October 30, 2017: Oral Testimony for Hearing before the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage

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“Unintended Consequences: M103 Harms all Canadians, especially Muslims”

By Dr. M. ZUHDI JASSER
PRESIDENT, AMERICAN ISLAMIC FORUM FOR DEMOCRACY
October 30, 2017

Introduction

Thank you Chairperson Fry and members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage for holding this very important hearing on studying whether and how to fulfill the recommendations of M-103. I am Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, President and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) based in Phoenix, Arizona. I am here today not only at the request of your staff, but I am taking the time to be with you because I could not feel more strongly that our current national, and moreover, joint Western direction in addressing the complexities of Muslim related issues from combating Islamist inspired terrorism to domestic tranquility is deeply flawed and profoundly dangerous. For Canadians, many of the questions with which you are wrestling, we as your American neighbors and allies to the south are also wrestling with as we all have since 9-11 and now especially since the rampant increase of Islamist inspired acts of terror against our homelands with the advent of ISIS and continued growth of global jihadism.

As a devout American Muslim who loves my faith, and loves my nation, I must tell you that any emphasis on “Islamophobia” is profoundly flawed and will continue our nations down the slippery slope of actually catering to Islamist separatism. I am here to tell you that by simply even using that term and referring to it as “Islamophobia” and getting the government into the business of monitoring any form of speech will end up paradoxically heightening societal divisions. We must not coddle Muslim communities which will only further separate Muslims out. Trying to suppress what can be painful speech about Islam at society’s fringes will actually paradoxically feed an unintended consequence of fomenting non-Muslim fears of Islam. Citizens who cannot have their real fears heard and their speech exercised will be stifled from the public sector and push underground resentment that will only foment.

Yes, all racism should be addressed by our free societies and prevented in all its forms, but it actually hurts Muslims for a government based in universal rights of all to pay special attention to protecting “Islam” from harsh critique versus protecting all human beings of faith or no faith from actual bigotry. The “special” treatment of Muslims will actually backfire and cause our communities to be culturally derided, hated, and feared more because our faith is not held to the same free-for-all as any other faith.

Brief Background on American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) and The Muslim Reform Movement (MRM)

Our American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) was founded in 2003 in the wake of the horrific attacks of September 11. For us, it is a very personal mission to leave our American Muslim children a legacy that their faith is based in the unalienable right to liberty and to teach them that the principles that founded America do not contradict their faith but strengthen it. AIFD’s founding principle is that we as Muslims are able to best practice our faith in a society like the United States that guarantees the rights of every individual under God but blind to any one faith with no governmental intermediary stepping between the individual and the creator to interpret the will of God. Because of this, our mission is explicitly to advocate for the principles of the Constitution of the United States of America, liberty and freedom through the separation of mosque and state. We believe that this mission from within the “House of Islam” is the only way to inoculate Muslim youth and young adults against radicalization. The “Liberty narrative” is the only effective counter to the “Islamist narrative.”

AIFD is the most prominent American Muslim organization directly confronting and attempting to reform against the ideas of political Islam. We believe Muslims can openly counter the common belief that the Muslim faith is inextricably rooted to the concept of the Islamic state (Islamism). AIFD’s mission is derived from a love for America and a love of our faith of Islam. The theocratic “Islamic” regimes of the Middle East and many Muslim majority nations use their interpretations of Islam and ‘shar’ia’ (Islamic jurisprudence) as a way to control Muslim populations. We believe, as did America’s founding fathers, that the purest practice of faith is one in which the faithful have complete freedom to accept or reject any of the tenants or laws of the faith no different than we enjoy as Americans in this Constitutional republic. We constantly ask that Americans not just observe what is happening inside the House of Islam but that they take the sides of the reformers, dissidents, and secularists against the theocratic Islamists.

AIFD was founded on the premise that the root cause of Islamist terrorism is the ideology of political Islam and a belief in the preference for and supremacy of an Islamic state. Terrorism is but a means to that end. Most Islamist terror is driven by the desire of Islamists to drive the influence of the west (the ideas of liberty) out of the Muslim consciousness and Muslim majority societies. With almost a quarter of the world’s population Muslim, American or Canadian security will never come without an understanding and winning out of the ideas of liberty by Muslims and an understanding of the harm of political Islam by non-Muslims. This will not happen if tough public discussion on Islam is muted by fears of “offending Muslim, read Islamist, sensibilities”.

We work to engage Muslim youth and empower them with the independence to question the ideas of imams, clerics, and so many “tribal” leaders of Muslim communities unwilling to work toward reform and modernity. We empower Muslim youth to have the confidence to take personal intellectual ownership of their own interpretation of Islam, the Qur’an, Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), and shariah (Islamic jurisprudence) and separate mosque and state. We work to advocate for the ideas of gender equality, genuine religious pluralism, and an unwavering preference of the secular state and a secular law over the Islamic state among other central ideas in modernity.

Our mission is on the front lines of what is probably the most essential and yet contentious debate of the 21st century. So it should be easy to understand why many Muslims may agree with our mission to separate mosque and state and marginalize political Islam, yet want to remain private and out of the public eye as supporters.

AIFD most recently convened and helped launch the Muslim Reform Movement (MRM) in December 2015 in Washington D.C. The Muslim Reform Movement is a coalition of over 15 Western Muslim Leaders (from the U.S., Canada, and Europe) whose goal is to actively fight radical Islam from inside by confronting the idea of Islamism at its roots. The MRM has written a Declaration for Muslim Reform, a living document which was presented to all Islamic organizations, leaders and mosques across the U.S. in 2016 (Appendix 1), with hopes of using its principles as a firewall to clearly separate radical Islamists from Muslims who believe in universal human rights.

Not one iota of this work is possible in an environment where government agencies and the western public writ large are unwilling to understand and engage Muslim groups domestically and abroad on their diverse interpretations of core terms, ideas, and movements. The attempts and policies of the Obama and Trudeau administrations and their advisors to obstruct the use of terms which are central to the precursor characteristics of radicalized Muslims is willfully blind, negligent, and leaves us bare against the threat of radical Islamism. It renders our greatest allies within the Muslim community- genuine reformers-entirely impotent and marginalized.

I hope and pray that my testimony today will open your eyes to how central the engagement of honest terminology is in demarcating who are our genuine allies from those who are or are working with our enemies abroad and the insurgents within.

Overview of M103 mandates
M103 asks your government, now via your committee, to assess the following:

1- “Address and quell the increasing climate of hate and fear”: I believe it’ll actually make it worse preventing the tough conversations we need to have publicly and instead allowing them to boil underneath the surface.
2- Specifically condemns “Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious discrimination and take note of House of Commons e-petition e-411 and the issues raised” which are all related to Islam, Muslims, and so-called Islamophobia: I believe that this inordinate focus on Islam and even Muslims will actually backfire and not have the effect upon your citizenry and culture that the author of M103 feels it will. It will only empower the tribal leaders, the Islamists in our midst. Racism and discrimination in all its forms should be fought and focusing on one community under the name of their faith (Islamophobia) rather than about the bigotry against those individuals (Muslims) will actually exacerbate the situation.

3- Asks your committee to “undertake a study on how the government could (i) develop a whole-of-government approach to reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination including Islamophobia, in Canada, while ensuring a community-centered focus with a holistic response through evidence-based policy-making”: While the government should certainly be in the business of protecting individual citizens from acts of violence and protecting their rights of free speech and religious freedom, they should not be in the business of studying negative or positive sentiments about a particular faith.

4- Asks you to “collect data to contextualize hate crime reports and to conduct needs assessments for impacted communities”: Again, this seems harmless enough. But the the focus should not simply and solely be on Muslims when in fact preventing racism and discrimination should be something that addresses all vulnerable minorities or groups. In Europe, areas for example seeing spikes in bigotry against Muslims are also seeing spikes in anti-Semitism and other forms of xenophobia.

Let me elaborate on these positions in the following areas to which I would like to call your attention.

‘Muslim’ issues should not be partisan wedge issues

First, I must emphasize, that having difficulties, as I and so many Canadian Muslims do with any of the above mandates imposed upon your committee by M103 does not in any way mean that individuals like myself, especially as a Muslim, would ever turn a blind eye towards hate crimes or discrimination against Muslims or any vulnerable minority for that matter. But we, Muslims, should not want special treatment beyond that afforded any other faith community. You should address anti-Semitism, and any form of xenophobia with the same vigor with no special treatment for Canadian Muslims.

Moreover, the best mechanism for your government to address any bigotry, that may exist against Muslims, is certainly not through the language and mandate of this proposal originated from MP Iqra Khalid. This resolution and the commentary on the original e-petition (E-411) actually smack of the language seen in Islamic Republics and their sharia-based (Islamist jurisprudence) restrictions on free speech rather than what we should expect from the freest nations on the planet which protect the rights of every individual equally with no protections of any religions or their ideas- only protections for individual citizens.

