The class in question was canceled in April and Dempsey noted the instructor responsible for the course, army lieutenant colonel Matthew A Dooley, is "no longer in a teaching status". Dooley, however, is still employed at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.

In a July presentation, Dooley claimed: “We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as 'moderate Islam.’”

Linda Sarsour, executive director at the Arab American Association of New York, said the course is merely the latest example in a proliferation of anti-Muslim teaching materials in law-enforcement agencies. “It's part of a much larger problem,” Sarsour said, pointing to similar controversies involving the FBI and the New York police department.

On Thursday, Danger Room - a national security blog at Wired.com - published a series of documents revealing that a defense department class for U.S. military officers urged soldiers to prepare for a “total war” against the world's 1.4 billion Muslims. In this battle for supremacy, Geneva Convention standards for armed conflict would be irrelevant and the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be applied to civilian populations “wherever necessary.”

Hundreds of pages of teaching material and reference documents obtained by Danger Room show the course - which was open to U.S. military commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels - argued that the real threat to U.S. national security stemmed not from radical militants, but from Islam itself.

The course echoes a curriculum presented to FBI agents. In September, FBI whistleblowers provided Danger Room with a trove of the agency's training materials in which counter-terrorism agents were taught that “main stream" [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers.”

The influence of anti-Islamic rhetoric has also found its way into municipal police departments. The New York police department has been the subject of increasing scrutiny amid a series of reports from the Associated Press revealing the existence of the department's so-called "Demographics Unit", which has been used to map out ethnic communities. The unit focused on a list of 28 "ancestries of interest", all of which are predominantly Muslim. In the course of over two dozen articles, the AP laid out how the NYPD - with the help of CIA advisers - infiltrated mosques, Muslim community centers and local colleges.

In January the New York Times revealed the department had played the Third Jihad - a film which claims that American Muslims of all stripes are in the midst of an effort to seize control of the country - for 1,489 police officers. The NYPD initially denied that any officers had seen the film and that it was not involved in its production, but was eventually forced to admit that police commissioner Ray Kelly participated in an interview for the film.

Sarsour said the latest revelations showed the problem was widespread. "It's not just the department of defense. It's not just the military. It's anywhere from showing a movie like the Third Jihad to 1,500 New York City police officers to training FBI agents that Muslims are easily radicalized to become terrorists." The Guardian