American officials attended training in Israel that leaned into anti-Muslim stereotypes

Glen Stellmacher

Aug 11, 2026

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This is Part 2 of Prism’s series “The ASTI Files.”

A group of U.S. first responders and at least one lawmaker went on a trip to Israel in 2017 to learn how the country claims to fight and respond to terrorism. The trip was among many led over the years by the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Advanced Security Training Institute (ASTI), founded in 2016 by Israeli-born dual American citizen Yisroel Stefansky.

Among numerous training lectures the group attended was a session titled “The Muslim Mindset,” according to notes obtained from a city of Seattle public records request.

Notes from the training assert that views held by Muslims include:

“A man is always preferable to a woman.”

“The function of a wife is to have kids.” 

“Rulers are more important than the law.”

“Luck is more important than discipline and planning.”

The notes for that session end with a bullet point that reads “Honor above all” with the sub-bullet “Most important issue in the mindset of Arabs.”

ASTI and Stefansky’s now-shuttered for-profit company Proactive Global Security (PGS) have led trainings in Israel for two decades, according to congressional travel filings and public records from Austin; Santa Clara County, California; Dallas; Denver; Seattle; and Washington, D.C. The sessions have been taught by former operatives of Israel’s national security agency, Shin Bet, and the Israeli military’s clandestine intelligence Unit 8200, according to biographies of the trainers included in the materials obtained through public records requests. In some cases, the trips were funded by the U.S. government, according to local and federal finance records. 

ASTI claims on its website that it has trained “over 1,100 first responders from more than 80 government agencies,” including American police officers, emergency management, and fire department officials. A handful of U.S. congressional representatives have also attended junkets in Israel over the past two decades with ASTI and PGS, the latter of which administratively dissolved in 2019, according to Washington state corporate business filings.

Over two years of investigation, Prism submitted dozens of public records requests to agencies across the U.S. and received thousands of pages of documents, including from the Seattle Police Department, the Austin Police Department, and D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, among others. Prism traced law enforcement training programs as far back as 2005 across Washington state to Colorado, Texas, and D.C. The documents map out how a series of little-known police training entities, including ASTI, crossed paths with law enforcement across the country. 

Prism uncovered documents from ASTI training programs in Israel from 2019. After Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7, 2023, ASTI proposed training as recently as 2025 in Seattle, Texas, and San Francisco, according to public records (The San Francisco Police Department told Prism that it has no record of receiving training or services from the organization). ASTI is active on X and maintains a website where it advertises its programs.

This is the second report in Prism’s series “The ASTI Files,” primarily based on these public records.

Stefansky and ASTI did not respond to numerous requests for comment sent via text message, email, and through ASTI’s online contact page.

A trove of documents obtained by Prism through public records and Freedom of Information Act requests to Washington, D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) show how ASTI lecture materials portrayed Muslims and Islam. None of the documents have been published previously.

“It seems to me they’re drawing on age-old tropes about Arabs being uniquely patriarchal, uniquely violent, uniquely driven by tribalistic sensibilities,” said Asad Dandia, a target of the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) notorious mosque infiltration operation after 9/11, with whom Prism shared the ASTI materials. Dandia sued the NYPD and won a settlement agreement in 2017. 

“It is exactly these tropes that are often used to later on justify or rationalize violent military invasions or bombings or as we see in the context of Israel and Palestine, the occupation,” Dandia said.

In addition to the material that several groups have called anti-Muslim and islamophobic, reporting by Seattle Gay News also found that ASTI has liked anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-immigrant, and conspiracy content on X. 

“The Muslim Mindset”

The May 2017 trip to Israel organized by ASTI included six days of a jam-packed schedule featuring lectures and site visits meant to showcase security threats, infrastructure, and Jewish and Christian history.

A description of the “Muslim Mindset” lecture obtained through a public records request states that the talk included “an assessment of behaviors and motivations of Muslim Arabs in the Middle East from the prospective [sic] of former Israeli Security Agency members.”

Notes from the lecture include bullet points asserting that among Muslims, “suspicion precedes trust,” “shouting precedes dialogue,” and “manipulation precedes listening.”

The trip notes were distributed to a Seattle Fire Department employee by Stefansky. The author is not identified.

Another lecture on the same trip, titled “Islam in the United States,” featured notes such as “‘Alive and Killing: Tribalism in the Arab World’” and “Islam–extends to other countries,” and suggested articles such as one titled “Shari’a and Violence in American Mosques.” One of the authors of the article, David Yerushalmi, was instrumental in starting the anti-Sharia legal movement in the U.S. that persists today in Congress. 

