Moderate Muslims Must Oppose Islamism

By M. Zuhdi Jasser

National Review Online, 04/20/13

The terror attacks in Boston, perpetrated by the Tsarnaev brothers, have finally come to an end with the capture of the younger brother Dzhoakhar in Watertown on Friday evening. One hopes that Dzhoakhar survives just long enough to tell us whether he was working with any foreign or domestic Islamist groups before he hopefully meets the same fate of his victims. Our nation will certainly be resilient, and we cannot let terrorists achieve their goals of unraveling our society.

Perhaps Boston’s terror may finally be the impetus to begin the long overdue process of retooling America’s current counterterrorism strategies. Since 9-11, except for the Fort Hood massacre, we have been fortunate enough to avoid the kind of devastation and loss of life that we saw this week in Boston. That was certainly not for a lack of trying by our enemies, with over 300 arrests on terrorism charges since 9-11. Of these, over 80 percent were Islamists. I’ve said it before — after 9-11, after Fort Hood, and after Times Square, this is a Muslim problem that needs a Muslim solution.

The Tsarnaev brothers prove that the current Homeland Security “whack-a-mole” strategy is severely limited and rather flawed. The United States must address head-on the ideology of political Islam, which is the root cause of Islamist terrorism.

As details emerge about the identity and ideologies of the Tsarnaev brothers, it should quickly become clear that these individuals did not go to sleep one night normal American Muslims and wake up the next day al-Qaeda jihadists putting together pressure-cooker bombs. Their pathway towards radicalization will now be obvious to those who honestly connect the dots in retrospect. Far more important now is that leading reform-minded American Muslims, along with the U.S. government, the media, and academe, begin to confront and dissect the early stages of radicalization (Islamism), not just the last one (violent extremism).

Despite our devotion to our faith, I and other leading anti-Islamist Muslims were vilified by Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in America, along with their choir on the left, for participating in Representative Peter King’s (R., N.Y.) hearing in Congress on American Muslim radicalization and the central role of Islamism. I believe history will show Chairman King’s hearings to be prescient. I was alsovilified by those same groups for my role in narrating the documentary The Third Jihad, which happened to open with an illustrative scene from the terror in Beslan, Russia, in September 2004, when militant Chechnyan Islamists killed 334 civilians, 186 of them children, after a two-week standoff. The 2008 documentary was about the threat of militant Islamism to the West and the need for anti-Islamist Muslims to counter that threat. How many attacks like that suffered by the people of Boston this week must we see before we recognize the need to drill down against the separatism of the global movement of political Islam and their dreams of an Islamic state?

Though these two brothers may have acted like regular American youth to unsuspecting neighbors, participating in sports, attending public schools, and hailing from neighborhoods in the Boston community, at some point they were taken in by the ideology of political Islam, which, like an intoxicating drug, lured them down the path of separatist Islamism and its common endpoint of militant jihadism against both non-Islamist Muslims and non-Muslim societies.

 

We at the American Islamic Forum for Democracyhope that our nation can begin to awaken from the anesthetic belief that we are simply fighting the nebulous threat of “violent extremism” to the fundamental realization that we need to counter early on the identifiable infection of Islamism that penetrates the mind of susceptible Muslim youth.

The struggle between western and Islamist ideologies rips to the core of a young Muslim’s identity. This is what I confront head on in my book A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith. Our nation must develop a robust “liberty doctrine” that acknowledges this battle both at home and abroad. Since the FBI actually interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, it will also be important to unravel in this case how the administration determines who actually poses an ideological risk for radicalization. As our diverseAmerican Islamic Leadership Coalition (AILC) of anti-Islamist Muslim organizations in North America wrote in 2011, to date the administration has been unwilling to even recognize that there is an identifiable ideological threat. Instead its strategy relies on the meaningless phrase “violent extremism,” or, in the case of Major Nidal Hasan’s Fort Hood massacre, “workplace violence.”

While these brothers were immigrants from Chechnya, they were not recent immigrants. It appears from their YouTube and Facebook pages that their Islamism was nurtured in just the past few years, after they had been in the U.S. for some time. So their radicalization was likely less about Chechnya than it was about the transnational Islamist supremacism that they brought with them. Tamerlan’s trip to Russia may ultimately reveal some indoctrination or training. Most likely, as we see the clues so far, is that they became obsessed with “Muslim victimhood” and became estranged from the America they had embraced to only fill that vacuum with militant Islamist hatred and supremacism.