There is nothing partisan that should either support or deny the premise of M103. For both liberals and conservatives, the protection of women’s rights, minority rights, and the rights of non-Muslims to criticize Islam in the struggle for modernity should bring you to reject the term ‘Islamophobia’ and any protections against it. There is absolutely no partisan or one-sided basis for rejecting jihad, Islamism, Salafism, and any other idea from within the Islamist mindset. M103 protects all these ideas from critique and dissection under the rubric of Islamophobia. If you are going to study anything, it may be wise for you to study why otherwise liberal anti-Islamist Muslims (more natural ideological allies of Liberals) are finding more support among Conservatives for our reformist ideas while fundamentalist theocratic Muslims are finding home among Liberals? Tahir Gora recently looked at this question for Clarion Project. The answer may lie in the exploitation of Muslim rights at the altar of group identity politics.

Increase in hate crimes?
According to one study the number of hate crimes versus Muslim Canadians doubled over a three-year period from 45 in 2012 to 99 in 2014. This was reported in 2016. I will not support nor deny here the reproducibility and validity of this data. But even if we accept these large shifts in relatively small numbers, this ignores so many variables. This is still in a setting where Jewish Canadians are still the most likely to be attacked of any vulnerable minority faith group. The total number of hate crimes in Canada went from 1414 in ’12 to 1295 in ’14. Thus, if you look at the totality and the proportion of numbers of 99 reports against Muslims versus 1300 hate crimes in total, it seems disproportional and biased to simply address bigotry towards Muslims. And this is not to mention that if and when you do address bigotry towards Muslims, please just address that-bigotry towards Muslims– and not a contrived Islamist concept of “Islamophobia”.

Muslims should be treated equally like any other group and not be coddled or protected more than any other group at the first sign of any concerns with a different threshold for study than any other minority faith group or vulnerable community. Doing so will in fact backfire and cause an increase in hostility and forces of separatism.

Do not use the term Islamophobia
You should understand that the term ‘Islamophobia’ was created by Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) nations in the 90’s in order to stifle criticism of Islam by Western nations and free market open media. It is a deceptive concept Islamist regimes employed for centuries as there are countless number of Muslims and non-Muslims (millions) in jails across Muslim majority nations for the crimes of blasphemy and apostasy linked to “criticism of Islam”. Any criticism of their government and legal systems are labeled Islamophobia in order mask systemic domestic repression under the guise of protecting ‘sacred Islam’. Muslim reformers like myself are attacked and derided even in our own mosques and Islamic institutions here in the West under the rubric of protection of the community from “Islamophobia” since they equate criticism of theocratic Islamism and Islamist groups with “Islamophobia”.

This is an inevitable result when a government gives ideas (like Islam) rights. The identification of bigotry under the label of a ‘phobia’ against a faith rather than bigotry against a particular group of people is Orwellian and in the end will harm Muslims and our rights. Ideas do not have rights. Islam is an idea. It does not have rights. Muslims are human beings that have rights and should be protected like any other free Canadian citizen.

Thus, your use of the term ‘Islamophobia’ and study thereof will actually have the effect of stifling your greatest most liberal allies within the Muslim community including the leaders of our Muslim Reform Movement. The ideas of our Muslim Reform Movement declaration have been derided as Islamophobic by many of the Islamist allies of the authors of M103. It is unfathomable to me that in the freest nations on the planet including Canada and the United States and Europe that we are being marginalized by our own communities through the platforms gained by resolutions like M103 which stifle our critique of Islamism under the rubric of ‘Islamophobia’.

You were asked to study systemic racism and religious discrimination. Islam is not a race. Just like you should address anti-Semitism but not Judeo-phobia our nations should address bigotry and hate against Muslims but not Islamophobia. You are also stifling the maturation of Muslims in dealing with the most difficult issues in our faith. “Tough love” for Canadian Muslims requires that you provide and protect the public space for the discussion of any ideas related to faith no matter how unpalatable while protecting individual rights, but it is not your role to protect ideas like Islam.

For example, the recent rejection in Quebec of the so-called freedom to where a face veil ‘niqab’ was described as Islamophobia, when in fact the reality is that there is nothing more pro-Muslim than protecting the individual rights of women to be identified and autonomous, and not be facelessly oppressed. The central aspect of the protection of individual rights is the ability to identify people by face. The oppression of women should not be dismissed under the guise of religious freedom. The claim that there is a slippery slope for government to prohibit niqab (face covering) and then go on to other religious clothing is absurd. There is no slippery slope from the niqab or face-veil to then having the government get involved in any other clothing such as the hijab or the burqa. No. The government should not be involved in personal dress; however even our Supreme Court in the U.S. has deemed it illegal for demonstrations to occur with facemasks.

M103 opens the door to connecting any and all issues even remotely involving Muslims to the so-called Islamophobia. This should be stopped from the get-go.

Harm of M103
There are many harms and unintended consequences that would naturally follow as a result of implementing M103.

1- The enabling and enshrinement of the term Islamophobia with the empowerment of all the Islamists domestically and abroad including their regimes who use that term to shut down dissent.

2- The empowerment of Islamists over Muslim reformers who are silenced by being called ‘Islamophobes’.

3- The infantilization of Muslims by disproportionally protecting them more than any other vulnerable community in Canada. This is especially true since “Islamophobia” includes the perception that Muslims are particularly sensitive about critique of our faith, Islam.

4- It will backfire and end up separating Muslims out more and feeding to both extremes in today’s Canadian society. Thus it will actually not only fail but make things worse than what it was intended to do at its stated inception.

5- It will feed into a false and deceptive partisan narrative on Muslim citizenship instead of both sides of the aisle agreeing to lift up common values shared by all Canadian heritage which are rejected by Islamists.

6- M103 treats Muslims as a monolith and in fact we are an ideologically diverse community for which many reject the platforms created by the Islamist establishment on our behalf. If many or most Muslims believe there is no need for this, you will cause more harm. No one appointed MP Khalid or any Islamist agitators our spokespersons.

7- The security apparatus will be harmed after being hamstrung even further in addressing the root cause of violent Islamism-non-violent Islamism. Petitions like e-411 which apparently led to M103 claim that radicals are an “infinitesimally small number” and “these violent individuals do not reflect in any way the values of the teachings of the religion of Islam. In fact they misrepresent the religion.” While most Muslims reject the violence, many remain in deep denial that the non-violent supremacist Islamist precursors lead directly to terrorism and need reform. You cannot divorce the connection between the cultural ostracization of Muslim reformers against Islamism and the blindness created by bromides and anesthetics like M103. Your security apparatus’ approach to violent extremism (CVE) and not (CVI-Countering Violent Islamism) comes from a fear of naming Islamism due to this major obstacle of the contrived “Islamophobia”.

8- Instead of entrenching further the obstacles to study Islamism, you should contrarily actually free up the public discourse on Islam and stop infantilizing Muslims. You should allow us the freedom to have major public debates about how non-violent Islamism is the precursor to violent Islamism. The conditions called for in M-103 are a major obstacle to that entire process.

9- Governments should never be in the business of protecting the image of a faith. This is what the Saudis try to always do regarding their radical version of Islam which is the root cancer -Wahhabism–, and it thus should not be the role of the Canadian government to protect the image of Islam. That is a slippery slope which will cause many of the problems noted above.

10- In fact, the avoidance of a discourse on Islam does not leave the government neutral. It effectively hands the argument to the predominant current power structure of the domestic and global Muslim faith community-the suffocating influence of ‘petro-Islam’, the Wahhabi version of Islam in Saudi Arabia and the Islamist movement of the Muslim Brotherhood based out of Egypt and Qatar or the Deobandis of Pakistan. Make no mistake this whole debate of this hearing is not only about the plight of Canadian Muslims, but it is also about appeasement of a host of foreign Islamist regimes (Islamic republics) who our government is afraid to critically engage on their supremacist shar’ia states and even protects from debates and critique in our own homelands.

11- Denial of the role of various forms of Islamic theology in radicalizing Muslims and creating the domestic and global threat of Islamism, will only fuel bigotry in our cultures rather than quell it.

12- Pew polling demonstrates that American feelings about Muslims, for example, are “cooler” than any other faith group scoring a 40 out of 100. In fact, I would ask you to see that there is actually nothing that would do more to melt away that anti-Muslim bigotry to the extent that it exists than for Americans to see Muslims step away from denial and actually engaging and confronting the Jihad with their own jihad for liberty and against theocracy. We should be calling for a jihad against jihad rather than shielding Muslims and Americans from the tough love that they need.

13- Please make sure that you understand that the advice you receive from ideological Islamists is compromised by their fealty to clerics, and the tribal construct of Islamic states for Muslim majority nations.

