Posted on 10/11/2004 3:08:39 PM PDT by nuconvert
Immigrants raise voices for democracy
Oct. 10, 2004
Since World War II, nearly every Middle Eastern nation has been under the smothering vise of ruthless tyrants, autocrats and monarchs.
Only since 9/11 has American foreign policy begun to show it understands there is a definite connection between Middle Eastern despotism and Islamo-fascist terrorism.
Yet, the ones most familiar with these systemic human rights abuses in the Middle East have been silent for years. Those Americans who escaped Middle Eastern tyranny during the last 40 years have until now been incomprehensibly silent.
Sept. 11, 2001 woke up America to the dangers of theocracy and despotism in the Middle East. It has also awakened the slumbering community of Middle Eastern immigrants.
The reasons for our past silence are manifold. Some Middle Eastern Americans have feared retribution to family in their ancestral lands. Some fear for their own safety. But many have simply not seen any viable alternative to the secular dictatorships, because the Islamo-fascists are waiting in the wings.
On the first day of this month in Washington, D.C., the first Middle Eastern American Convention for Freedom and Democracy took place. It was sponsored by the newly formed Center for Freedom in the Middle East, and included a consortium of more than 20 liberty-minded organizations of Middle Eastern Americans.
This meeting was nothing less than historic. It brought together first-, second- and third-generation immigrants who share a common ancestral heritage and whose lands remain governed by these malignant despots.
We shared a common love for the freedom and liberty we have experienced in America and yearned to bring these ideals back to our brethren in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Iraq, to name a few.
We also clearly identified organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaida as terrorist organizations that must be combated.
We agreed that it is the duty of we who have enjoyed freedoms here to help our brethren break free of the murderous ideologies that have suffocated them for so long. The truth also is that the tribal culture of the Middle East has hijacked the religion of Islam. We see this most clearly in the case of Wahhabism and Salafism, which has been at the center of this war on terrorism.
It is finally clear, at least to those of us in attendance, that the liberation of the Middle Eastern peoples will also be the liberation of Islam from the terrorist ideologies that have proven so helpful in propping up these despotic autocrats and monarchs.
The conveners all agreed that our American founding principles are universal. They are not limited to any particular culture, faith or place. It became unanimously clear to all that any Middle Eastern state that wants its people to flourish must have separation of religion and state, protection of minority rights and a fundamentally tolerant and spiritual environment for its citizens.
Such a gathering of Middle Eastern Americans had never happened. It sent a new collective message that the future belongs to the secular democrats in the Middle East and not the authoritarian theocrats.
Our American soldiers and the coalition of the willing of more than 30 nations have been fighting for freedom in Iraq. Thousands have given their lives to free the Iraqi people. To that the conveners expressed their everlasting debt and acknowledged their responsibility to lead this effort in winning this war of ideas in the Middle East.
At the center of this global confict is not "terror," which is only a tactic, but rather a competition between theocracy and secular democracy. To those of us who know the freedom of religion in America, there is no system of government that comes close to empowering the faithful as here. No meeting of this sort could have happened anywhere else but in America.
M. Zuhdi Jasser is a Phoenix physician and chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (www.aifdemocracy.org). AIFD is a member organization of the Center for Freedom in the Middle East (www.middleeastfreedom.org), which sponsored the Oct. 1 Middle East American Convention for Freedom and Democracy.
Great, I am glad that these groups are speaking out..Hope that this thing gets some play in the media..
"Hope that this thing gets some play in the media"
I wouldn't count on it. Especially before the election.
pong
I think this is so very important and I am so proud of these Americans. Please help get this message out, because the MSM won’t. They’ll feed the public some radical convert with a chip on his collective shoulder instead. I saw a young man named Muhamed Ali Hasan (spelling?) with Muslims for Bush on the Dennis Miller show on MSNBC. He was dynamic, funny, articulate and oh, what a wonderful voice for President Bush.
Yes. I've seen him, too. He's enthusiastic!
Thanx for pinging others. You're right, the MSM doesn't want to report this. Especially now.
