Center for Security Policy

Large centerforsecuritypolicy

Center for Security Policy

Founded in 1988 by Frank Gaffney, the Center for Security Policy, or CSP, is a nonprofit conservative think tank and a main driver of the “creeping Sharia” conspiracy theory.

CSP's 2010 report “Shariah: The Threat to America” alleges that the United States is under serious threat of coming under Islamic religious law. Frank Gaffney employs CSP as a vehicle to develop and promote his paranoid conceptions, namely that mosques shroud Muslim sedition and that Sharia is, above all, a totalitarian ideology.

In June 2012, CSP posted a 10-part video series, “The Muslim Brotherhood In America,” which essentially lays out their entire unfounded theory of the threat posed by American Muslims and serves as the main source for former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) witch hunt against Huma Abedin, long-time aide to Hillary Clinton.

In 2012, CSP’s annual revenue was more than $3.2 million, and Frank Gaffney’s annual salary was nearly $300,000 as president of the organization. Since 2001, CSP has received more than $7 million from donors and other organizations in the Islamophobia network, including $300,000 from Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum between 2008 and 2012. In addition to this funding, CSP has received $37,660 from the Joyce and Donald Rumsfeld Foundation between 2007 and 2012. 

Gaffney and CSP use this money to promote an increasingly paranoid misrepresentation of the threats posed by Islam in the United States. The baseless accusations peddled by Gaffney and his think tank echo the tactics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who claimed that communists had thoroughly infiltrated the federal government of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Gaffney even asserts that radical Islam has infiltrated the conservative movement. He insists Islamists have infiltrated the American Conservative Union, which hosts the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, because of their associations with anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan, a former political appointee in the George W. Bush administration.

 

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