STATEMENT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PHOENIX (August 15, 2010) – Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim and the president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy issued the following statement regarding remarks from President Obama on the proposed mosque and Islamic Center at Ground Zero:

“As an American Muslim whose family fled persecution in Syria and as someone who has stood in the face of some resistance to the building of many of our houses of worship in the U.S., I fully understand the value of standing for religious freedom in America. But President Obama’s statement about the Ground Zero mosque at last night’s White House Iftar dinner is the latest example of political correctness gone awry.

The President commented that:

“Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America.”

Yes, Mr. President, this is America and you have fundamentally misunderstood the stakes in this discussion and the sentiments of the American people. Instead, you have focused on the very issue that the Islamist propagandists wish you to– the narrative that Americans somehow need lectures about Islam, Muslims, and religious freedom.

Your message to Americans will be spun on Al Jazeera and by Islamists across the world that President Obama reassured a friendly global Muslim audience at the White House Ramadan dinner that he was going to remind Americans about the principles of religious freedom for Muslims since they seem to be trampling over those principles in the local dispute at Ground Zero in New York.

Mr. President this is not about religious freedom. It is about the importance of the World Trade Center site to the psyche of the American People. It is about a blatant attack on our sovereignty by people whose ideology ultimately demands the elimination of our way of life. While Imam Faisal Rauf may not share their violent tendencies he does seem to share a belief that Islamic structures are a political statement and even Ground Zero should be looked upon through the lens of political Islam and not a solely American one.

As a Muslim desperate to reform his faith, your remarks take us backwards from the day that my faith will come into modernity. I do not stand to eliminate Imam Rauf’s religious freedom; I stand to make sure that my children’s religious freedom will be determined by the liberty guaranteed in the American Constitution and not by clerics or leaders who are apologists for shar’iah law and will tell me what religious freedom is.

‘Park 51’, ‘The Cordoba House’ or whatever they are calling it today should not be built, not because it is not their right to do it – but because it is not right to do it.” Mr. President, your involvement in this issue is divisive not uniting. Your follow-up stating that ‘you will not speak to the wisdom of the construction of that mosque and center’ indicates a passive-aggressive meddling on your part that only marginalizes those Muslim and non-Muslim voices against it while pretending to understand both sides of the debate.

Contact: 602-254-1840 (office), email: info@aifdemocracy.org, web: www.aifdemocracy.org

About the American Islamic Foundation 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/.

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AIFD PRESS RELEASE

NEWS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PHOENIX (August 6, 2010) – The Council on American Islamic Relations attacks on the Tea-Party movement are outlandish and an example of the denial in which the Islamist organization exists. In a recent article in WhoRunsGov.com Ibrahim Hooper, Executive Director of CAIR, claims that the “level of Islamophobia is ‘going off the charts’ recently and he thinks it’s coincided with the rise of the Tea Party movement.” He also in a patently political admonishment called for Democrats to “take a tougher position against the anti-Muslim sentiments that have cropped up in the debate over whether to build a mosque near Ground Zero.”

There is nothing within the charters of the Tea Party movement or the vast majority of their gatherings to justify a claim that they are increasing “Islamophobia” in the United States. It is profoundly hypocritical for an organization supposedly focused on Muslim civil rights to taint an entire movement of millions of Americans with a broad brush.

CAIR prefers to stereotype and slander Americans rather than deal with our own realities as Muslims. The fact is that there has been a significant increase in the number of homegrown terror arrests in the past year. The fact is that the building of an ostentatious display of Islamist culture with unknown funding sources within shouting distance of Ground Zero demonstrates a profound lack of sensitivity. This is all amplified by a continued lack of effort by Muslim organizations to address the underlying issues of Islamist radicalization. And CAIR yet cannot comprehend why there may be ill feelings or unintentional fear towards Muslims in America. Mr. Hooper’s inability to recognize that demonstrates how out of touch his clearly Islamist organization is with the American people, Muslim and Non-Muslim alike.

“There is nothing that more exemplifies the true nature of CAIR and their fellow Islamists who carry the platform of political Islam in the United States than this open admonition to the Democratic Party and their inappropriate slander of the entire Tea Party Movement,” said Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD). “If CAIR was truly about the religion of Islam, spirituality and faith, they would stay above the political fray and deal with those issues which focus on Islam and the reforms we need to make our faith stronger and more modern such as pursuing the separation of mosque and state. But instead, they use the Ground Zero mosque controversy and other flash points to advance their Islamist party platform.”

Last month CAIR distributed a press release calling for hate crime investigations into an arson attack upon a Georgia mosque. That attack was soon thereafter linked to a Muslim congregant of that mosque. No apology was issued to Americans. CAIRs Nihad Awad said this week on Fox’s Bill O’Reilly that he was “sick and tired of the linkage of Islam to 9/11”.

“Awad is in denial. There are interpretations of Islam that are obviously linked to 9-11. The righteous battle is for us Muslims to defeat those Islamic ideas that create those interpretations- political Islam. The only way to eliminate the linkage of Islam and 9/11 is for Muslims to fight the battle within the House of Islam and eliminate the ideology of political Islam,” said Jasser. “Instead of throwing slanderous insults at a growing national movement of millions of tea partiers and acting like an Islamist political party by imploring “the Democrats” to buy into Muslim victimology, we need to take non-partisan anti-Islamist responsibility for reforming our faith and protecting American Muslims from the slippery slope of Islamist radicalization.”

About the American Islamic Foundation 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/.

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The Obama administration decided to dispatch Charles Bolden, head of NASA, to do “public diplomacy” on Al Jazeera, where he said that President Obama wanted him to “find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.” He then announced that our deficit-ridden U.S. government will begin a new fund “to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries.”

The 57 OIC countries include some of the wealthiest in the world, yet many are human-rights offenders. Handing them our technology and funds could end up strengthening theocrats and monarchs, further preventing real reform.

Consider the words of Dr. Ahmed Zewail, this administration’s first science envoy to the Middle East and appointee to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. After Obama’s Cairo speech last June, Zewail wrote a very revealing op-ed in the Boston Globe, in which he professed that the way for Obama to stimulate an “Islamic Renaissance” would be to provide “investment in education” with a “new emphasis on science and technology.” This ignores the fact that many militant Islamist leaders, from bin Laden to Zawahiri to most of the heads of the Muslim Brotherhood, are very scientifically educated. In fact, the Brotherhood (Ikhwan) is sometimes pejoratively referred to as the “Brotherhood of Engineers.”

Zewail goes on to write: “Most Westerners today are unaware of the extent to which Nasser’s regime promoted education as the vital engine of progress.” How insulting: Gamal Abdel Nasser’s legendary fascism, pan-Arabism, and socialism have become “engines of progress.” Nasser infected the Middle East with a deeply corrupt ideology, yet Obama’s science envoy is apologizing for the Egyptian despot.

The challenge is not science and technology. Real Muslim reform will only come from modernization of thought in the political sciences, liberal arts, free markets, theology, and philosophy. Theocratic Islamist movements are the primary obstacles to Muslim enlightenment – not the absence of space technology.

– M. Zuhdi Jasser, MD, is the founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix, Arizona.