White’s group will hold its third event Tuesday evening at the Village Parkway Baptist Church in San Antonio where anti-Muslim activists loyal to White will hear a speech on Iran, “Past, Present and Future with The United States,” by speaker Amil Imani.
White’s very public and ugly dismissal from ACT caused major dissention within the organization, with many activists both in San Antonio and elsewhere coming to his defense. The grounds for his dismissal are also hotly contested. ACT claimed White advertised an event put on by his San Antonio chapter where activists would learn how to “shut down” mosques in their area. White claimed that he never used that language in his advertisements ,and email alerts from White’s San Antonio chapter back up his claim. In fact, White published email and text exchanges between himself and ACT staffer J. Craig which implies Craig used the term “shut down” mosques and not White.
White was not your typical ACT chapter leader. He also ran a project called Truth In Textbooks (TNT), which became part of the ACT umbrella of organizations in early 2016. The project targeted textbooks which ACT deemed too favorable to Islam in comparison to Christianity. After White’s dismissal, he sought to take his pet project back. In an email to his supporters days following his firing, White wrote, “Lots of good things are happening: 1. Truth in Textbooks is filing as a Texas non-profit.”
White also quietly tried to scrub the evidence that he had in fact allowed his TNT to be subsumed by the ACT umbrella. White’s original post on the TNT website from January of 2016 read, “Truth in Textbooks (TNT), formerly known as Truth in Texas Textbooks (TTT) along with Textbook Alert are combining and joining ACT for America Education to form the most extensive teams of social studies textbook reviewers in the country.” However the post, still dated January 2016, now reads, “Truth in Textbooks (TNT), formerly known as Truth in Texas Textbooks (TTT) is joining with Textbook Alert to form the most extensive teams of social studies textbook reviewers in the country.” It remains to be seen whether ACT will fight White on his attempt to take back the TNT project.
White’s newly formed Patriots of San Antonio held its second event on March 21 where White took to the stage to promote the TNT project and attack ACT, first thanking the many people who defended White after his firing and criticizing ACT founder Brigitte Gabriel. White proclaimed:
“As a result of what happened, so many doors are opened up. As you may or may nor realize, ACT for America promotes itself as a secular organization. It does not promote one religion over another and that’s ok, but in our going forward with this group, the group that I hope that you’ll become a part of, I think one of the most important battles that are going on with the fight against Islam, not against Muslims but against Islam, that form of Islam that is the political Islam. We are going to tell the truth about Islam, we are not going to sugarcoat, not going to call it radical Islam we’re not going to try to call it lots of other things, we’re going to talk about the ideology of Islam.”
The April 11 event will be the last for White’s new group until September when he hopes to adopt a new name and establish the group’s 501(c)3 status.
Whatever the name of White’s new organization may be, his speech in March clearly indicates that he intends to be even more radical than he was with his previous organization, which is quite disturbing considering the hateful rhetoric and actions ACT for America has pushed for the last decade. And if Wednesday’s invited guest speaker Amil Imani is any indication, White’s crusade against Islam shows no signs of letting up.
“What aspects of Islam do you find most problematic and disturbing?” Imani asked on a post to his website in 2013. “To answer this question properly, volumes can be written. Just a few keywords should cue you for now. Intolerance, fatalism, institutionalized slavery, injustice, jihadism, oppression of women and non-Muslims, celebration of death, lack of respect for individualism, rejection of freedom and democracy … ”
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