This supremacism often originates from Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi or Salafist ideologues, now positioned around the world and in social media. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, for example, had lauded the radical sermons of Feiz Muhammad out of Australia. On his Facebook page he described his own world view as “Islam,” which is synonymous with the Islamist desire to create theocratic Islamic states and a global neo-Caliphate. This is also code for the ultimate defeat of non-Islamic-majority nations by the ascent of Islamist states.

To jihadists, terror is a tool against societies that they dehumanize in order to disrupt their harmony and economy. Through terrorism, they can also make the West less comfortable or attractive for liberal Muslims, making it much easier for them to win this battle within the House of Islam. Their narrative is not new. Brothers like this, despite outward appearances of being “normal Americans,” never actually bought into the idea of Americanism and a truly pluralist society. We’ve seen it before in Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, and so many of the other radicalized jihadists found since 9-11 on our soil.

Even in Boston itself, a quick look at various competing Muslim and non-Muslim narratives finds the arrest and conviction of Tarek Mahenna — a recent, important teachable moment. In April 2012 the MIT graduate and pharmacist received more than 17 years in prison for aiding al-Qaeda. His arrest, trial, and conviction were reviled by the left and Islamist groups alike including the bizarre New York Times op-ed “A Dangerous Mind?” Just see theFreeTarek.com website for a virtual clinic into how the soil of Muslim victimization is tilled.

An obsessive mindset of “Muslims as victims” rather than as Americans is how many of these radical Islamists start. Put another way, Muslims are indoctrinated by many Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups and the like in the West to sympathize with the grievances and supremacist identity of the transnational theo-political movements of political Islam. Notice the brothers’ aunt and parents in Canada and Russia, who were brimming to the media with conspiracy theories and excuses. But then, as many point out, the Islamists of Chechnya have been fueled for decades by radicalization from salafi and Wahhabi ideas brought in by Saudi masters. Russia’s authoritarian and repressive response to entire swaths of Muslims in Chechnya certainly didn’t help empower moderate Muslims to defeat the radicals.

In A Battle for the Soul of Islam I dissect how my own patriotic upbringing in the Midwest, as the son of Syrian expatriates, taught me that I could practice my faith more freely in America than any where else in the world. I was raised with the sense that my primary allegiance was always to America and its fabric of Americanism, which can be realized only through a rejection of “Islamism” and its ideology. The idea of liberty must be nurtured within the Muslim consciousness in order to inoculate youth against the ideology of Islamism. This requires Muslim leaders who both believe in the separation of mosque and state and reject the “Islamic state.”

Until most Muslims begin to harness our resources and our efforts to counter the ideology of Islamism and its attraction of vulnerable American Muslim youth and its pathway towards jihadization, we will continue to see youth ages 13 and up turn against us. The “morphine” of jihadism numbs their identity and drives them to destroy free societies. It infects them, dehumanizes their fellow Americans, and instructs them to commit acts of terrorism against their own — Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

As is often the case with Islamists, their radicalization is preceded by misogyny and a learned behavior that dehumanizes women and then all those who seek to be free. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was arrested in 2009 for assault and battery against his girlfriend.

The warning signs in these two youths were obvious. But as a society that refuses to engage Islamism, we ignored them at our own peril.

— M. Zuhdi Jasser is the author of A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, based in Phoenix, Ariz. Follow him on Twitter @DrZuhdiJasser

 

American Muslims revile Boston Marathon terror attack

Statement

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

American Muslims revile Boston Marathon terror attack

AIFD thoughts and prayers are with the people of Boston after senseless attack

 

PHOENIX (April 16, 2013) – Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim and author of “A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith” issued the following statement on behalf of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) on the horrific attack on Boston, MA.

“The American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) sends it heartfelt condolences to the victims of the horrific attack on the City of Boston.  Incidents like this remind us of the need to be constantly vigilant in the protection of this great country and all of our people.

There is evil in this world and we must be prepared to fight against it in all of its forms.  The trauma and death of the innocent including the death of a young eight year old boy are a stark reminder of this fact. We are reminded of how vulnerable we all our as we struggle to maintain normalcy in our free and open democracy. But we also can find solace in the resiliency of the American people.

While it is early in this investigation, we pray for our law enforcement officials to be able to swiftly find the culprits of this heinous act and bring them all to justice.

Terror in all of its forms is a symptom of a much greater ideological battle and we will not eliminate these incidents until we take the battle to the enemy and destroy their ideological position”

About the American Islamic Forum for Democracy

The American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization. AIFD’s mission advocates for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state. For more information on AIFD, please visit our website at http://www.aifdemocracy.org/.