Here is Ali Hasan's website:
www.muslimsforbush.com/
And a recent article fromhttp://www.muslimwakeup.com/mainarchive/000988.php
August 05, 2004
US Elections 2004
Muslim Organizations to Endorse Bush After Debates, New Group Predicts
By Ahmed Nassef
Today marks the official launch of Muslims for Bush, a group founded by filmmaker Muhammad Ali Hasan and his mother, Seeme Hasan, and committed to “actively campaigning among all Americans, particularly American Muslims, to re-elect the President.” As we reported in February, members of the Hasan family have been active long-time supporters of the President, having reportedly raised “several hundred thousand dollars” for the campaign.
I spoke with the group’s President, Muhammad Ali Hasan, a 24-year-old filmmaker and teacher who graduated this year from Occidental College in Southern California. Hasan describes himself on the group's website as “a budding comedian.”
MWU!: Tell us about why you have formed this group?
Muhammad Ali Hasan: The main reason we founded it is we truly believe that President Bush is good for Muslims. We feel like he is getting a bad rap. A lot of Muslims are going against him not for the right reasons. If there is someone who is very wrong for the job, it is John Kerry. Bush is the right guy for Muslims.
~snip~
"The conveners all agreed that our American founding principles are universal. They are not limited to any particular culture, faith or place. It became unanimously clear to all that any Middle Eastern state that wants its people to flourish must have separation of religion and state, protection of minority rights and a fundamentally tolerant and spiritual environment for its citizens. "
Good read here!
Thanks for posting!
Thank you, nuconvert, for posting this article...let's hope someone takes a look at it.
I had never heard of Dr. Jassar. What an interesting man. Here's a bit from his website.
"Dr. Jasser is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander and served in the U.S. Navy as a medical officer from 1988-1999. In 2002, he noted the obvious increasing American attention to Islam and Muslims and their role in the national and international war against Islamo-fascists. As a result of what he felt to be a paucity of Muslim scholarship demonstrating the synergy of American democracy and its founding principles with the religion of Islam, he set out to form AIFD. He felt that many Muslims came to America in fact somewhat similarly to our founding fathers and so many others seeking freedom, liberty, and the American dream in order to escape religious persecution from so-called "Islamic" lands."
I have posted about a dozen of his editorials.
If you'd like to read them, search under Keyword - Jasser
Bump to freedom --- it would sure be a good thing for guys like this to re-make a form of Islam for those who wish to still stay some kind of Muslim to have an alternative type of Islam to follow --- there is still the problem of the Koran --- it's got some very strong anti-Jew and anti-Christian stuff in there. Maybe they could come up with another prophet to replace Mohammad --- something like the B'hai religion has.
redrock
Latenight bump
"I have posted about a dozen of his editorials. "
I'm sorry I missed them! Did you get any more resonse from them than this thread? I think the title with "immigrants" in it has thrown people off...no one wants to talk about immigration right now.
Thanks for the post, nuconvert.
"Did you get any more resonse from them than this thread?"
Yes. But some wheren't very friendly.
This was posted previously. It's excerpted from an editorial by Walid Phares.
"Today in the United States, thousands of Americans of Middle East descent are joining forces to answer the anxious questions of their neighbors: "Yes we are fully Americans and we feel this is our country which we love and want to defend against Terrorists," said the organizers of a historic conference to take place in Washington DC on Friday October 1, 2004. "It is time for our communities to break the silence imposed by the oil backed elite," said Tom Harb, a member of the American Lebanese Alliance, a group that co-sponsored the event. John Michael, a medical doctor from Chicago revealed that, "tens of thousands of Assyrians and Chaldeans have sided since day one with the U.S. when it decided to liberate our mother country – Iraq – from the bloody Saddam."
More than 30 organizations, from all ethnic and religious backgrounds, have been meeting and planning for what will become a "beginning for a new era in Mideast-American history" as qualified by Dr Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim activist heading the American Muslim Forum for Democracy. "The mass graves in Iraq shook off the basis of our consciousness" said Zainab al Suwajj, the courageous Arab female leading the Islamic American Congress.
Walking hand in hand with Muslim moderates, Coptic groups are raising the issue of persecution of Christians in Egypt at the hands of fundamentalists. Michael Meunir, President of US Copts said "it will be interesting to see that this new wave of Americans from Mideast descent will show the world and the fanatics that Muslims would stand by Christians when persecuted and the other way around." Moyammed Yahia from Darfur's exiled community agrees: "We saw Christians coming to our help, when we Black Muslims were massacred by the Janjaweed.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=15332
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