A different face of Islam,, By Melissa Radler
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/946530/posts
"Any plan that helps to create a terror state cannot be termed a peace plan," wrote Tashbih Sayyed in the May 30 edition of Pakistan Today, a moderate Muslim weekly published in southern California.
...
Sayyed, 61, a Muslim immigrant to the US and president of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance, has never hesitated to express his views. Born in India and raised in Pakistan, he spent his childhood in one of that country's notorious madrassas, where he learned the religiously sanctioned anti-Semitism of militant Islam.
"As a little boy, I thought all Jews should be killed," he says. As a young man, his virulent tirades against his purported enemy at a local radio school attracted the attention of a Pakistani Jew who quietly funneled him books on Jewish history and Israel, including Exodus by Leon Uris. When Sayyed took a closer look at the Koran, a different Islam was revealed to him: a religion of peace, free of the hatred that he argues has held his people back for centuries.
"I became vengeful, as if somebody had cheated me of my childhood, as if somebody had tried to make me a serpent when I was not a serpent. I blamed the mullahs and the clerics," he says.
Under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Sayyed headed Pakistan Television's current affairs department, where he was given an outlet to rail against Islamic extremism. When the fundamentalist leader Gen. Mohammed Zia-ul Haq took over the country's leadership, Sayyed found himself demoted, threatened with state-sponsored violence, and surrounded by anti-Semitic incitement. He emigrated to the US in 1980.
In California, however, Sayyed faces intimidation of a different kind by the leaders of Muslim organizations, many of them Saudi-financed, who he says use their adopted land's freedoms to spread their message of hate. As evidence of the leaders' success, Sayyed, who calls such groups as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Public Affairs Council "the most accomplished fifth column in America," notes that while his call for democracy in the Muslim world resonates with many of those who fled persecution, his backing of the Jewish right to self-determination and his abhorrence of anti-Semitism is met with hostility and allegations that the "Zionists" control his every move.
And close to the same talking points.