The ASTI notes also listed “found documents” including “‘40 Hadith on Jihad’ against infidels (Americans).” The lecture also featured a pyramid highlighting “degrees of support by Muslims for terrorist activity,” with terrorists at the tip and “understanderers” at the base.

Among the attendees of the trip was then-Rep. Louie Gohmert, who disclosed that ASTI paid for his expenses. 

“ASTI provided me with an unparalleled opportunity to meet with Israeli officials and to get a first-hand accounting of how Israel deals with the constant threat of terrorism,” Gohmert wrote in a June 9, 2017, recommendation letter about the training, obtained through a public records request. “The knowledge gained from this experience will be directly applied to our efforts to address terrorism and violence both in the United States and on a global scale.”

Prism’s text messages, calls, and voicemails sent to two telephone numbers for Gohmert were not answered.

Bigoted narratives and warrantless suspicion of Muslims increased dramatically in the U.S. after 9/11, with President George W. Bush and future administrations giving law enforcement officials sweeping new powers to operate a surveillance dragnet across sections of America’s Muslim communities.

ASTI instructors apparently discussed intelligence efforts to monitor “who goes to the mosque for the early prayers,” in order to assess who is a more devout Muslim. A separate bullet point under “Ramadan” reads that there is a “greater chance of terror attacks because people feel more devout.”

The ASTI training appears to have reinforced this type of targeting, according to notes from the sessions. In one lecture during the same 2017 trip, ASTI instructors apparently discussed intelligence efforts to monitor “who goes to the mosque for the early prayers,” in order to assess who is a more devout Muslim. A separate bullet point under “Ramadan” reads that there is a “greater chance of terror attacks because people feel more devout.”

“The very idea that you are practicing or a believing Muslim is itself being talked about and written about as if it’s a crime on its own,” Dandia told Prism. “I find it remarkable that you are going to say that this community of [2] billion people, the more devout and practicing they are, the more likely they are to be extremists. You would never say that about Jews. You would never say that about other religious traditions, and you rightly shouldn’t.”

Prism also shared ASTI’s training notes and course packets with the Council on American Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) Research and Advocacy Director Corey Saylor.

“That sounds like the same kind of junk that we have seen for years. It’s the same kind of anti-Muslim propaganda,” Saylor said, adding that the 9/11 hijackers went to a strip club prior to the attacks, evincing the level of their piety. 

Later in 2018, two dozen police and fire personnel from the D.C. area attended a FEMA-funded ASTI training junket to Israel that included a session to “assess the Muslim mindset (i.e. behaviors and motivations of Muslim Arabs in the Middle East),” according to records. 

“It’s completely unacceptable,” Dandia told Prism. “Why is FEMA funding these trainings that are very explicitly Islamophobic?”

Saylor said, “Any reasonable taxpayer wants their money back.” 

FEMA did not respond to multiple emailed requests for comment.

For years, American law enforcement has made sweeping, false generalizations about Muslims, linking routine activities to possible violent threats. Saylor said that Obama-era Countering Violent Extremism programming considered both shaving and growing out a beard as possible indicators of malevolent intent.

“For the most part, Muslim Arabs are the issue in creating threats for Israel. Christian Arabs are not part of the problem for Israelis,” the notes stated.

“This statement strikes me as a dangerous stereotype that constructs all Muslims as a threat to security,” said Julian Go, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago and the author of “Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US.” 

“It’s not qualified by reference to any subgroup of Muslim Arabs—it’s just the fact that they’re ‘Muslim’ as opposed to ‘Christian,’” Go said. “This seems to suggest a view [that] at least some fundamentalist Christians and right-wing Zionist groups share: All Muslims are a threat.”

Go said this is a classic trope used to justify colonial violence.

“It justifies repression and even state violence on the part of both the Israeli and the United States governments against Muslim populations, or groups that are seen as allied with those populations,” such as student protesters hailing from other religious communities including Jews, Go said. “Historically, this use of pernicious stereotypes with ethnoreligious or racialized undertones to harm entire populations is standard practice of imperial regimes.” 

“Much of this could be adopted in the United States”

In 2019, Cedar Park Police Chief Sean Mannix returned to Texas from Israel with a new outlook. He drafted a review of his ASTI training, writing, “With the rising threat of Muslim extremist attacks in the United States more education may be appropriate to include the 20 Commandments of the Middle East,” according to documents obtained through a public records request.

