Selim’s biography evokes a bygone era. He’s an Arab American—his family is of Egyptian and Lebanese descent. Early in his career, he worked at the Arab American Institute, which advocates for Arab American civil rights, and in 2004 served as an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention. Soon after that, he joined the Bush administration.

Back then, these biographical nuggets didn’t seem so contradictory. In his second debate with Al Gore, Bush had denounced the fact that “Arab Americans are racially profiled in what is called secret evidence.” After September 11, Bush insisted that “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes.” In 2008, it was Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff—not Barack Obama—who first instructed the federal government to avoid terms like “Islamist” and “Islamic” in describing al-Qaeda. Selim served under Chertoff as a senior policy adviser in the Department’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

In its relationships with Arab and Muslim communities in the United States, the Obama administration didn’t so much change Bush administration policy as institutionalize it. Selim worked for four years under Obama as the National Security Council’s Director for Community Partnerships, before returning to the Department of Homeland Security to lead the federal CVE effort.

The theory behind CVE was that the government should build relationships with local Muslim communities and empower them to prevent radicalization. At times, that meant giving community leaders the chance to work with at-risk youth before calling in law enforcement. It meant avoiding the dragnet surveillance that made Muslims feel like victims of religious profiling. And it meant addressing white supremacism rather than viewing Islamist extremism as the sole domestic terrorist threat.

From the beginning, CVE encountered two very different forms of opposition. The first was from conservatives who saw it as politically correct way to avoid calling Islamic terrorism by its name. In June 2016, Senator Ted Cruz declared that by adopting such “meaningless policies as the ‘countering violent extremism’ initiative,” the Obama administration was “willfully blinding itself to the real threat.” After Trump’s election, Sebastian Gorka declared that, “I predict with absolute certitude, the jettisoning of concepts such as CVE.”

Ironically, however, CVE also met opposition from Muslim organizations, which insisted that despite its ecumenical veneer, it still treated domestic terrorism as a primarily Muslim phenomenon, even though the data suggested otherwise. Thus, some activists argued, the program stigmatized Muslims as potential terrorists rather than treating them like any other group of Americans.

The Conservative Review article that reported Selim’s resignation claimed that he had “admitted to hosting hundreds of meetings with officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR),” a claim Selim disputed to me. But what’s truly ironic about the charge is that CAIR strongly opposed CVE. Dawud Walid, executive director of the group’s Michigan chapter, told me that “the outreach Mr. Selim was involved in was just soft intelligence gathering and CVE in and of itself was still a program that overwhelmingly focused on American Muslim community even though it claimed not to be.”