John Guandolo, an anti-Muslim activist who likes to post photos of TSA agents who he thinks look Muslim and call them “terrorists” and “jihadis,” spoke at a Capitol Hill event today where he told his audience that U.S. mosques should not be “afforded the same legal rights” as churches and should instead be treated like foreign military bases.
Guandolo’s organization, Understanding the Threat, wrote on Facebook that Guandolo was set to participate in a “national security discussion” on Capitol Hill featuring fellow anti-Muslim extremists Frank Gaffney, Jerry Boykin and Ace Lyons. The group said on Twitter that the event would include members of Congress
Guandolo live streamed his remarks to the event on Periscope, which included his usual claims that the version of Islam practiced by ISIS is in fact true Islam and that the truly loving thing to do is to “speak truth” to Muslims about their religion “just like you would do with your child.”
At the end of his remarks, Guandolo was asked by an audience member about the mosques appearing in “every single community” in the U.S. Guandolo responded that a mosque is “an embassy, it’s a townhall, it’s a military base all rolled up into one” and so we should treat mosques just like we would treat a Chinese military base on American soil:
Until we actually zero in on the reality that that’s what this is—this is not a Muslim church, so it is not afforded the same legal rights. It is right now, because that’s the way the law views it. So I think it’s going to take time for people to realize just the reality of what it is, to treat it like that. …Would we allow the Chinese to build a military base in the central United States? No. That’s what we’re doing. There are over 3,100 mosques in the United States because we’re afraid to offend, we’re afraid to be called names, we’re afraid our family’s going to be threatened, we don’t want to speak truth. I just think that time is long past.
UTT also tweeted during the event, which appears to have been emceed by Gaffney, that Lyons called National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster a “jackass” who “should have been fired long ago” in his remarks.
