Press Release: TERROR ON U.S. SOIL AN IMMINENT THREAT

Immediate Release

Phoenix – May 22, 2009 – Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, President and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), today warned that the foiled bomb plot in New York City is a “clear and calculated warning that well-coordinated extremists are on the move within the U.S.”  Four individuals were arrested Thursday in New York City on charges that they planned to detonate explosives at a Jewish synagogue and community center and shoot down U.S. military aircraft with surface-to-air missiles.

“The arrest of four individuals – three of whom appear to be U.S. citizens – confirms that homegrown Islamist-inspired terrorism is a clear and present danger,” said Dr. Jasser.  “Today’s arrests should be a wake-up call to America and especially to American Muslims that we are long overdue in countering the well-coordinated and well-funded Islamist programs which exist within the United States.”

• “The 2007 NYPD Radicalization Report is accurate – radicalization in U.S. prisons is an immediate threat.  This recent terrorist attempt on Jewish synagogues shows the NYPD Report was right.  The Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) opposed that report because as usual they were in denial about the radicalization in U.S. prisons,” said Dr. Jasser.  “It’s now acknowledged that at least some of the alleged bombers were radicalized in U.S. prisons –Many Islamist imams are aggressively recruiting inmates in our prisons with ideologies that fuel ‘home-grown’ terror.”
• “It’s significant that this terrorist plot was targeted against synagogues, underscoring the dangerous hatred promoted by radical imams in American prisons,” said Dr. Jasser.
• “The solution begins with government rejection of Islamist apologist groups like CAIR, who are not representatives of the Muslims in America.  The FBI has recently rejected them and we support that decision.  We must engage the majority non-Islamist American Muslim community to reject political Islam and its fuel for radicalized Islam,” said Dr. Jasser.

Dr. Jasser, a devout Muslim and son of Muslim-Syrian immigrants, is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander, physician and past president of the Arizona Medical Association.  Jasser is widely known as a moderate, anti-Islamist Muslim leader featured in the PBS film, Islam v Islamists produced by ABG Films, Inc. in 2007 and narrator of the recently released The Third Jihad produced by Clarion Fund, Inc. which focuses on the threat of radical Islam to America. Jasser appears regularly in print and on national TV and radio programs.

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About American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD)

AIFD is a think tank and activist Muslim organization which provides a platform for a movement to separate spiritual Islam from the political.

AIFD openly engages and challenges all American Muslims to proactively be in the forefront of the domestic and foreign struggle against the primary driving force of militant Islamism and its terrorist offshoots-the ideology of political Islam. Militant Islamists are fueled ideologically by a radicalization of the faith of Islam. This radicalization is fueled by both militant components and a more central political desire (Islamism) to establish Islamic states. Islamists view secular pluralistic societies like America as an anathema to Islam.

AIFD rather seeks to build coalitions of Muslims which not only reject the means of terror as an anathema to Islam but more globally reject the ends of the Islamic state which Islamists seek.

AIFD believes that the only way to genuinely wage the contest of ideas and counter the root cause of terrorism is for Muslims to be given ample opportunity for debate between one another– especially within the mosques. AIFD believes that the outcome of these debates between political Islam and non-political Islam will ultimately be one of the primary reasons globally for the decrease in the threat of homegrown terrorism. For more information see www.aifdemocracy.org.