 

MEDIA CONTACTS:         Gregg Edgar

Gordon C. James Public Relations

gedgar@gcjpr.com

602-690-7977

Boston Bombers are yet another wake-up call for a national strategy against the root cause of Islamist terror

Statement

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Boston Bombers are yet another wake-up call for a national strategy against the root cause of Islamist terror

Department of Homeland Security whack-a-mole program against “Violent Extremism” failed the American public

 

PHOENIX (April 19, 2013) – Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim and author of “A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith” issued the following statement on behalf of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) regarding the ongoing terror incident in Boston:

“The terror attacks in Boston, perpetrated by the Tsarnaev brothers have finally come to an end with the surrender of the younger brother Dzhoakhar in Watertown, MA Friday evening. But perhaps it will finally be the beginning of the long overdue process to retool America’s current counterterrorism strategies.  Since 9-11, we have been fortunate up until this attack to avoid the kind of devastation and loss of life that we saw in Boston, but that was not for a lack of trying by our enemies.

The Tsarnaev brothers prove that the current whack-a-mole strategy is severely limited and flawed and that it is time for the United States to address head on the ideology of political Islam which is the root cause of Islamist terrorism.

It appears from their YouTube and Facebook pages that the brothers Islamism was nurtured in just the past few years after they had been in the U.S. for some time. So their radicalization seemed to be less about Chechnya as it was about the transnational Islamist supremacism that infected their mind, was brought with them and nurtured in the end on our soil.

Since the FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, it will be important to unravel how the administration determines who actually poses an ideological risk for radicalization. To date the administration has been unwilling to even recognize that there is an ideological threat and instead calls it the meaningless “violent extremism” or in the case of Major Nidal Hasan’s Fort Hood massacre “workplace violence”.

AIFD calls upon American Muslims, the Obama Administration, media and academe to develop a coherent strategy to promote western ideals of liberty among Muslims domestically and abroad, while seeking to defeat the supremacist mindset of political Islam and its continued threat to our national security.”

 

 

About the American Islamic Forum for Democracy

The American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization. AIFD’s mission advocates for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state. For more information on AIFD, please visit our website at http://www.aifdemocracy.org/.

 

MEDIA CONTACTS:         Gregg Edgar

Gordon C. James Public Relations

gedgar@gcjpr.com

602-690-7977

####

Mosque that Boston suspects attended has radical ties

Mosque that Boston suspects attended has radical ties

USA Today, April 23, 2013

By Oren Dorell

BOSTON — The mosque attended by the two brothers accused in the Boston Marathon bombing has been associated with other terrorist suspects, has invited radical speakers to a sister mosque in Boston and is affiliated with a Muslim group that critics say nurses grievances that can lead to extremism.

Several people who attended the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Mass., have been investigated for Islamic terrorism, including a conviction of the mosque’s first president, Abdulrahman Alamoudi, in connection with an assassination plot against a Saudi prince.

And its sister mosque in Boston, known as the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, has invited guests who have defended terror suspects. A former trustee appears in a series of videos in which he advocates treating gays as criminals, says husbands should sometimes beat their wives and calls on Allah (God) to kill Zionists and Jews, according to Americans for Peace and Tolerance, an interfaith group that has investigated the mosques.

The head of the group is among critics who say the mosques teach a brand of Islamic thought that encourages grievances against the West, distrust of law enforcement and opposition to Western forms of government, dress and social values.

“We don’t know where these boys were radicalized,” says the head of the group, Charles Jacobs. “But this mosque has a curriculum that radicalizes people. Other people have been radicalized there.”

Yusufi Vali, executive director at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, insists his mosque does not spread radical ideology and cannot be blamed for the acts of a few worshipers.

“If there were really any worry about us being extreme,” Vali said, U.S. law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and Departments of Justice and Homeland Security would not partner with the Muslim American Society and the Boston mosque in conducting monthly meetings that have been ongoing for four years, he said, in an apparent reference to U.S. government outreach programs in the Muslim community.

The Cambridge and Boston mosques, separated by the Charles River, are owned by the same entity but managed individually. The imam of the Cambridge mosque, Sheik Basyouny Nehela, is on the board of directors of the Boston mosque.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, attended the Cambridge mosque for services and are accused of setting two bombs that killed three people and injured at least 264 others at the April 15 Boston Marathon.

The FBI has not indicated that either mosque was involved in any criminal activity. But mosque attendees and officials have been implicated in terrorist activity.

