Who Is Brigitte Gabriel? Trump Welcomes Anti-Muslim Activist To White House

Brigitte Gabriel, who founded the anti-Muslim group known as ACT for America, made a visit to the White House Tuesday and called her talks with members of President Donald Trump’s administration “productive.”

Gabriel and a colleague were at the White House to “participate in a brief meeting with a member of our legislative staff. The purpose was to make general introductions, which is pretty typical with any new administration,” a White house official told The Guardian, saying Gabriel herself had requested the visit.

Read: Hate In America: Anti-Muslim Groups Quadruple In 2016; Others Also Increase For Second Straight Year

Though Act for America, which has roughly 500,000 members in its 1,000 chapters across the country, refers to itself as a “grassroots national security organization” on its website, the Southern Poverty Law Group classified it as “the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in America.”

Gabriel, a 52-year-old Lebanese-American, founded ACT for America in 2007. She worked as a news anchor in Marjayoun, Lebanon, for Israel-funded World News, and covered an array of historic events ranging from the Israeli withdrawal from central Lebanon in 1982 and the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank in 1987. She immigrated to the U.S. in 1989 and continued her career as a broadcaster where her pro-Israel stance and compelling personal history made her a popular anti-Muslim speaker and writer.

The Center for International Policy, a social justice group based in Washington D.C., has said Gabriel “has made a post 9/11 career out of round denouncing Islam, decrying political correctness and promoting the concept of an existential clash of cultures.”

In Gabriel's first book, "Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America," she criticized left-wing Americans who still “refuse to accept that in the Muslim world, extreme is mainstream.” In her subsequent book, "They Must Be Stopped," Gabriel wrote, "It's not radical Islam. It's what Islam is at its core."

The Council On American-Islamic Relations said Tuesday that ACT for America was "one of the main sources of growing anti-Muslim bigotry in our nation."

When Gabriel took to Twitter Monday night to ask her followers what topics she should discuss at the White House, one user replied “Officially identify Islam as a political system and not a religion” while another posted “ask how we can islam ed out our schools and universities.”

Last year represented the second consecutive year in which the number of hate groups grew across America, with anti-Muslim groups seeing the biggest rise, increasing from 24 in 2015 to 101 in 2016. That could be linked to rhetoric throughout Trump’s campaign in which he associated Islam with terrorist attacks worldwide. The president has also signed two executive orders banning citizens of Muslim-majority nations from traveling to the U.S.