14- In the United States, and in the West, Muslim reformers are constantly confronted with advocates like MP Iqra Khalid who provide an apologetic for Islamists and their ideology of Islamism promoting similar restrictions on freedom of speech seen in many Islamic Republics from Pakistan to Iran and Saudi Arabia to name a few. We must understand that for what it is.

15- M103 empowers the OIC lobby. The OIC is the proverbial elephant in the room. The constant refrain from the Obama and Trudeau administrations is that the West should not “declare war against 1.6 billion Muslims and their governments” is related to global intimidation by the OIC sadly while ignoring the plight of Muslim and non-Muslim dissidents in their nations who lead the fight against Islamist movements.

Conclusion:
I recommend the following in lieu of M103. We must treat our Muslim communities with a tough love and give the following recommendations:

1. Address any bigotry and racism equally across faith and racial communities without a disproportionate focus on Muslims.

2. Do not use the term Islamophobia.

3. The best way to melt away any bigotry that exists against Muslims is for Muslims to abandon the denial, victimization and grievance narratives and instead lead an ideological revolution against Islamism. When our anti-jihad work is seen to predominate our bandwidth, then bigotry will whither on the vine. See our Muslim Reform Movement. (Appendix A).

4. ‘Whole of government’ should immediately move from a center of gravity on “Countering Violent Islamism” (CVE) to one centered on “Countering Violent Islamism” (CVI).

5. The Canadian government and public discourse (academia, NGO’s, and media) must include a broad spectrum of ideologically diverse voices in the Muslim community. Just as you have done in the testimony to this committee. It is time to end the un-democratic ban on any theological terms and with that also end the marginalization of reform minded Muslims most notably the bipartisan group of Muslim leaders of the Muslim Reform Movement. This will melt away bigotry far more quickly than making people fear any discussion about Islam, Islamism, and Muslims.

6. It is time to stop engaging Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in government and media and recognize their misogynist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and anti-American ideological underpinnings. We must recognize that they are not the only voice for Western Muslims. We must make women’s issue and freedom of conscience a litmus test. These groups, when pressed, will fail.

7. It is time to stop giving credence to the concerns of OIC dictatorships about our word choices and counter-radicalization strategies. Our real allies abroad are the free thinkers in their prisons not in their palaces.

8. In fact, Canadian Muslims, like all in the West, have a moral obligation to utilize the freedoms we have here to counter all the ideas which are the precursor ideas to militant Islamism through public reform that create these massive Islamist political movements.

Respectfully submitted,

M. Zuhdi Jasser,
President, American Islamic Forum for Democracy
October 30, 2017

10/30/2017: Video of my virtual testimony to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage regarding M103

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August 22, 2017: Radical Islam: we must talk about more than ISIS

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Asia Times

By M. ZUHDI JASSER AUGUST 22, 2017 12:55 PM (UTC+8)

Over the past several years, innocent people the world over have endured blow after blow: Islamist terrorist attacks from San Bernardino to Beirut, Paris, London and now Barcelona and more. Children have seen blood pour into the aisles of concert venues, colleagues have watched their peers slaughtered, and families have lost everything at the hands of ISIS, aka the Islamic State.

There is no denying that the ISIS monster is committed to destroying innocents in its path and taking as many lives as it can – and relishes every time its savagery and carnage dominate the headlines.

It is vital that we pay close and vigilant attention to ISIS: its plans, its whereabouts, and its public statements. We must also pursue it, relentlessly and until it is decimated.

Sadly, this is the same tail we chase with the rise of each radical Islamist terror group in what has become a global whack-a-mole program. As we were on the verge of decimating al-Qaeda, the violent jihadist brand shifted to ISIS. Without treating the real root cause of theocratic Islamism, any chance of decimating ISIS will disappear as the global terror movement shifts to the latest “brand” of violent jihad.

ISIS didn’t begin as the multinational, heavily armed force for violent jihadist terror that it is today. It began as a cluster of radicals who, around 1999, were on the fringes of the jihadist movement. Many of them over time likely affiliated with the militant jihadist flavor of the month or year from al-Qaeda (in North Africa and the Middle East) to al-Shabaab (in Somalia) to Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Taliban (Afghanistan, Pakistan and India).

Given the time to fester and indoctrinate vulnerable young men across the planet in particular, ISIS’ jihadism was expanding by 2003 as al-Qaeda, and wreaking havoc on the international stage as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq unfolded. Now more than a decade later, with the Arab Awakening’s opportunities to confront the despotism that fed these ideologies, and instead finding the growing vacuums of failed revolutions against the twin tyrannies of Arabism and Islamism, radical Islamists have capitalized on increasing chaos, and their recruitment only increases in the wake of carnage both online and in person.

There was no greater opportunity than the Arab Awakening to defeat jihadism by ending the regimes that fueled Islamist ideology in their open-air prisons, but at the same time the complete collapse of civil society has created vacuums that only benefit militants. So we must first, again, militarily usher in the decimation and end of ISIS before looking at more wholly treating the root cause.

Make no mistake: As soon as ISIS is decimated, the global jihadist movement will find other means to advance its ambition for an Islamic state and a caliphate. Like a virus, Islamist ideology in both its militant and non-violent forms will find vectors aplenty among the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. Non-violent Islamism, the precursor for militant Islamism, encompasses major mass theo-political movements across the global Muslim consciousness.

So it is because these militant groups often begin with one or a few individuals, deeply empowered by malignant theocratic interpretations of religion, that we must talk about more than their bloodletting and violence. We must talk about the very root of the issue: the spark that is Islamism – a theo-political ideology devoted to the subjugation of any and all people who challenge the goal of an Islamic state.

We must uncover information about those so-called moderates who don’t seek to promote a peaceful, pluralistic interpretation of Islam, but who, like “celebrity imam” Siraj Wahhaj, claim to be peaceful while actually wishing for the Koran to replace the US constitution.

We must publicly discuss the fact that too many Muslims in the public eye are preaching hate, misogyny, intolerance, racism and bigotry both at the pulpit and in the streets, all while refusing to condemn the doctrine of armed jihad, frivolous lawfare against freedom of expression, and ideologies like anti-Semitism.

Young people from Connecticut to Chechnya are radicalized in their local communities and online, talking not just to ISIS sympathizers, but to jihadist groups and sympathizers in London, New York, and elsewhere. Youth whose parents and spiritual leaders fail to instill in them a sense of their own identity (be it American, French, or otherwise), and/or who don’t teach them the difference between personal piety and theocracy, or who shame them into archaic, malignant understandings of gender relations, which often leads to violence on a larger scale.

How radicalization works is at once complicated and simple.

On the complicated side of things, there are vast funding networks along with massive political machinery pumping hatred, victim-mindset thinking, revivalist thought and supremacist philosophy into the minds of Muslims and would-be Muslims. These systems will take a Herculean effort to dismantle.

On the simpler side, everyday Muslims and our neighbors are subjected to radicalizing materials, more subtle forms of Islamist thought and the “us versus them” mentality of the contemporary Muslim community. Many well-intentioned people, seeking to help Muslims during tense times, simply sign up to help the wrong groups, thinking the only filter should be condemnation of violence.

These things will not be easy to undo, but they are things regular people can challenge – they are things they must challenge. For example, if Muslims express concerns about a young, dynamic preacher who seems to be spouting radical rhetoric and gaining a following – they must be listened to.

Someone like Anwar al-Awlaki was not born as he died: He became that monster, and was allowed to – even empowered to, enjoying invitations to lead prayers on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and offer lectures to audiences large and small. He became a lead global radicalizer after being radicalized himself by innumerable precursor ideologues.

In our local communities, gender disparities in mosques, unchecked censorship of freedom of expression, and the unsupervised use of social media by children and very young adults create a breeding ground for malignant interpretations of Islam to take hold. We must all confront and expose with the antiseptic of sunlight any and all ideas that conflict with modernity and the modern liberal democratic state.

Lifezette: Islam Inspires Terror, Not Climate Change or Poverty

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Study: Islam, Not Climate Change or Poverty, Inspires Terror

Analysis reveals jihadis of varying backgrounds rooted in religious ideology, not factors floated by liberals

by Edmund Kozak | Updated 07 Aug 2017 at 3:41 PM

Liberal and globalist influencers in the West have attempted to attribute the spread of violent, radical Islam to everything from poverty to global warming, but a new study by an Islamic expert from the University of Vienna belies these persistent claims that Islamic terrorism is spurred primarily by factors outside the religion.

The 310-page study of nearly 30 violent Islamists by Islamic theologian Ednan Aslan and financed by the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggests that many radical Islamists have extensive knowledge of Islam and are motivated by their violent interpretation of their religion to a much greater extent than any of the plethora of reasons provided by Western liberals.

Aslan told the German newspaper Die Tagespost that he found debate and interaction “with content, norms and values ​​of the Islamic doctrine” plays a critical role in individuals’ radicalization.