• Abdulrahman Alamoudi, who signed the articles of incorporation as the Cambridge mosque’s president, was sentenced to 23 years in federal court in Alexandria, Va., in 2004 for his role as a facilitator in what federal prosecutors called a Libyan assassination plot against then-Saudi crown prince Abdullah. Abdullah is now the Saudi king.
Aafia Siddiqui is shown after her graduation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.(Photo: AP)
• Aafia Siddiqui, who occasionally prayed at the Cambridge mosque, was arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 while in possession of cyanide canisters and plans for a chemical attack in New York City. She tried to grab a rifle while in detention and shot at military officers and FBI agents, for which she was convicted in New York in 2010 and is serving an 86-year sentence.
The 2009 booking photo of Tarek Mehanna, of Sudbury, Mass.(Photo: Sudbury Police Department via AP)
• Tarek Mehanna, who worshiped at the Cambridge mosque, was sentenced in 2012 to 17 years in prison for conspiring to aid al-Qaeda. Mehanna had traveled to Yemen to seek terrorist training and plotted to use automatic weapons to shoot up a mall in the Boston suburbs, federal investigators in Boston alleged.

• Ahmad Abousamra, the son of a former vice president of the Muslim American Society Boston Abdul-Badi Abousamra, was identified by the FBI as Mehanna’s co-conspirator. He fled to Syria and is wanted by the FBI on charges of providing support to terrorists and conspiracy to kill Americans in a foreign country.

• Jamal Badawi of Canada, a former trustee of the Islamic Society of Boston Trust, which owns both mosques, was named as a non-indicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism trial in Texas over the funneling of money to Hamas, which is the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.

What both mosques have in common is an affiliation with the Muslim American Society, an organization founded in 1993 that describes itself as an American Islamic revival movement. It has also been described by federal prosecutors in court as the “overt arm” of the Muslim Brotherhood, which calls for Islamic law and is the parent organization of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terror group.

Critics say the Muslim American Society promotes a fraught relationship with the United States, expressed in part by the pattern discussed by Americans for Progress and Tolerance in which adherents are made to feel cut off from their home country and to identify with a global Islamist political community rather than with America.

Zhudi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, says the radical teachings often follow a theme of recitation of grievances that Islam has with the West, advocacy against U.S. foreign policy and terrorist prosecutions, and efforts “to evangelize Islam in order to improve Western society that is secularized,” he says.

Jasser, a veteran of the U.S. Navy and author of the 2012 book A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot Fights to Save His Faith, says the teachings make some followers feel “like their national identity is completely absent and hollow, and that vacuum can be filled by (radical) Islamic ideology, which is supremacist and looks upon the West as evil.”

The Cambridge mosque was founded in 1982 by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and several other Boston-area schools, according to a profile by the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. Its members founded the sister mosque in Boston in 2009.

The leadership of the two mosques is intertwined and the ideology they teach is the same, Jacobs says. Ilya Feoktistov, director of research at Americans for Peace and Tolerance, says much of the money to create the Boston mosque came not from local Muslims but from foreign sources.

More than half of the $15.5 million used to found the Boston mosque came from Saudi sources, Feoktistov said, who cites financial documents that Jacobs’ group obtained when the mosque sued it for defamation. The lawsuit was later dropped.

But Vali said the vast majority of total donors were in the United States and that “no donations were accepted if the donor wanted to have any decision-making influence (even if benign).”

Vali characterized Americans for Peace and Tolerance and its founder, Jacobs, as anti-Muslim activists who spread “lies and half-truths in order to attack and marginalize much of the local Muslim community and many of its institutions.”

“It’s the new McCarthyism in full swing,” he said.

Sheik Basyouny Nehela, the imam of the Cambridge mosque, which is located across the Charles River from Boston, is on the board of directors for the Muslim American Society of Boston, which runs the Boston mosque. The Tsarnaevs attended the Cambridge mosque.

A statement issued by the Cambridge mosque say the Tsarnaev brothers were “occasional visitors” and the mosque’s office manager, Nichole Mossalam, said neither brother expressed radical views. “They never exhibited any violent sentiments or behaviors. Otherwise, they would have been reported,” Mossalam said.

The Cambridge mosque says Tsarnaev, 26, who died Thursday night in a shootout with police, “disagreed with the moderate American-Islamic theology” of the mosque. Tsarnaev challenged an imam who said in his sermon that it was appropriate to celebrate U.S. national holidays and was told to stop such outbursts, the mosque said in a statement.

Talal Eid, a Muslim chaplain at Brandeis University, says focusing on individual radicals that prayed in a building is unfair.

