King Abdullah, Another Shining Star in our Fight Against Radical Islam

Will American leadership finally declare radical Islam the enemy and act decisively to win? King Abdullah is leading the way and the time to act is now.

“He (King Abdullah) said there is going to be retribution like ISIS hasn’t seen. He mentioned ‘Unforgiven’ and he mentioned Clint Eastwood, and he actually quoted a part of the movie—‘Any man I see out there, I’m gonna kill him. Any son of a # takes a shot at me, I’m not only going to kill him I’m going to…’”—Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr. (R-CA) referring to King Abdullah of Jordan after learning of Jordanian pilot Kasasbeh being burned alive

The Islamic State (IS) crossed a new threshold of barbarity beyond the beheading videos we have become accustomed to when IS terrorists burned-to-death Jordanian pilot Lieutenant Moaz al Kasasbeh and filmed the horrendous act. In quick response, Jordan’s King Abdullah ordered two IS terrorists hung the next morning. He quickly left his meetings in Washington, D.C. to fly back to Jordan and lead the Jordanian military response against IS.

King Abdullah has quickly become the face of the fight against our enemy, radical Islam, and yet many Americans know almost nothing of the man or Jordan’s critical role in the region.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser Smacks Down Obama’s “ISIS is not Islamic” Proclamation
http://www.westernfreepress.com/2014/09/20/dr-zuhdi-jasser-smacks-down-obamas-isis-is-not-islamic-proclamation/

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser is aghast at the ignorance and arrogance of Barack Obama, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, Jeh Johnson, and Josh Earnest who presume to tell the world what is, and is not, Islamic. Says Jasser, the behavior of ISIS/ISIL most certainly is Islamic, in its fundamentalist form, and by pretending and posturing otherwise, Obama et al are burying efforts like Jasser’s to reform Islam from within.

Zuhdi Jasser is an American physician, a devout Muslim, a former US Navy Lt. Commander, and a leader in the struggle within Islam to reform the religion away from Wahhabism and other fundamentalist versions and towards western democratic norms.

Boldly and unequivocally, Jasser says that Muslims have a problem, Muslims need to own it, and little progress can be made when people like Barack Obama and John Kerry spread confusion and falsehoods that undermine efforts like his and those of other reformers.

Dr. Jasser has written a book on reform titled: A Battle for the Soul of Islam, an American Muslim’s Fight to Save His Faith. He is also a founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, based in Phoenix, Arizona.

Pro-Democracy Muslim Promotes ‘Sunlight’ to Combat Radical Islam
http://jewishexponent.com/headlines/2014/12/pro-democracy-muslim-promotes-sunlight-to-combat-radical-islam

Zuhdi Jasser, 46, was amazed to hear his pro-democracy views become the target of a verbal attack in front of his family by the imam of the Phoenix mosque he attends.

As the American-born son of Syrian refugees from that country’s dictatorial Baathist regime, Jasser has made a name from himself as a devout Muslim and avid supporter of democracy, helping to found the American Islamic Forum for Democracy in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Speaking to about 25 guests at a StandWithUs luncheon on Dec. 10 at the Duane Morris law offices in Center City, Jasser explained how an August interview on Fox News, during which he slammed Islamic leaders such as fellow guest Imam Muhammad Siddeeq of the Nur-Allah Islamic Center in Indianapolis, Ind., for their failure to speak out against terrorist groups like ISIS and Hamas, became the topic of a scathing rant by the imam of Jasser’s own mosque.

“The imam called out against me just two months ago in the largest sermon of our annual services at the end of Ramadan,” said Jasser, who also spoke to an audience of 120 at Penn Valley’s Har Zion Temple the evening before the luncheon. “The sermon went from being about Islamophobia and about Ramadan to being about ‘a Muslim amongst us who is not one of us.’ ”

Jasser added that the imam called him a hater of Islam and “compared me to the hypocrites in the Koran, which basically is apostating me.”

The Medical College of Wisconsin graduate and former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander’s pro-Israel views and efforts to decry the Islamic nation-state have made him a minority voice in the Islamic world.

“This is a world where radicals are keen on eliminating any kind of dissenting voice,” said Joseph Puder, executive director of Philadelphia’s chapter of StandWithUs, a national Israel advocacy group. “So he’s got a lot of courage and what he says is very important.”

Jasser is the second pro-Israel Muslim guest speaker that the regional StandWithUs branch has hosted since forming about a year ago. Kasim Hafeez — a former Islamic radical who said he once considered becoming a suicide bomber before later adopting a pro-Israel stance — spoke on Sept. 7 at Temple Beth Hillel-Beth El in Wynnewood.

“A guy like Zuhdi understands our mission, which is to promote Israel,” said Puder, adding that he also hopes to bring in Sherkoh Abbas, president of the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria, for a StandWithUs talk in the near future. “In his own way, even though he talks about his own work and his battle within the Islamic community, he essentially promotes Israel.”

He continued, “It’s important for people to know that it’s not just Jews and Zionist Christians that support Israel, but also Muslims — moderate Muslims — that really want to see a better world.”

Jasser explained that a visit to Israel in his youth helped him forge his current backing of the Jewish homeland, which at the time surprised him with its normalcy. He certainly didn’t hold back any punches while sharing his current opinion of the United Nations’ relations with Israel in regards to the Middle East conflict.