“This intensive examination of theological issues is a turning point in many of the respondents in their lives,” he said. Moreover, “persons with a higher theological knowledge function as authorities and play a central role in the spread of ideology.”

The results of the study have clearly come as a shock to Western liberals conditioned by years of multicultural propaganda. The German newspaper Die Welt reported the study under the headline, “Islam plays a greater role in radicalization than assumed.” It would be far more accurate, however, to say that “Islam plays a greater role in radicalization than admitted,” experts say.

“The only thing that surprises me about all this is that we needed a university study to prove it,” said Raheem Kassam, editor-in-chief of Breitbart London and author of the soon to be published book, “No Go Zones: How Sharia Law Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You” (August 14, Regnery).

Indeed, the only reason that some were surprised by the study’s results at all was “because we have now had decades of indoctrination in this regard,” he told LifeZette. “We are continually force-fed false narratives that are built to advance multiculturalist agendas and fetishization, usually in the name of cheap, migrant labour.”

When asked about the numerous excuses liberal and Islamist apologists have provided for the root cause of Islamic terror, Kassam said, “I’ve heard them all, but the climate change theory is particularly galling.”

“The Left is tying itself in knots trying to excuse radical Islam while advancing its Marxist agendas elsewhere,” he told LifeZette. “They haven’t yet realized they sound more like The Onion than reputable sources of news and analysis.”

“It is fairly evident from the Quranic verses often cited by Islamist leaders, as well as lectures freely available online, that there isn’t so much a ‘perversion’ of Islam going on, as establishment leaders so often suggest, but rather, a literalist interpretation of what that book and the Hadiths openly state,” Kassam said.

While “one study scarcely ever proves anything,” he said, “in my estimation this comes closer to the truth than the public pronouncements of Barack Obama and Theresa May ever have.”

Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a practicing Muslim and president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, agrees. “This study proves what any honest Muslim already knows or [has] been in major denial about,” he said.

“While our ‘Islam’ as we practice it here in the West is for reform-minded Muslims compatible with Western values, the reality is the ‘Islam’ practiced by large swaths of Muslims in Muslim-majority nations run by Sharia law is supremacist and theocratic in mindset,” Jasser continued.

“Our organization [AIFD] and other leaders in our Muslim Reform Movement have been screaming from the rooftops for over a decade that there is a direct connection between non-violent Islamism (the supremacism of Islamic states based in Sharia law) and the violent Islamism of militant jihadists,” he said. “One naturally leads to the other, and this study is simply proving what has been painfully obvious to any honest Muslims.”

“There have been many especially on the Left that refuse to admit the obvious ideological precursors of Islamism (Sharia state identity movements) and instead have blamed issues that are patently unrelated as precursors of militant Islamism such as our ‘western foreign policy’ — which is repackaged by Islamists as ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’ or ‘Zionism’ (pick your conspiracy theory of the day),” Jasser said.

He continued: “Islamists will blame the ‘anti-Muslim bigotry’ or aka ‘Islamophobia’ of the ‘Right’ when in fact it is Islamist groups in the West (Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups) that exaggerate the extent of anti-Muslim bigotry, trying to impose anti-blasphemy behaviors by calling it ‘Islamophobia.'”

“The Islamist groups like CAIR, MPAC, MAS, ICNA, ISNA and others will do anything possible to blame everyone on the planet who is non-Muslim except their own ideologies and in essence the ideology spread across the planet by OIC [Organization of Islamic Cooperation] regimes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan, to name a few,” Jasser said.

“This study proves the obvious,” he said, “that the Islam of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Iran … example our so-called allies or at least common enemies in the war against ISIS are actually the founding fathers of ISIS (for KSA) and Hezballah (For Iran).”

“The denial of this direct connection for so long has not only been due to American Muslim groups wanting to avoid any responsibility of confronting the root-cause ideologies of “salafi-jihadism” (political Islam/Islamism) — all synonyms; but it has also and most poignantly taken the Islamic regimes off the hook as being the primary sources of Sharia state supremacism that indoctrinates the future militant jihadists that attack the West and secular societies,” Jasser said.

“Perhaps finally, this study and so many others will begin to peel away the veneer of benevolence from the cancer which is the modern day ‘Islamic Sharia Republics’ of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — today’s equivalent of the Cold War’s ‘Evil Empire.”

6/26/2017: Gatestone Institute – Female Genital Mutilation: American Muslim Physician Says Stop Defending the Abuse of Girls and Women

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Female Genital Mutilation: American Muslim Physician Says Stop Defending the Abuse of Girls and Women

by Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser

  • Any cutting or prick upon a female’s genitalia that is not actually, absolutely medically necessary, but rather demanded by twisted interpretation of religion and misogynistic manifestations of culture, is abuse.
  • Even if, one were to submit that the medical part of the procedure could possibly be done with no physical trauma (and that is a big fictitious ‘if’), the whole intent of the procedure is ceremonially to desexualize women and place their bodies under patriarchal control. No physician or modern culture that respects the equality of men and women should agree to participate in a procedure based in hate or supremacy….There is no compromise for the free world with the misogyny, abuse, and torture of the familial, community and individual oppressive forces involved in the draconian Islamist behaviors around FGM. It was a false compromise and a false moral equivalency with male circumcision.
  • The AMA Board of Trustees six months later returned an opinion in our favor in June 2017, which basically stood by existing AMA policy that any and all forms of FGM including nicking were prohibited by the AMA and thus deemed to be entirely inappropriate and unethical…Some courtroom reports in the government’s case against Dr. Nagarwala in Detroit are that in fact some of the 7–year-old girls suffered significant physical harm and scarring despite the defendant’s claim of only a pin-prick.

Some of America’s most respected attorneys have been willing to earn the ire of their colleagues and critics for the sake of what is right and good defending the rights of Muslims. Many Americans have also defended the rights of Muslims to pray and to have access to halal food. These positions, while not always popular in certain circles, are consistent with America’s commitment to religious liberty and the first amendment of the Constitution. Many of us Muslims have appreciated and applauded these outspoken heroes for their commitment to religious liberty and principled positions on matters pertaining to free speech and human rights. They have often taken stances representative of the best of America’s commitment to freedom.

It therefore came as a shock and a serious disappointment to learn that the great attorney, Mr. Alan M. Dershowitz, America’s most vigorous defender of religious liberty, has chosen to participate as a consultant in the defense of a Michigan doctor, Jumana Nagarwala, who has been arrested for mutilating the genitals of girls in her Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community. Our American Islamic Forum for Democracy made this statement in April at the time of her arrest. We also then sent an open letter to Mr. Janel Amil Saheb, the head of her Detroit Dawoodi Bohra community, which very likely created an environment that was complicit in the crimes. Rather than enable them by consulting in their defense as Mr. Dershowitz seems want to do, it is incumbent upon all genuine defenders of women’s rights to demand immediate reform.

It has been revealed that Nagarwala and others in the community have essentially been trafficking young girls from out of state to her “practice” so that she can cut and maim their bodies, all the while claiming to uphold the Hippocratic oath – one I also took and hold sacred as a physician – to “do no harm.”

Responding to criticism, according to Breitbart, Mr. Dershowitz now says of his consulting agreement with the Dawat-e-Hadiyah :

“This group rejects female genital mutilation. I agreed to consult with them and to work toward an acceptance of merely a symbolic pin prick, not even of the clitoris, but just of the clitoral hood, which is the equivalent of the foreskin…The idea really is the functional equivalent of what Jews do. If a non-Jewish kid were circumcised at birth, as many are but didn’t have a bris, didn’t have a religious circumcision and he wants to convert to Judaism or his parents want to convert him to Judaism, he has a little symbolic pin prick, it draws one tiny bit of blood and that takes the place of a circumcision and that’s what I propose.”

Mr. Dershowitz is apparently seeking to divert criticism and justify his choice to defend this doctor and her accomplices – who, from various courtroom testimony accounts – was doing more than “pin pricking” with objective reports of severe scarring and disfigurement upon the victims of this familial and community conspiracy against these 6-8 year old girls.

Despite whatever Mr. Dershowitz may claim, or twisted tales he wishes to weave about adults choosing to press blades to the genitals of little girls, any cutting or prick upon a female’s genitalia that is not actually, absolutely medically necessary, but rather demanded by twisted interpretation of religion and misogynistic manifestations of culture, is abuse.

A campaign against female genital mutilation – a road sign near Kapchorwa, Uganda. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

First, as a physician it is important to alert Mr. Dershowitz and anyone potentially sympathetic to his views, that a “nick or cut” to the clitoral hood is not as benign as apologists who falsely wrap themselves in religious freedom would have you believe. The clitoral hood protects the glans of the clitoris, covers its shaft, and forms part of the structure of the labia minora. Basic information as to the clerical, familial and societal intent of the procedure, the structure of the female anatomy, the practice’s dangerous link to extremist ideology, and the horrific psychological impact of it all no matter how small the ‘prick’ seem to be lost by those who wish to placate those communities who wish to control, mutilate, and usurp the bodily autonomy of these girls.

