Blakeley's instinct and awareness may have saved the lives of many Americans. But instead of being lauded, he has been attacked by the American Civil Liberties Union, which believes he "profiled" the two young men because they were Arabs. He told the TREXPO audience that lawyers for Megahed subpoenaed three years of his traffic tickets, patrol car videos, and reports, and they kept him on the stand for eight-and-a-half hours as they sought to suppress his search.
Another stirring presentation on terrorism was delivered by Long Beach, Calif., detective Ebrahim Ashabi. Ashabi, who was born and raised in Iran, escaped the Islamic Theocracy after he was pressed into service as cannon fodder for the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. His presentation on radical Islam was from the point of view of someone who knows its evil personally.
Ashabi stressed that his class was not intended to incite anger toward Muslims. "More Muslims have been killed by terrorists than Americans or anybody else," he said. The message of his course is that fundamentalist Islam is a threat to the peace and freedom of everyone worldwide and that it is especially a threat to first responders.
In a four-hour course that could have been much longer and still been riveting, Ashabi detailed the history of Islam, covering its many wars and the split between Sunnis and Shiites. "Shiites and Sunnis have been killing each other for 1,400 years. They aren't doing it just because we are in Iraq," Ashabi said.
Ashabi drove home his points with graphic videos of attacks perpetrated by radical Islamists, including a video that showed the beheading of an American truck driver in Iraq. The man's death agony lasts for a very long time. "They use a dull knife on purpose," Ashabi stressed to the audience.