The “20 Commandments” is a proprietary lecture offered by ASTI that raised significant concerns among several American Muslim civil rights groups with whom Prism shared the materials. The ASTI notes from a 2018 “20 Commandments” lecture are almost identical to the 2017 “Muslim Mindset” lecture. However, Prism only obtained an itinerary of Mannix’s 2019 trip to Israel that does not include detailed notes and cannot confirm the specific content of the lecture Mannix attended. 

“During our visit we learned a great deal about the profiling model and the conditioning of the populace to accept stop and inspect points before entering shopping centers, public attractions like the Western Wall, hospitals, schools, and the airport,” Mannix, who is now retired, wrote in his review. “Much of this could be adopted in the United States if the political will can be mustered.” 

Mannix wrote that he was previously opposed to certain aspects of the Israeli model around school safety, such as the presence of plainclothes armed security or armed faculty members. After the training, however, “I am now moving toward working with my home school district to hire retired police officers as school marshals to have that well trained armed resource in our schools,” he wrote.

Mannix did not respond to Prism’s calls, voicemails, and text messages. None of the officers who attended the 2019 ASTI training accepted Prism’s requests for interview.

Bill Wilson, a former city of Austin Emergency Management plans officer who also attended the 2019 ASTI trip to Israel with Mannix, told Prism, “I had a positive experience with the ASTI training and found the trip worthwhile.”

The ASTI instructors

ASTI instructors include veteran Israeli intelligence officials, Israeli police commanders and weapons trainers, and some individuals with minimal public biographic details.  

In 2019, an Austin police lieutenant and director of the Austin Regional Intelligence Center, wrote to ASTI trip attendees, “Your instructors are very experienced and have long distinguished careers in the Israeli military and intelligence service. They will be armed.”

Austin police did not respond to multiple emailed requests for comment.

ASTI’s focus on Muslims was further emphasized in notes from a 2018 ASTI trip. The notes were distributed to participants by Stefansky. The author is not identified.

An ASTI biography of one instructor describes him as an adviser to U.S. intelligence police departments and “one of Israel’s most active architects of strategic intelligence management and implementation.”

Notes from ASTI’s’s 2017 training state that “two veteran Israeli Security Agency members provided a series of lectures throughout the day on numerous topics related to Israel, the security situation, and terrorist incidents.”

Another ASTI lecturer, Mordechai Kedar, served in the Israeli military’s intelligence services as a lieutenant colonel and head of the clandestine Unit 8200 before retiring in 1995, according to a biography on the National Council of Young Israel’s website. Unit 8200 has frequently been compared to the U.S. National Security Agency.

Kedar did not respond to multiple emailed requests for comment.

Whistleblowers from Unit 8200 have previously said in 2014 that information gathered and held in the military’s systems “harms innocent people. It is used for political persecution and to create divisions within Palestinian society by recruiting collaborators and driving parts of Palestinian society against itself.” 

Kedar’s past comments offer a window into his personal views. In 2014, after Hamas kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers near the Gush Etzion settlement, where ASTI weapons training has been taught, Kedar said in a radio interview, “The only thing that can deter terrorists, like those who kidnapped the children and killed them, is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped,” according to a Haaretz report. 

Notes from a 2018 ASTI trip show that Kedar gave a lecture titled “Islam.” Almost the entirety of the lecture was devoted to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic political group founded in Egypt in 1928, and included a point that women are viewed “as a walking womb.”

CAIR’s Saylor said the notes from Kedar’s lecture seemed to treat the Muslim Brotherhood as a stand-in for Islam itself, linking the entire religion to a specific group. 

“That’s the type of denigrating an entire faith and painting it as a threat that is a very common anti-Muslim stereotype,” he told Prism.

“The mindset behind the trainers that I see here, the Israeli security aparatus, has led to starving children and, I argue, genocide [in Gaza],” Saylor added. “Those charged with protecting public safety in the United States, is that the mindset we want them to adopt?”

Kedar also appears to have shared a Middle East Forum article he wrote in 2011 with the ASTI trip attendees that included pseudo-study of “root causes and enabling mechanisms” and “incitement to violence in American mosques,” according to ASTI notes. Kedar’s article cited and quoted text from a 2007 NYPD report titled “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” whose foundational “methods and conclusions have long been debunked,” according to Dandia in a 2020 Jewish Currents opinion piece.

“It just shows how deeply imbricated and intertwined the Islamophobia industry is with the Israeli occupation,” Dandia told Prism. “It’s really hard to separate those two things; they directly feed on each other.”