Second, as the attorney, Mr. Dershowitz surely knows, the morality and legality of the procedure follows directly from the familial, societal, and clerical intent of the procedure. Even if, one were to submit the medical part of the procedure could possibly be done with no physical trauma (and that’s a big fictitious ‘if’), the whole intent of the procedure is ceremonially to desexualize women and place their bodies under patriarchal control. No physician or modern culture that respects the equality of men and women should agree to participate in a procedure based in hate or supremacy. To compare the established non-sexual, non-oppressive intent of male circumcision done in Jewish and Muslim communities to the medieval intent of any procedure done by misogynistic Islamists upon the genitals of young girls is dangerously ignorant.

Rather than taking blindly the deceptive explanations of Islamist religious leaders using the cloak of religious freedom to conceal their subjugation of women, Mr. Dershowitz would do well to research the real theological underpinnings of female genital mutilation and any associated so called “compromise” procedure or “nicking”. In any form, whether mutilation or ‘cutting’ the procedure is inflicted upon women due to a draconian belief that girls need to be physically ‘cleansed of their innate hypersexuality,’ which will persist if the clitoral organ is left without alteration from birth. This is not only inhumanly ignorant but complicit with a patriarchal culture that seeks from birth to keep girls and women under the psychological subjugation of the men in their family and community. Watch and listen, thanks to MEMRI, to the obvious words of Imam Shaker El Sayed, one of America’s leading Sunni imams, only a few weeks ago at Dar Al-Hijra mosque in Northern Virginia who explained the exact reasoning behind this culture of abuse against women:

“On the contrary, you see in societies where circumcision of girls is completely prohibited, hypersexuality takes over the entire society, and a woman is not satisfied with one person, or two, or three. This, God forbid, is now happening even in Muslim societies where they prohibit circumcision. They use a mistake in practice to prohibit the tradition, and they end up causing a lot of damage on the extreme side of the sexual life of the woman.”

For hundreds if not a few thousand years, any and all of the physical acts of mutilation, nicking, cutting or any procedure done to the genitals of young girls has been done in order to appease this Neanderthal mentality. There is no other established alternative intent or rational explanation. In this case, the arrested physicians and cases in Detroit which Mr. Dershowitz is seeking to aid and abet, are part of a network of the Dawat-e-Hadiyah, an organization that oversees a small heterodox Shiite Muslim sect called the Dawoodi Bohras. But make no mistake. From Sunni to Shia, the victimization of women and girls through FGM practices is not peculiar to that one sect. Its misogynistic origins are both tribal and also bolstered with a deeply Salafist and Islamist interpretation of Islam across Sunni and Shia sects, and includes leading theologians.

Mr. Dershowitz’s position that he now claims to propose is actually not new. The American Islamic Forum for Democracy and I spoke out very publicly in February 2016 condemning a similar proposal of a new so-called “compromise” which the Journal of Medical Ethics bizarrely dubbed “Female genital alteration: A new compromise procedure” by Drs. Kavita Shah Arora and Allan J. Jacobs as if they were speaking about a pair of pants or a dress. AIFD then spoke out nationally in response to all of the mainstream media attention given to Dr. Arora and Jacobs, who were for the most part, sadly lauded by a politically correct media as courageous for posing a utilitarian solution to the trafficking of girls abroad to countries where FGM is permitted. We pleaded that there is no compromise for the free world with the misogyny, abuse, and torture of the familial, community and individual oppressive forces involved in the draconian Islamist behaviors around FGM. It was a false compromise and a false moral equivalency with male circumcision.

We took our protest to the AMA House of Delegates in November 2016 against protests from representatives of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) to the AMA, which also happened to include Dr. Arora, the author. The AMA Board of Trustees six months later returned an opinion in our favor in June 2017, which basically stood by existing AMA policy that any and all forms of FGM including nicking were prohibited by the AMA and thus deemed to be entirely inappropriate and unethical.

It is critical that all people familiarize themselves with the opinion of the AMA and other leading medical professionals and ethicists before carrying the water for the inhuman medical criminals arrested in Detroit or physicians like Dr. Arora and Jacobs who are apologists for this unethical procedure.

As we stated in a statement on this issue last year, the clitoral hood serves protective, immunological, and erogenous purposes. The structure of this hood varies from woman to woman; some women have clitoral hoods that do not retract fully, thus leaving these women vulnerable to even more severe cutting should a practitioner be trying to remove the hood. Cutting of the clitoral hood on infants, children, and many women would necessarily lead to the cutting and damaging of the clitoral shaft and the clitoris itself, as well as the labia. Of course, there is also the risk of infection and excessive bleeding and the certainty of trauma. If such “procedures” were ever permitted, there would be no ability actually to review whether the microscopic area of the clitoral hood of an infant or small girl were not actually scarred, setting aside the lifetime of associated psychological oppression carried with the ritual. Scar tissue from “nicking,” particularly on women prone to keloid scarring (as many women of color are) and difficult healing, can inhibit erogenous response and cause discomfort. In fact, some courtroom reports in the government’s case against Dr. Nagarwala in Detroit is that in fact some of the 7-year-old girls suffered significant physical harm and scarring despite the defendant’s claim of only a pin-prick.

In addition to sacrificing girls and women to physical torture by defending the alleged “compromise” of a “pin prick,” supporters of this unenforceable and therefore fake “compromise” are disappointingly and alarmingly ceding to extremist interpretations of Islam and radical tribal culture. As I wrote last year:

“Female genital mutilation is advocated by misogynists, many of whom are radical Islamists; and is carried out in families who seek to forcibly deny girls and women their bodily autonomy and normal healthy sexuality. This procedure serves no purpose other than to diminish the sexuality of women in the name of religion and/or culture.

“Allowing a girl or woman to be forcibly mutilated in any way sets the stage for male-dominant psychological torture, control, and dehumanization of that woman in her family forever. Whether it’s a so-called “nick” or a more extensive cut, the [inability to] forcefully reject this practice in its entirety is an act of complacency, and a medically unethical act of criminally negligent proportions.”

Survivors of, and advocates against, FGM also reject these “compromises” on genital mutilation. Survivors such as Khadija Gbla, Hibo Wardere, Leyla Hussein (who is also a psychotherapist), and others warn that those who propose or defend “nicking,” or in this instance “pin-pricking,” are glorifying mutilation and harm against girls and women. One should speak to any survivors or leading women’s rights activists who have dedicated their lives to fighting any and all forms of cutting. Sahiyo, for instance, is an entire organization dedicated specifically to countering the ignorance in the Dawoodi Bohra community of those who try to endorse female genital cutting, nicking or any procedure as justifiable alternatives or any different from horrific mutilation.

It is stunning, and frightening, to see champions of liberty and ethics bend on this issue. While freedom of religion is an essential and foundational American value, it cannot mean the “freedom” to deny universal human rights via the mutilation of another human being’s body – especially one who cannot consent, such as a 7-year-old girl or a woman doing so under compulsion, or extreme societal pressure. Mr. Dershowitz and others who hold his view have to know this. While they may think they are making the right decision and protecting freedom of religion as a whole by participating in this “torture theater,” we hope they realize that Muslim women, and Muslim reformers as a whole, are betrayed by his actions, and can only see that they are no allies or friends to those who seek to end the barbarism of FGM and of radical Islam.

If supposed liberals can defend FGM in the name of freedom of religion, what is next on the list of Islamist requests for religious freedom? Beating your wife “just a little bit” without lifting your elbow from your hip? Marital rape? After all, religious texts have been widely used to justify both. What about breast ironing? Acid attacks – with just a little acid — as punishment for sin?

You see, women always pay when freedom is sacrificed to “cultural sensitivity.” Deep down, liberals are good people, who know better, but sadly many have proceeded anyway – a chilling and tragic fact.

No! It is not just a “prick” or a “cut”. At the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, we call it what it is — mutilation.

There is no compromise against the immorality and barbarism of FGM. To offer any compromise, even a so-called, easily abused, “pin prick,” sacrifices girls and women to barbarism and sets back the movement for women’s rights in Muslim communities hundreds of years.

M. Zuhdi Jasser is the President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix, Arizona. He is the co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement and a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander. He is an internal medicine physician in private practice in Phoenix with an expertise in bioethics serving as an ethics consultant for a large healthcare corporation. He can be found on Twitter @DrZuhdiJasser and online at www.takebackIslam.com

Muslims must stand together against the scourge of radical Islamism.

