American troops were opposing terrorists, who used Islam to justify violence.
“Even the average Iraqi knew the difference between the radical jihadists and the average Muslim walking around the street,” he said. “We have to be careful about who we label as a radical Muslim.”
Brooks also took issue with how ACT! for America and its supporters describe Sharia. “A lot of it has to do with religious compliance and personal holiness,” Brooks said.
Ron Leonard, ACT chapter leader in Hermitage, Tennessee, said his group is only worried about terrorists.
“I want to make that real clear,” said Leonard, who retired from the Army National Guard in 2004. “It is not Muslims. It is the extremist elements that we are dealing with. Muslims are good people. There are people that take their extremist views to the point of killing people. And ACT is in a position to stop this from going on.”
ACT! for America is the brainchild of Hanah Kahwagi Tudor, a Lebanese Christian who fled her homeland during that country’s civil war, which raged from 1975 to 1990.
Tudor, who goes by the pseudonym Brigitte Gabriel, first moved to Israel, where she worked for a television network owned by Pat Robertson. She married a co-worker named Charles Tudor.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she began speaking out about terrorism. She wrote two books — “They Must Be Stopped” and “Because They Hate.”
In her books and speeches, Tudor says that Islamic terrorists took over her home country, and she wants to stop them before they take over America. Tudor declined to be interviewed by The Tennessean.
ACT and Tudor’s other nonprofit, the education group American Congress for Truth, took in a combined $1,612,908 in 2009, according to their latest federal tax returns, known as Form 990s. The groups asked for an extension for filing their 2010 tax returns.
Tudor was paid $178,441 in salary by the two charities.
Julie Ingersoll, associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, attended ACT’s national convention and wrote about her experience for religiondispatches.com.
Ingersoll, who is critical of ACT, said the event was well organized and professional and focused on an “us versus them” approach to Islam and to liberals, who are seen as supporting Muslims. “It’s framed as this real fear of outsiders,” she said. “It’s tied to all of the tea party rhetoric about the real America.”