The idea that Muslims in this country are a fifth column is very well-entrenched within society, up to the highest levels of the federal government.

Terry Albury, former FBI agent

“The idea that Muslims in this country are a fifth column is very well-entrenched within society, up to the highest levels of the federal government,” said former FBI counterterrorism agent Terry Albury, who was sentenced to prison for leaking documents to reporters relating to the FBI’s targeting of vulnerable communities. “They believe that, and they’re able to justify their investigative action along those lines, because Muslims are ostensibly an enemy within.” 

ASTI notes from Kedar’s lecture also say, “If you support the idea ‘f’ the system, then you are a friend of the MB [Muslim Brotherhood].” 

The final takeaway of Kedar’s lecture: “If US does not act, it will resemble the Europe of today in about 15 years because of political correctness, and paralyzing laws and policies that tie the hands of the authorities from acting. America does not need a culture change. The US must protect the culture. Just send those who wish to change the culture back to where they will feel more comfortable.”

ASTI notes from a 2017 Kedar lecture “Islam in the United States” also appear to show that attendees were shown a video called “lying in Islam” and that attendees appeared to be shown images of billboards from whyIslam, a public outreach arm of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). The context in which the billboards were discussed is unclear.

In a TV interview in 2016, Kedar talked about how he had seen the whyIslam billboards on the highway while driving in Florida, and suggested without evidence that they exposed how the Muslim Brotherhood aims to take over the U.S. “I don’t believe that there is some kind of term named Islamophobia,” Kedar said. “If there is a fear against Islam, it is based on facts, based on history.”

In a statement to Prism, ICNA President Saad Kazmi said, “ICNA strongly opposes any foreign efforts to influence American law enforcement officers with the aim of manufacturing bias against the Muslim community.” 

For Kazmi, anti-Muslim police training can ultimately lead to violence against all American minority populations, regardless of religion.

“Such programs only reinforce and amplify discriminatory and repressive policing practices already present in the United States—practices that have tragically resulted in the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others,” Kazmi said.

“Efforts to misinform officers with biased narratives against Islam and Muslims must be exposed and stopped at all costs, as such propaganda directly threatens the safety and well-being of our communities here in America,” Kazmi added. “It is the responsibility of law enforcement authorities to immediately end these so-called ‘training’ visits, which are biased, unnecessary, propagandistic, and irrelevant to the actual duties of American law enforcement.”

Today, Kedar is listed as part of the staff of the influential Israel Defense & Security Forum.

Saylor, of CAIR, told Prism that he “was quite shocked” to see some of the participants in ASTI training, including officials from Fairfax County, Virginia, home to one of the nation’s largest Muslim communities.  

Tony Castrilli, director of public affairs for Fairfax County, told Prism that “Fairfax County has not integrated ASTI programming into any training and is not currently involved with the organization in any capacity.” A federal Urban Area Security Initiative grant financed an ASTI training trip to Israel that Fairfax County personnel attended in 2018, Castrilli said.

In 2010, the Fairfax County Office of Emergency Management hosted a seminar presented by Stefansky’s training company PGS and lead instructor Michael Cardash, according to an email sent by Stefansky to American law enforcement. 

The event promised to train public safety personnel on “awareness and recognition of suicide/homicide bombers,” according to a Fairfax County newsletter obtained through a public records request.

The newsletter article was authored by Michael Guditus, a then-Fairfax County Office of Emergency Management coordinator, who later recommended ASTI training to police in Washington state. 

Guditus wrote that the event included “almost every” Metropolitan Washington Council of Government jurisdiction, as well as many state and federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, and members of the military and the CIA. Guditus declined to be interviewed.

Cardash now works with the Israeli firm Terrogence, which provides the NYPD with intelligence reports. In a report Cardash authored in 2011, he wrote, “‘Mowing the lawn short’ is the motto, don’t let the bomb makers and the terror operators evolve, try and cease operations and operatives as early as possible.”

The Israeli phrase of “mowing the lawn” is highly controversial and considered by some as a euphemism for indiscriminate punitive killing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip with scores of collateral killings of children and civilians. Cardash emphatically denied using the phrase with any ill-intent. 

“In no way was my mention of this strategy meant or intended to refer to as you wrote ‘killing Palestinians,’” Cardash told Prism. “The reference to ‘mowing the lawn’ in my document from 2011 was a mention of the Israeli security forces strategy in fighting terror cells, meaning continuous and enduring operations to detain and prosecute bomb makers, cut off bomb precursor supplies and intercept the command chain of bombers.”