“It is absurd that the U.N. spends so much time on Israel when it’s like England, it’s like America,” Jasser said. “The Palestinian question is a problem because of the Palestinian leadership — the warmongering Hamas, which is sending rockets and starts a war and then expects nothing to happen in response.”

During his speech, Jasser outlined his belief that the only solution to the threat of radical Islam posed by groups like Hamas is to combat the issue on an ideological level. He equated extremist Islamic views to an illness.

You can’t treat “terrorism or violence, that’s one little symptom — you treat the cancer, which is the identification of Muslims with the nation-state through faith,” he said.

The speaker, who cited American revolutionaries Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine as his personal heroes, explained that he is attempting to change the way American Muslims view America, Israel and the principles of democracy.

But that change has come slowly, he asserted. For example, athough he is able to visit and lecture at some mosques, he is kept away from children — the very audience, he argued, that really needs to learn about the importance of Western governance.

“The bigger threat is the quiet majority” of American Muslims “that hates America, that doesn’t feel a bond to this country, would be horrified if their kids became military officers, and don’t feel an affinity for America,” Jasser said. “The only way to fix that is the antiseptic of sunlight, to start asking them these questions. The problems all over the world are only going to go away when we teach them why interfaith cooperation needs to work.”

The American Islamic Forum for Democracy
http://aifdemocracy.org/about/

The American Islamic Forum for Democracy’s (AIFD) mission is to advocate for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state.

AIFD is the most prominent American Muslim organization directly confronting the ideologies of political Islam and openly countering the common belief that the Muslim faith is inextricably rooted to the concept of the Islamic State (Islamism). Founded by Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, AIFD looks to build the future of Islam through the concepts of liberty and freedom.

AIFD’s mission is derived from a love for America and a love of our faith of Islam. Dr. Jasser and the board of AIFD believe that Muslims can better practice Islam in an environment that protects the rights of an individual to practice their faith as they choose. The theocratic “Islamic” regimes of the Middle East and some Muslim majority nations use Islam as a way to control Muslim populations, not to glorify God as they portend. The purest practice of Islam is one in which Muslims have complete freedom to accept or reject any of the tenants or laws of the faith no different than we enjoy as Americans in this Constitutional republic.

AIFD believes that the root cause of Islamist terrorism is the ideology of political Islam and a belief in the preference for and supremacy of the Islamic state. Terrorism is but a means to that end. Most Islamist terror is driven by the desire of Islamists to drive the influence of the west (the ideas of liberty) out of the Muslim consciousness and Muslim majority societies. The underlying philosophy of Islamism is what western society should fear most. With almost a quarter of the world’s population Muslim, American security will never come without an understanding and winning out of the ideas of liberty by Muslims and an understanding of the harm of political Islam by non-Muslims.

AIFD seeks to build and establish an institution that can provide an ideological infrastructure for the ideas of liberty and freedom to Muslims and our future generations. We seek to give Muslims a powerful intellectual alternative to political Islam (Islamism) ultimately seeking the defeat of political Islam as a theo-political ideology.

AIFD’s ideas will be promoted through this think tank and foundation as we take every opportunity to directly engage advocates of political Islam on the folly of their ideas. Our ideas are based in the American ideas of liberty and the separation of mosque and state without compromising the centrality of God in our life as devout Muslims.

We hope that AIFD’s ideas in the public place will ultimately serve as the seeds that will drive a prevailing liberty movement from within the American and ultimately the global Muslim consciousness to embrace the tenets of liberty and freedom. We will work to engage Muslim youth and empower them with the independence to question the ideas of imams, clerics, and so many “tribal” leaders of Muslim communities unwilling to look toward reform and modernity. We will empower Muslim youth to have the confidence to take personal intellectual ownership of their own interpretation of Islam, the Qur’an, Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), and shariah (Islamic jurisprudence) and separate mosque and state. We will work to advocate for the ideas of gender equality, genuine religious pluralism, and an unwavering preference of the secular state and a secular law over the Islamic state among other central ideas in modernity.

The most effective counter to the current problem of Muslim radicalization is the advocacy of the American principle of liberty over the prevailing ideas of political Islam. Muslim children in America need to be taught that the principles of the United States Constitution are not only in line with their faith, but are the best way to protect the sanctity of their faith. At AIFD we recognize that these ideas require not only an advocacy for liberty but a need to create and promote deep reforms against political Islam. It is this legacy that we seek to leave future generations with our work at AIFD.

Since our inception, AIFD has seen a steady and consistent growth in our platform, our ideas, and following. Our mission is challenging on almost every front. Our primary adversaries, the advocates for political Islam do not generally promote an environment that gives anti-Islamist foundations like ours a protective or a naturally engaging environment from which to operate among Muslims and non-Muslims. AIFD has slowly and steadily built upon our body of ideas most of which are contained on this website. We have also slowly and steadily built upon our base of support nationally and internationally.

Our mission is on the frontlines of what is probably the most essential and yet contentious debate of the 21st century. So it should be easy to understand why many Muslims may agree with our mission to separate mosque and state and marginalize political Islam, but yet want to remain private and out of the public eye as supporters.

Ultimately transforming the work of AIFD as a think tank into a palpable movement by American Muslims is a tall task that will not happen until the public environment becomes more welcoming to the diversity of Muslims who disagree with the Islamist movement and its organizations. AIFD will continue to grow and advocate for our ideas and protect those of all faiths who join us in this critical venture.

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