Robert Muise

Muise is a lawyer and the co-founder (along with Islamophobe David Yerushalmi) and senior counsel of the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC). Muise is an observant Catholic and has been repeatedly claiming that the Christian religion is under attack.

The Center's mission statement is 'to fight for faith and freedom', but their main focus has been their campaign to change the Constitutional criminal law, in order to prohibit the imposition of Shariah religious laws on U.S. courts.

Views

On Muslims and Islam

He appears to believe in the conspiracy theory of 'stealth jihad', i.e. the alleged planned 'invasion' of the U.S. by Muslims through immigration and population mixing. In a press release from 2013 for AFLC, he said:'It is crucial that Americans understand the threat our Nation faces from sharia-adherent Islam, especially from stealth jihadists who covertly seek to perpetuate sharia into American society.'

• In July 2012, he was interviewed by the National Catholic Register. Citing a study co-authored by David Yerushalmi, he claimed: 'Most people don’t know that 80% of the mosques in the United States distribute literature that promotes violence against nonbelievers.'

On Christianity

• In the interview that he gave in July 2012 to the National Catholic Register, he expressed the idea that the Christian religion was under attack:

'Secular progressives have an agenda and know that Christians and Christian principles are their main obstacle,[...] They don’t want us to be able to fight back. At the end of the day, it’s a battle between good and evil.' In a 2014 interview with Glenn Beck he also said :'We have many domestic enemies, and we’re going to fight them.'

• When he was interviewed by Fox News on that matter in June 2010, he said:

'[i]t’s probably not a coincidence in a city where you have the largest Muslim population in the United States that you have police who are persecuting Christians.'

• He appears to believe in the religious 'American Exceptionality' theory as well, having said in 2014 that America was 'the chosen nation' and that it was 'founded on Judeo-Christian principles' on live television.

Work as lawyer

Thomas More Law Center

Muise first worked at the Thomas More Law Center as a senior trial counsel. During his time there he filed a suit against the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, accusing it of merely being a tool designed to 'criminalize the Bible … and [impose] long jail sentences to silence Christians' who describe homosexuality as a sin.

He said of the 'opponents of Christianity' that they were 'fight[ing] as long and hard as they can to ensure that, you know, their [homosexual people] really deviant sexual behavior is elevated to a special protected class … and they … want to silence Christians who oppose it. … [T]hey really want to equate the biblical teaching of homosexuality with racist speech… . I mean, this is all part and parcel of a really grand plan.'

American Freedom Law Center

Muise has defended notorious right-wing anti-Muslim propagandists, such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer when their ads were accused of attacking Islam, as well as other lesser known ones. He for instance defended both the owners of a Florida gun shop and an Oklahoma gun range who refused to serve Muslims in 2016. One of the arguments for defense that he gave Reuters was that 'the law does not require a gun shop or gun range owner — owners of an inherently dangerous business — to equip or train the next jihadist.'

Another cases was with an ex-Marine high-ranked official who had been prosecuted for parading a 'Disgrace My Countries [sic] Flag And I Will Shit on Your Quran' bump-sticker on his vehicle.

Affiliations

• American Freedom Law Center
• He once gave a 40-minute interview to the anti-Semitic American Free Press.