Omar Alomari v. City of Columbus, Ohio

Throughout America, sharia-adherent Islamists are using “lawfare” to silence investigations into the stealth activities of radicals within our borders.  In April 2012, Omar Alomari, a Jordanian Muslim who immigrated to the United States in 1978, filed a lawsuit against several national security experts — whose focus is on the Muslim Brotherhood and their sharia-driven stealth jihad — for investigating his background and ties to terrorist organizations.

The American Freedom Law Center, which is internationally recognized as the premier public interest law firm fighting civilization jihad, agreed to represent the security experts pro bono.

In 2005, Alomari was hired by the Ohio Department of Public Safety’s Office of Homeland Security (OHS) to work as a liaison between OHS and Ohio’s Muslim communities.  In this capacity, and as a means for educating OHS on Islamic “cultural competency issues,” Alomari published “A Guide to Arabic and Islamic Culture.”  In this document, Alomari defined jihad as “the benign pursuit of personal betterment.  It may be applied to physical conflict for Muslims, but only in the arena of Muslims defending themselves when attacked or when attempting to overthrow oppression and occupation.”  Furthermore, he wrote that “Jihad as a holy war is a European invention, spread in the West.”

As this lawsuit will demonstrate, the materials published by Alomari are classic Islamist propaganda.  Furthermore, Alomari authored a brochure entitled, “Agents of Radicalization,” which promoted several Muslim groups as “organizations we [OHS] are working with.”  Several of these groups, including CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), have been identified by the Department of Justice and the FBI as supporters of terrorism.  In fact, CAIR and ISNA were unindicted co-conspirators in the largest terrorism financing trial ever brought by the Department of Justice.  As a result, OHS destroyed thousands of the brochures for promoting these terror-linked groups.

In 2010, the Jawa Report, a prominent anti-sharia website, began publishing reports on Alomari’s background and his ties to terrorist organizations.  After Alomari was fired from his position as a multicultural officer for OHS, investigations revealed that Alomari was once a high-ranking official in the Jordanian government.

In his lawsuit, Alomari claims that our clients caused the OHS to fire him because he was the subject of some critical analysis during a training session for Ohio law enforcement personnel.  In short, Alomari claims that our clients cast him in a “false light” by publishing false statements about him, and that our clients tortiously interfered with a business relationship by causing him to be fired as a result of these statements.

There are many problems with Alomari’s complaint, but the most fatal one is that Alomari was fired from OHS because, according to documents obtained through a freedom of information request, he lied about his background—notably, he misstated his employment background when he applied for work.  Furthermore, this misstatement included an omission that Alomari had been fired from a teaching position for having an inappropriate relationship with a student.

AFLC Co-Founder and Senior Counsel David Yerushalmi commented:

“This case is yet another example of sharia-adherent Muslims using our legal system to engage in a form of ‘lawfare’ that is designed to silence those who speak out against sharia and to intimidate those who seek to expose the dangerous links between sharia adherence and terrorism.  The American Freedom Law Center is committed to upholding our First Amendment right to freedom of speech against such frontal attacks.”

CASE UPDATE (May 28, 2013): AFLC filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that Alomari’s allegations lack the requisite elements to sustain his causes of action.

CASE UPDATE (September 10, 2014): Alomari dismissed his lawsuit against our clients.  Another victory against civilization jihad.  Case closed.

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