Professor Trump wrong again

Muslim-Americans have repeatedly informed authorities of fellow Muslims they fear might be turning to extremism, law enforcement officials say, contrary to a claim by presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump this week.

"They don't report them," Trump said in a CNN interview on Monday, in the wake of the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub of 49 people by an American Muslim who claimed allegiance to Islamic State. "For some reason, the Muslim community does not report people like this."

But FBI director James Comey said, "They do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim.

“It’s at the heart of the FBI’s effectiveness to have good relationships with these folks,” Comey said at a press conference following the Orlando shootings.

Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Washington field office, told Reuters on Wednesday that the agency has a “robust” relationship with the local Muslim community. FBI agents operating in the area have received reports about suspicious activity and other issues from community members.

Michael Downing, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and head of its Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau, said the city's Muslim community has been cooperative in reporting "red flags."

“I personally have been called by community members about several things, very significant things,” Downing told Reuters. “What we say to communities is that we don’t want you to profile humans, we want you to profile behavior.”

American Muslims are in fact more culturally integrated than European Muslims and say they identify more strongly with their American identity than their religious identity, according to a study from the Council on Foreign Relations: 

The percentage of U.S. Muslims in individual income and education brackets tracks closely to that of the rest of the U.S. population, surveys suggest. According to a 2009 Gallup poll, U.S. Muslims have the second-highest level of education among major religious groups in the United States. Almost 50 percent of Muslims identify with religion before their U.S. identity (nearly half of U.S. Christians polled by Gallup also identified with their religion first).

Even so, Americans are increasingly less tolerant of Muslims; a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute in September 2015 found that 56 percent of Americans think Islam is "at odds with American values and way of life," up from 47 percent in 2011.