Steven Emerson

Steven Emerson is founder and executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which claims to be “one of the world’s largest storehouses of archival data and intelligence on Islamic and Middle Eastern terrorist groups.” According to Emerson, he and his staff frequently provide briefings to U.S. government and law-enforcement agencies, members of Congress, and congressional committees.

Emerson frames Islam as an inherently violent and antagonistic religion and boasts a history of fabricating evidence that perpetuates conspiracies of radical Islam infiltrating America through Muslim civil rights and advocacy organizations. "The level of vitriol against Jews and Christianity within contemporary Islam, unfortunately, is something that we are not totally cognizant of, or that we don’t want to accept,” says Emerson. “We don’t want to accept it because to do so would be to acknowledge that one of the world’s great religions, which has more than 1.4 billion adherents, somehow sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.”  

In 1997, Emerson presented the Associated Press with a purported Federal Bureau of Investigation dossier showing ties between Muslim American organizations and radical Islamist groups, but the AP reporters concluded that Emerson had in fact created the dossier himself. Emerson has a history of peddling questionable facts. Through the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Emerson pushed misleading statistics on “Muslim terrorism” to hype the domestic Muslim threat leading up to Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) Muslim radicalization hearings.

Emerson received widespread condemnation after an appearance on Fox News in the aftermath of the January 2015 attack on French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. On Fox News, he described the British city of Birmingham as a “Muslim-only city” and claimed that in London, “there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn’t dress according to Muslim, religious Muslim attire.” British Prime Minister David Cameron called Emerson “a complete idiot” while Birmingham’s member of parliament said Emerson’s remarks were “stupid.”

For funding, Emerson turns to a number of the top funders featured on this site, but with several twists. Emerson’s nonprofit organization helps fund his for-profit company, SAE Productions, of which Emerson is the sole employee. IPT paid SAE Productions $3.33 million to enable the company to study “alleged ties between American Muslims and overseas terrorism.” Even more intriguingly, a review of grants in November 2010 showed that large sums of money were contributed to the Investigative Project, or IPT, care of the Counterterrorism & Security Education and Research Foundation, or CTSERF. An examination of CTSERF’s 990 forms showed that, much like the Investigative Project, all grant revenue was transferred to a private, for-profit entity, the International Association of Counterterrorism and Security Professionals.

 

Source: Center for American Progress research is based on 990s filed with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.