NAWAR SHORA

• Served as legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
• Sees the war on terror through the lens of anti-Arab discrimination
  
• Was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as a senior advisor to the Civil Rights and Liberties Office of the Transportation Security Administration

Nawar Shora worked as the Legal Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and also founded its Diversity Education and Law Enforcement Outreach Program (LEOP). Since 1999, he has devoted himself to educating government employees and the general public about ethnic discrimination and the infringement of civil liberties in the United States. Along with representatives from the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Sikh American Legal Defense Education Fund, the Arab American Institute, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the ADAMS (All Dulles Area Muslim Society) Center, Shora took part in an FBI outreach program after 9/11 to air Muslim community grievances pertaining to hate crimes (allegedly committed against Arabs and Muslims) and the Patriot Act. In March, 2010, the Obama administration appointed Shora as a senior advisor to the Civil Rights and Liberties Office of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in the Department of Homeland Security.

Born in Syria and raised in Huntington, West Virginia, Shora graduated from Marshall University and the West Virginia University College of Law. In 1999 he joined the ADC as an intern and, in 2001, became a legal advisor, founding (in 2002) the LEOP program, which he headed for the rest of the decade. Designed to inform law-enforcement officers and agencies in the U.S. about Arab-American and Muslim communities in “the wake of the post-9/11 backlash,” the LEOP program reached 20,000 individuals in government and the private sector as well as hundreds of thousands through a DVD series for Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security employees.

As director of the LEOP, Shora has championed the ADC’s mission to recast the war on terror as a narrative of ethnic discrimination perpetuated by the Bush administration. According to the ADC, Arab Americans and Muslims have become the “the secondary victims” of the 9/11 attacks – and Shora views the war on terror exclusively through the prism of discrimination. In 2003, when the FBI conducted an investigation of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), which has ties to the extremist Saudi-Wahhabi movement, Shora interpreted the raid in terms of a continuing pattern of abuse against Arab Americans: “I would like to believe that the four homes that were hit today were not raided purely because they were Muslim homes.”

Instead of promoting stringent security protocols, Shora emphasizes the American government's alleged mistrust of Arab Americans and Muslims. “Perhaps one of our greatest challenges as a society has been a lack of trust and lack of understanding,” he said in 2009 in remarks about the U.S. security system. After the TSA heightened scrutiny of travelers following a series of “homegrown” terrorist incidents and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s 2009 attempted airline attack, Shora called the new protocols “extreme and very dangerous,” and found evidence of ethnic profiling: “All of a sudden, people are labeled as being related to terrorism just because of the nation they are from.”

Months later, in March 2010, Shora was tapped to be a senior adviser for the TSA. He characterized his new job as an opportunity to change policy from within. “It's about time I cross over to the government and start working within the system. That’s the beauty of our society: Anybody can work with the government.”