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Asia Times

http://www.atimes.com/muslims-must-declare-blasphemy-invented-crime/

JUNE 22, 2017 2:24 AM (UTC+8)

Author: M. Zuhdi Jasser

In the past few years and especially the past few months, radical Islamism has been accelerating its influence among Indonesians. In May a bomb exploded in Jakarta, killing three and wounding 10. This incident, which occurred one day after the horrific attack at a concert in Manchester, England, was not the first time the world’s most populous Muslim country has experienced terror.

Indonesia has long had a reputation for being a model of Muslim moderation and pluralism, yet its problem with radical Islamism is real. From soaring rates of female genital mutilation to violent protests against authors and artists who offend religious hardliners, the country is undergoing an ugly and dangerous radicalization that will traumatize its citizens and leak across its borders, threatening global security.

Ahok abandoned by moderate Islamic scholars

Ahok was accused because of his analysis of a Qur’anic verse which offered a more modern and tolerant apologetic. He claimed that a more modern interpretation of the Qur’an did not prevent Muslims from being led or governed by Jews or Christians. He was not protected and defended by moderate Indonesian Islamic scholars (ulema).

Indonesia, which supposedly is based on a constitution that separates mosque and state, finds itself slipping slowly into the quagmire of theocracy like a frog slowly boiling to death in a kettle of water as the temperature increases daily.

Ahok lost his bid for re-election in April and despite claims by many that his blasphemy case would disappear after he lost the election, he now sits in a Jakarta jail as a troubling example to any who would consider using free speech to counter Islamists.

Islamists are winning on many fronts. Aware that pursuing his own freedom could mean an even more severe sentence, Ahok has withdrawn his appeal of the blasphemy sentence. It is important to note that Ahok was an elected politician and was rich with the social and material capital many Indonesians simply don’t have. Yet he was targeted, has not been able to successfully defend himself, and has not received sufficient public support. If this is the fate of an elected official, what does it mean for everyday people who don’t have his resources?

Popular student killed for his beliefs

Pakistani Mashal Khan was just such a person: a student, a budding poet, a sensitive soul beloved by friends and popular on social media networks. Yet, for online postings some deemed “disrespectful to Islam,” about 20 university students in April stripped him naked in public, beat him, taunted him and tortured him until finally, one shot him dead.

While Mashal was not nearly as well known as Ahok, stories like his are terrifyingly common. Many people in Muslim-majority societies around the world believe, either privately or openly, in punishing those they believe to have insulted Islam.

In the United States, Islamists may not physically lynch “blasphemers,” but they harass, stalk, threaten and bully those they believe have gone beyond the bounds of their interpretation of Islam. This more insidious tactic — of scaring truly moderate Muslims into silence — means that clueless Westerners allow Islamists access to the halls of power, and grant them social legitimacy.

The core of this threat is Islamism — a theopolitical ideology, distinct from the personal faith of Islam, that seeks to establish Islamic states and a caliphate. It’s a system that cannot exist without the censure of dissident voices and the subjugation of anyone — Muslim or non-Muslim — who opposes it. Those who jailed Ahok and those who murdered Mashal Khan are simply taking Islamism to its natural conclusion, and doing the dirty work of non-violent Islamists.

Blasphemy laws violate the very spirit of Islam

We Muslims have nothing to lose by opposing blasphemy laws and the culture that fosters them. After all, we are among its targets, and the failure to address these issues head-on also cultivates mistrust between ourselves and our non-Muslim neighbors. It is my view, as a devout Muslim, that blasphemy laws violate the very spirit of Islam: if faith is professed under duress, but not held by choice it cannot be sincere.

We at the Muslim Reform Movement do not believe that any ideas or religions, no matter how sacred we may perceive them, have any rights whatsoever, but that individuals — those of faith and those who choose to profess no faith — have rights that must be protected at all costs.

We stand in solidarity with Ahok, and with the Mashal Khans everywhere. We call attention to the intellectual, social, cultural, and legal battles being waged for free speech across the planet from Indonesia to the United States. It’s time for all free-thinking peoples to confront the scourge against free speech and individual rights which Islamism poses. To read our declaration and join us, click here.

The unseen war: The Islamist assault on dissidents.

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Asia Times

OCTOBER 20, 2016 11:31 PM (UTC+8)

Author: M. Zuhdi Jasser

Since September 2001, terrorism has dominated the headlines. But there is a much less discussed form of terrorism — assault on dissidents in which the very systems meant to protect them fail and hand them over to their killers.

The attack on dissidents is robbing families of their loved ones, instilling fear in communities, and obstructing many pathways toward deep reform within the House of Islam. It is long overdue for security forces and governments to modify their policies and stand unwaveringly by the universal human right of free speech.

Last month, Jordanian writer and political activist Nahed Hattar was murdered in cold blood outside a local court for “insulting Islam” by sharing a satirical cartoon on his Facebook page.

Hattar was murdered by a “known extremist” cleric as he was facing trial by his own government which opposed his freedom expression. These autocratic and quasi-theocratic governments often light the fuses of radicalism which at times they explode themselves and other times hand over blindly to rogue assassins who they empower.

In Bangladesh, bloggers who question theocracy are slaughtered in broad daylight – this year alone, at least eight dissident bloggers have been murdered. In Pakistan, dissidents and even lawmakers who break rank with the religious establishment are murdered with impunity – often with their own bodyguards tipping off and aiding the killers. When they are not killed, Muslim reformers, dissidents and freethinkers are threatened, stalked and made to live in fear. With the continued advance of Islamic State and those who are inspired by them, the problem is growing.

While some of these cases make headlines, many go unnoticed by the broader public. Worst of all, those who tacitly endorse such crimes are more prevalent than ever. Even in the United States, non-violent Islamists enthusiastically harass reformists on social media and at public events, spotlighting them with slanderous comments, inciting others to hate them, and leaking false personal information about them online.­­

You’d think that the broader society would completely marginalize such malignant actors. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong in many cases.

Nonviolent Islamists who knowingly cause dissidents to be targeted with harassment and threats aren’t just allowed to continue their malicious activities – they are positioned as representatives of the Muslim community in the media and even in the halls of political power, from Washington to London and even at the United Nations. It is when these individuals are granted legitimacy through political and social clout that they become even more dangerous.

For example, in the United States, Islamist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), whose leadership has targeted members of the Muslim Reform Movement (including myself) as well as women’s rights and LGBT activists, have trained law enforcement on how to treat Muslims – when they themselves incite hate campaigns against minorities within the Muslim community.

At the United Nations, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) claims to represent all of the world’s Muslims and even purporting to fight anti-Muslim bigotry. However, the OIC’s ideology and resulting actions – which include seeking to criminalize any speech or art they deem “offensive” to their interpretation of Islam – are exactly what inspire radicals to slit the throats of dissidents. Their governments and attendant systems are the malignant cauldrons that brew the ideas, culture, legalisms, and ideologues that suffocate reform.

The OIC, true to its name, has one purpose and that is to maintain control of the “House of Islam” by Islamists and suppress the diverse voices of anti-Islamist, pro-liberty reformers. Each Islamist regime does both domestically and globally. Domestically, they do so either directly or passive-aggressively by giving militants impunity over the murder of reformers, and globally they do so by making the free world in the West believe that Islamism and its attendant sharia states is the only possible form of Islam.

How can this be stopped? Through the education of the Muslim community as to the nefarious aims of Islamist regimes and their sympathizers; and by holding politicians, the media and national security establishments worldwide accountable for their empowerment of the worst within the Muslim community. While we must pay urgent heed to stopping violent extremism, that is only a tactic among many tried by Islamist movements. We must more importantly engage boldly and take sides in the war of ideas within the “House of Islam.” We must disarm non-violent Islamists as the theocrats they are in their war against dissidents, minorities and

The Muslim Reform Movement: Even more necessary a year in.

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Asia Times

DECEMBER 6, 2016 4:12 PM (UTC+8)

Author: M. Zuhdi Jasser

On December 4, 2015, Muslim leaders from the United States, Canada and Europe convened in Washington, DC to embark on an urgently needed mission: to demand, as a collective, bold and deep reforms within the Muslim community.

We stood before the press and the global community declaring that we stand for universal human rights; including gender equality, freedom of conscience, LGBTQ rights and more; that we stand for secular governance and the rejection of governance by “sharia” or any other set of religious rules, and more. We stood together as Muslims who reject any form of an ‘Islamic state’ or ‘caliphate’. We happened to have convened during the very week two Islamist terrorists, a couple, Syed Farouk and his wife.

That day’s convening garnered significant media attention. Our members include men and women, Muslims at varying levels of practice, liberals and conservatives. Some have been activists for decades, others were just starting out, compelled to make a difference after yet another year of violent attacks by Islamists the world over made it clear that change simply will not happen without more Muslims putting ourselves on the front lines for reform.