“In 2011, the two brothers were right under the nose of the FBI and they didn’t find anything,” Eid said, who never met the Tsarnaevs. “How do you want me as an imam to know enough to tell them they are not welcome here? How can I figure out those people have that kind of criminal intent?”

The Muslim American Society says on its website that it is independent of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, early Brotherhood literature is considered “the foundational texts for the intellectual component for Islamic work in America,” the website states.

Jacobs says claims of moderate Islam do not square with the mosque’s classic jihadi texts in its library and its hosting of radical speakers.

Jacobs said Ahmed Mansour, his co-director at Americans for Peace and Tolerance, found writings by Syed Qutb, the former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and other jihadi texts at the Cambridge mosque’s library when Mansour went there in 2003. Qutb pioneered the radical violent ideology espoused by al-Qaeda.

Yusuf al Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader who espouses radical views in videos collected by Jacobs’ group, was listed as a trustee on the Cambridge mosque’s IRS filings until 2000, and on the mosque’s website until 2003, when he addressed congregants via recorded video message to raise money for the Boston mosque, according to a screenshot of the announcement that Feoktistov provided.

But Vali said Qaradawi was listed as an honorary trustee years ago only because his scholarship and high esteem in Muslim circles would help with fundraising.

Yasir Qadhi, who lectured at the Boston mosque in April 2009, has advocated replacing U.S. democracy with Islamic rule and called Christians “filthy” polytheists whose “life and prosperity … holds no value in the state of Jihad,” according to a video obtained by Jacobs’ group.

Vali said Qadhi was a guest of a non-profit that was renting space at the Boston mosque and changed his views since that video was made.

But Jacobs and others say it is not only renters who express sympathetic views for terrorists. Leaders of the Boston and Cambridge mosques, and invited guests, have advocated on behalf of convicted terrorists, urging followers to seek their release or lenient sentences.

Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, sometimes a spokesman for the Boston mosque, used Siddiqui’s case to speak against the Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism law passed under the Bush administration. “After they’re done with (Siddiqui) they are going to come to your door if they feel like it,” he said according to a video obtained by Americans for Peace and Tolerance.

Anwar Kazmi, a member of the Cambridge mosque’s board of trustees, called for leniency for Mehanna and Siddiqui at a Boston rally in February 2012, in a video posted to YouTube. He characterized Siddiqui’s 86-year sentence as excessive.

In an interview with USA TODAY, Kazmi insisted that the Cambridge mosque is moderate and condemns the bombings. On Monday, the mosque e-mailed members to caution them that the FBI may question them and that they may want to seek representation.

“This kind of violence, terrorism, it’s just completely contrary to the spirit of Islam,” Kasmi said. “The words in the Quran say if anybody kills even a single human being without just cause, it’s as if you’ve killed all of humanity.”

Contributing: Yamiche Alcindor

On Yom HaShoah AIFD remembers the Holocaust

Statement

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

On Yom HaShoah AIFD remembers the Holocaust

 

PHOENIX, AZ (April 7, 2013) – Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim and the president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) issued the following statement to mark the day of Yom HaShoah.

“At this point in history with so much transformation and uncertainty throughout the Middle East and North Africa it is very important to take time and commemorate Yom HaShoah, which reminds us of the evil that was perpetrated on the Jewish people in the Holocaust. As we say together a collective – “Never Again!” and pray for all the victims and their families, we should resolve to bring the global community together in eradicating anti-Semitism from the earth.  This day of commemoration ensures that we will never forget.

At AIFD, as Muslims we worry about the rising tide of Islamism in the region and its use of anti-Semitism to gain power. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, President of AIFD provided this testimony linked here to Congress on February 27, 2013 to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations  on the direct link between Islamism and anti-Semitism and its threat to global security as it spreads among Muslim populations. We must stand in solidarity with the people of Israel and Jews from around the world to ensure that hatred and bigotry cannot dominate the region.  We must stand in the face of the supremacist ideology of Islamism and be outspoken advocates for religious freedoms

Yom HaShoah is an opportunity to remind ourselves what can happen when we allow bigotry to go unanswered and renew our vigilance to protect the rights of all.

We offer a fervent prayer to remind ourselves of the collective strength we have to make sure that the Holocaust is never repeated.”

About the American Islamic Forum for Democracy

The American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization. AIFD’s mission advocates for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state. For more information on AIFD, please visit our website at http://www.aifdemocracy.org/.

 

MEDIA CONTACTS:   Gregg Edgar
                                    Gordon C. James Public Relations
                                    gedgar@gcjpr.com
                                    602-690-7977