Our December 4, 2015 press conference releasing the Declaration of the Muslim Reform Movement to the world can be seen here:

Since that day, the enemy – Islamism both violent and non-violent – has continued to advance across the globe. Islamist terror in Florida and Ohio, attacks in France, Iraq, Pakistan, India and beyond continue to take innocent lives and create an understandable culture of fear. Meanwhile, many Muslims still find themselves marginalized within their own community spaces: women, Black Muslims, sexual minorities and scores of other vulnerable communities continue to feel ostracized and even persecuted for who they are and what they believe.

Over the past year, our declaration – which lays out both what we stand for and oppose, in clear language – has been posted on mosque doors, and sent to thousands of Muslim leaders across the United States, to mixed reception. Our team has been busy following up with recipients, asking them to sign onto our declaration and be a part of the solution. While some have supported us, others have cursed us – and even threatened to “come after us.” In the coming months, we will publish a full review of this project for the world to see who stands for universal human rights, and who doesn’t.

On this one year anniversary we again ask those Muslims who choose not to be a part of our Muslim Reform Movement and its Declaration to come clean and explain to the world why not. Muslim leaders and public figures need to be held fully accountable locally, nationally, and internationally about what it is exactly regarding our Declaration for Muslim Reform that they find objectionable. That debate about universal human rights is the only path towards, modernity, counter-radicalization, and global security.

Our Declaration is at our landing page and embodied in our hashtag #MyMuslimReform. Now, at our one year anniversary, December 4, 2016, we are asking everyone to support our movement online with the #MyMuslimReform hashtag and in sharing all over social media with Muslims who would join us and our neighbors who would support us.

Ask every Muslim you know what #MyMuslimReform means to them.

We have remained at the forefront on some of the most important issues of our time, those issues which most urgently require reform “within the house of Islam” – female genital mutilation, forced marriage, the targeting of apostates and minority Muslims like the Ahmadiyya, and the continued exportation of radical jihadist ideology from Saudi Arabia into mosques and communities worldwide to name a few.

We at the Muslim Reform Movement are aware that we are fighting an uphill if not generational battle, and we are not unfamiliar with tension and even controversy. We will continue our daily fight for universal human rights and against Islamism – and we ask you to join us. If you care about world peace, human rights, and the protection of pluralism and freedom, we ask you to share our declaration with your friends, family, colleagues and community members, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and to refer people to our presence online (check us out on Facebook and Twitter). We are a grassroots movement of committed, passionate volunteers fighting a massive movement fueled by petrodollars and a cult-like ideology. We need your support, and we welcome your fellowship. Join us across social media and tell us why you stand with Muslims who advocate hashtag #MyMuslimReform.

May 10, 2017: Is Tawhidi the Imam Australia’s been waiting for?

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Asia Times

MAY 10, 2017 8:57 PM (UTC+8)

Is Mohammad Tawhidi the Imam we’ve been waiting for?

Author: M. Zuhdi Jasser

Shaikh Mohammad Tawhidi hits all the right notes as the ideal Australian Muslim media darling: a website full of condemnations of ISIS; a friendly visage at rallies, vigils and in the media; and a smattering of criticism from militant Sunnis. He has expressed opposition to unregulated madrassahs (Islamic schools), and says he “doesn’t want burqas running around.” He also insists that Muslims in the West should assimilate, saying that had his father known “so many extreme Muslims” would one day be in Australia, he would never have moved there. He says all of these things while wearing a robe and beard, providing a veneer of legitimacy so appealing to Westerners eager to hear these words in a suitably “Islamic” package.

So, is Tawhidi the imam we have been waiting for? The one who sincerely seeks to advocate for critical thinking within the “house of Islam,” who will work to abolish sectarianism, promote gender equality, combat anti-Semitism, and bring about the reformation many have discussed – but so few have meaningfully supported?

In a word, no. In a few more words: not even close.

Let me be clear: I wish he were. I would welcome such an imam, and offer him my full support. I would use every platform at my disposal to promote his views, and pass the mic to him and his colleagues whenever and wherever possible. I wish I were readying myself to do just that, rather than coming to the unfortunate conclusion that I must instead ask that he be denied this empowerment.

The unfortunate reality of this instantly famous imam seems to be something more than simple opportunism. Rather, things seem much more sinister: Tawhidi may not be the reformist imam of our dreams – but rather simply a radical of a different flavor. Rather than espousing the radical ideology of ISIS, which draws from an extremist interpretation of Sunni Islam, Tawhidi subscribes to its reflection – a nefarious interpretation of Shia Islam. And because the West is so hungry for figures such as the one he appears to be, they are none the wiser.

Archived tweets made by Tawhidi reveal extreme views held by a minority of Shias with regard to the Prophet Muhammad’s family: in them, he calls Aisha (Muhammad’s wife) a “b*tch,” talks about her “experience with semen,” and other vulgarities. He has not only called for a “review” of Islam – but specifically the banning of most Sunni teachings. His is not a reformist project: it is a sectarian project. He is troublingly quick to jump on far-right bandwagons – not because he agrees with their concerns about Islam as a whole – but because aiding them would rush the end of Sunni Islam. His religious and educational programming originates in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and radical Shia strains in Iraq and Iran. It should cause significant pause that his criticisms extend only to Sunni Islamists – never the Islamists within his own community – and never the regimes of Iran and Syria, the heart of radical Shi’ism.

If Tawhidi wishes to prove his reformist bona fides, we urge him to indicate his clear support for the Muslim Reform Movement declaration, retract his hateful comments that stoke sectarianism, and issue swift, thorough and regular condemnations of Shia radicals and their movements by name as well. He must disclose and sever any ties with the Iranian and Syrian regimes or their supporters in Iraq, commit to the active opposition of sectarianism, and embrace the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

There’s a distinct reason that our work at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) is directed at the need for reforms against all forms of Islamism – “political Islam” and all its attendant permutations of an Islamic state mentality. At AIFD, our work is blind to Sunni or Shia with a clear universal mission statement to defend liberty through the separation of mosque and state. Whether Sunni or Shia, all forms of the Islamic sharia state and its admixture of Islamic law and state are doomed theocracies and plagues upon humanity. It makes no difference whether Islamist theocracy has a Sunni or Shia flavor, it is a theocracy and thus supremacist. Tawhidi’s positions, while appealing to many in the West as an apparently bold and courageous “Muslim cleric” against Sunni Islamism, is grotesquely and conveniently unilaterally anti-Sunni Islamist.

Understanding this whole dynamic is, if anything, a distinct teaching moment.

The defeat of Islamism and its movements will never happen if one side of the Sunni-Shia sectarian battle of the Islamists is favored over the other — with the ends justifying the means. The only path towards modernity and defeat of all radical Islamism in Muslim communities is the advancement of liberal ideas against both cancers of Sunni and Shia Islamism. Anything short of that is an exercise in deceptive sectarianism, which will actually only continue the cycle of global Islamism. As the old adage goes, Australia’s Sheikh Tawhidi proves once again that if something is too good to be true, it often is.

3/15/2017: There’s An Emerging “Alt-Jihad” Movement in the U.S.

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There’s An Emerging ‘Alt-Jihad’ Movement In The U.S.
But It’s Not Muslims Who Are Pushing It…

by M. Zuhdi Jasser
Independent Journal Review
March 15, 2017

 

The “alt-right” and the “alt-left” are recent terms to describe extreme sides of the political spectrum. While the members of the “alt-” movements may feel comfortable trying to attach themselves to other travelers on the right and left, most members of the traditional conservative and liberal spectrum reject the extreme un-American nature of the alt-movements.

The insidious, myopic, and extreme nature of one movement in particular has inspired me to coin a new term: the “alt-Jihad.”

Everyone knows the “jihad” of violent and Islamist supremacism. Jihadists are those who advocate the establishment of a caliphate, or any so-called “Islamic state,” via violent or nonviolent (but no less supremacist) means.

The Muslim community worldwide is comprised of 1.6 billion individuals, each with their own relationship to the faith. There are those Muslims who subscribe to the forms of global jihadism of the 56 Islamic states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Most people understand that while they may be a plurality of Muslims, they are a minority. The rest of us – the vast majority – reject it.

The ideological divisions are far more complicated and to that end, I was recently interviewed in the Federalist: “A Muslim Reformer Speaks about his Battle Against Islamism and PC.” Steve Postal interviewed me to commemorate the one year anniversary of the founding of the Muslim Reform Movement. Our declaration is a must read for Americans who seek to find ways to ideologically discern which Muslims share our American values and are working with us versus those who are Islamists.

Most Americans have long known the American ‘petro-Islamic’ establishment who have long been the “useful idiots for Islamism” who “willfully blind” themselves to the evils of Islamism in the name of progressive politics. Sen. Ted Cruz had hearings on this “willful blindness” last year.

A deceptively similar yet polar opposite (alt-side) is the willful blindness of the ‘alt-jihadists.’ Alt-jihadists support, empower, flaunt, and legitimize Islamist radicals and their leaders by branding all Muslims and all Islam as one and the same, and deeming us all to be enemies of freedom.

Alt-jihadists are non-Muslim thought leaders who are defined by two characteristics. Regardless of their intentions, first, they view Islam as a terminal monolith, a supremacist political ideology leaving no room for a distinction between the faith of Islam and Islamism. Second, they universally dismiss and vilify anti-Islamist reformers not as Uncle Toms but essentially similarly calling them “liars” and “illegitimate.” Alt-jihadists take it upon themselves to excommunicate anti-Islamists reformers from their monolithic version of Islam.

These two characteristics, like the apologists, only end up serving entrenching the global jihad and its Islamist monopoly from which the alt-jihadists claim to want to save the world.

The alt-jihad consists of non-Muslims who refuse to leave room for even the remote possibility of branding Islam and any faithful Muslims into modernity. The alt-jihad is simple, simplistic, self-serving and dangerous. It attempts to deny Muslim dissidents any space, hope, or support whatsoever we so urgently need to make headway. Their parroting of Islamist tyrannical rhetoric and their slash-and-burn approach only strengthens the hold Islamist extremists have on Muslim communities.

The alt-jihad does not sincerely seek for Muslims to find solutions to the problems plaguing our communities, but rather seeks the containment, if not the elimination, of Islam as a faith. Some even seem to advocate that this happen “by any means necessary.” For the alt-jihad, there is no hope for modernization of Islam – there are terrorist Muslims, and terrorist Muslims-in-waiting.

In the past few weeks the alt-jihad criticism of our work has spiked. Is something afoot? Stephen Kirby penned this for Robert Spencer’s JihadWatch.org: “Muslim Reform Group reached out to 3,000 US Mosques, got only 40 responses.” Kirby is the head of the Act for America Des Moines Chapter, and like Carl Goldberg here in Arizona, has long trolled our work, blindly striking us at the knees whenever possible.

Among many deceptive missives he wrote this patronizing fatwa (legal ruling) from his own quasi “sharia court:”

But I would like to save the Muslim Reform Movement (MRM) time and non-Muslims money. Instead of a new study on why the MRM has virtually no Muslim support, I will provide the answer: in terms of Islamic doctrine, the MRM declaration is blasphemous, and the MRM should not be surprised that over 99% of the larger Muslim community does not want to join in with that blasphemy.

It is only attention from the non-Muslim world that will enable the Muslim Reform Movement to remain on life-support, visible but irrelevant.

There you have it. With the strike of a few keystrokes from a comfortable bunker in that Iowa haven of anti-Muslim engagement, Kirby rendered his fatwa. His like-minded echo chamber across the blogosphere has since reposted these words of mass destruction and dancing gleefully on our grave.

That was not from the propaganda arm of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s PressTV, or Qatar’s and the Muslim Brotherhood’s AlJazeera, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s state TV, nor the propaganda of American Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups – it was from the alt-jihad.

Kirby was only to be then echoed by the fatwas of Diana West at the Daily Caller (Islam Catastrophe Continues), John Guandolo at UTT (Unfit for Duty), and Militant Islam Monitor to name but a few in the metaphorical Alt-Jihadi Shura council. Their primary target was hit pieces on Sebastian Gorka, but why pass an opportunity to collaterally eulogize Muslim reformists? Therein alt-Jihadists declared the Muslim Reform Movement “an abject failure”, “utter nonsense” and “a personal fantasy Islam.”

The alt-jihadists malignantly took one fact about the poor response we received from American mosques and willfully disregarded the rest of the interview and the body of our 13 years of work at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) and the new Muslim Reform Movement. Instead of honestly dissecting strategic position papers like this one: Fighting for Victory against Islamism: A Blueprint for how the West can Counter Islamist Tyranny, the alt-jihadists trip over themselves to dance on the graves of Muslim dissidents.

Beyond being destructive, the entire premise of the alt-jihad is absurd: we put out our challenge to the self-appointed leaders of the community to prove that it’s true that the vast majority of the Islamic establishment would not sign our declaration. We’ve been saying essentially that since our founding. Our effort was another public demonstration of that fact, with a new way to demonstrate it to the broader Muslim community, who are now able to see which principles their self-appointed leaders refuse to sign on to.

We admit the majority have been asleep. The alt-jihad claims in an un-American blindness to the anti-theocrats that we have no oxygen to breathe in the House of Islam.

This didn’t start this month. Alt-jihadists declared our reform movement dead on arrival at our outset in December 2015, much as they did over ten years ago with AIFD when we launched. Kirby had issued his fatwa declaring our “still-birth” days after our first press conference in December 2015: The Muslim Reform Movement plays Fantasy Islam. His Wahhabi sharia court “welcomed his readers to a personal version of Islam that had nothing to do with Islam”.

Classic alt-jihadism. The alt-jihadists have for years invoked takfirism (excommunication) against our work. But who needs an Iranian or Saudi Islamist Supreme Council of Inquisition when we have Stephen Kirby (July 2015, Dec 2015), Diana West (2012), Robert Spencer, and others to dismiss reformist dissenters inside the House of Islam as illegitimate Muslims?

But really. What brilliance and foresight does it take to defeat a nascent dissident reform movement by declaring it DOA? The alt-jihadi cabal’s arguments are not bolstered by their own strongly held Islamic interpretations, exegesis, and beliefs but rather by simply conveniently parroting the tyrannical dogma of their favorite Islamist theocrats. After I initially debated Stephen Kirby in Omaha, he went on to write the “the Lure of Fantasy Islam.” The archetypal alt-jihadist, he dismisses my own knowledge of Arabic, Qur’an, and Hadith, and instead with no rationale just regurgitates irrelevant fatwas of salafi-jihadis.

We offer theological deconstructions of Salafi-jihadi arguments and the alt-jihad’s only response is to channel the scoffing of the Islamist establishment.

There is far more than one interpretation of Islam. Our belief is that the future of freedom depends upon the victory of the Muslim Reform Movement over Islamists. And as I stated in the Federalist, Muslim interpretations of Islam cannot ever be reformed under the boots of tyrannical regimes across the 56 OIC Muslim majority nations who torture and assassinate dissidents.

But the alt-jihad does not care about solutions, especially those advocating American ideas against theocracy within the House of Islam. The alt-jihad does not care about advocating American ideas for the freedom and liberation of secular movements across the planet (the only real allies of the US) that separate mosque and state. No. It’s only about convincing the rest of America and the West that the entire religion of Islam is the monolithic problem and there is no viable path within towards modernity.

In fact, if the OIC had sought to create both, Orwellian foils and promoters of their own global supremacist form of the Islam of their sharia states, the alt-jihadists would be it. My attempts to graciously address the “concerns” of the alt-jihad are not new. I’ve engaged Robert Spencer in a debate on his conclusions regarding the Prophet Muhammad and Islam in 2010. Pamela Geller also ruled in her fatwa that I practice my own “Private Islam.” As I said in my response to similar dismissals from Pamela Geller’s in 2011, one of her numerous lies exposed was that I was “kicked out of my mosque.” Then she doubled down and I was somehow “kicked out of his mosque twice.”m I was never kicked out and never said I was. The fact they intentionally ignore is how I actually publicly took on the leadership of our mosque here: “I was bullied for criticizing Hamas.”

Alt-jihadists live in a world where truth and intellectual credibility are optional. They have one purpose: to obstruct any hope or path towards a solution within the House of Islam.

Despite the now over 14 Muslim leaders in the US, Canada, and Europe that launched our diverse Muslim Reform Movement and their diverse followings, the alt-jihad waits to impugn motives, declare us liars, or declare themselves more informed about Islam – much like the playbook of every OIC tyrant and government paid Islamist cleric across the planet would also do. But they are the traditional global jihad.

The wind beneath the sails of the traditional global jihad is the alt-jihad.

Lastly, make no mistake. The opinions of alt-jihadists are free speech. But their disagreements with us reformers are neither professional, respectful, nor hopeful of our space within the faith. They are only dismissive. Defeatist. Islamist. Exactly how the Saudi government, Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, or Khomeinists scoff at Muslim thinkers and reformers as “un-Islamic,” the alt-jihad does the same. Their work never sees the hope of our reforms for the possible synergy of secularism with our interpretations of Islam. Instead, they empower the Islamist establishment.

It is actually rather bizarre that their like-minded ideological bedfellows in takfir (the declaration of another Muslim as not being ‘Muslim’ or ‘Muslim enough’ in their behavior or ideas) are the Islamist supremacists. They seem to have all the conclusions and answers about who is and who is not a legitimate Muslim thinker.

Alt-jihadism at its core is takfirism by any other name.

No different from the useful idiocy of Islamist apologists who choose willful blindness, the alt-jihad are useful idiots for Islamist jihadists who also view Islam as one interpretation and true Muslims as only sharia supremacists. The alt-jihad is another willfully blind dead-end.