{AIFD Commentary} “Hamas’ war on Israel”, Center for Security Policy, October 9, 2023

Hamas’ war on Israel

Center for Security Policy

By M Zuhdi Jasser, MD

October 9, 2023

This Saturday, my mind went back to September 11, 2001. I well recall that day that Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu said, “Today, we are all Americans”. And I recall how important that was to hear back then. Today, I would like to say, “We are all Israelis’.

Make no mistake: this past Saturday the people of Israel were massively and unjustifiably attacked by the Islamist terror organization, Hamas, a movement owing its potency to Iran.

In fact, a spokesman for Hamas thanked Iran while a spokesman for the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said, “I promise that you will be victorious and you were faithful to your promise and to the enemy.” Grandmothers were kidnapped, women were raped and unarmed civilians were slaughtered. Over 700 Israelis were savagely killed and over 1500 have been injured with over 50 hostages known thus far.

But you wouldn’t know that from the supposed ‘umbrella’ organization of American Muslims, the United States Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), which only one day after the slaughter, “reaffirms its unwavering support for the Palestinian people” and railed against, “the unprovoked and continuous attacks by Israel.” When you see people like this around the world exploiting and celebrating slaughter, know that this is not about Israel. It’s about civilization itself.

It is crucial in all this we see the key players in all this, Iran and the global network of Shia and Sunni Islamists. They are the puppet masters and the Palestinians are puppets-turned-cannon fodder for their genocidal ambitions. History will look back at the six billion dollar ransom paid to Iran and authorized by the Biden administration on the anniversary of September 11th this year, a mere month ago. This was collective madness by Biden and his administration.

Yes, President Biden has overseen the further bankrolling of Iran, which, in turn, bankrolls Hamas, which has just now turned the Mid-East into a cauldron of war. President Biden is also responsible for turning hundreds of millions of dollars over to the Yasser Arafat-created Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority.

Commentaries that include tired, worn-out phrases like “cycle of violence,” “both sides,” “calls for ceasefire,” “proportionality,” and a “two-state solution” are now beyond offensive to anyone with a moral compass and liberty-minded world view. The people of Israel have not even had an opportunity to defend themselves after a launch of a massive terror attack and the apologists for the Hamas Islamist terror organization are already in full propaganda (pro-terror) mode.

The true radical, un-American, antisemitic colors of the radical progressives and Islamist apologists in the Democratic party are now on full display from Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Cori Bush (D-MO), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) and beyond, speaking as they do on behalf of intransigent Palestinian claims.

Ironically, perhaps the most irrelevant people to the hate-mongering radical Islamists of Hamas are the Palestinians.

Saturday’s unilateral initiation of war by Hamas is part of a greater, regional operation driven and fueled directly by Iran’s terror supporting IRGC and Khomeinists and cheered on by the global Islamist movement from Qatar, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, and Erdogan’s Turkey to just begin.

It is undeniable that this Islamist war of aggression is about unvarnished Jew-hatred and more substantively about negating the recent moves towards the normalization of non-Islamist Arabs and Muslims in the region via the growing Abraham Accords with Israel.

I call on all people of conscience, especially my fellow Muslims, to reject the tribal savagery of Hamas. Anyone of conscience must reject a world whose stock in trade is the abuse of civility and civilization. Some may want to live in that world of perpetual hate, but sadism is not the world of the decent. A world that slaughters indiscriminately and parades a woman naked through the streets is a world we all must reject and fight.

Today, Israel is suffering. The only democracy in the Middle East is suffering, and all those who believe in civilization, in tolerance, in freedom, must make a full throated and clear stand on this, on behalf of humanity.

In short, the United States I know and love is the United States that stands against evil acts and ideologies and marshals the rest of the civilized community to do the same. It’s been too long since we’ve done that. Our ally, Israel, is paying that price today.

{AIFD Holiday Message} A wish for you for a most Blessed Eid al-Adha (Holiday of the Sacrifice) Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Eid Mubarak!

Eid al-Adha

To all of our Muslim friends, members, and supporters,

Those of us at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy wish our Muslim friends and supporters a most Bless ed Eid al-Adha (Holiday of the Sacrifice) on this 10th day of Zul-Hijjah, Wednesday, June 28, 2023.

May this holiday inspire each of us to increase our awarenes s of and gratitude for the many blessings we have been given as well as the enormous responsibility we have to serve and aid others. We are so proud of our many accomplishments and programs that our community at AIFD and the Muslim Reform Movement continue to do every day. May this holiday help launch us all into an engaged, empathic, community focused on legacy and the values that we share in the communities that mean the most to us.

We will continue to keep you up to date on our latest as it happens here! We are so blessed to have all of your support and community.

On this holiday of the sacrifice, remember all those you love and all the aspects of your life from family to nation to God that keep us strong and for which we should be forever thankful. We are resolved to continue our mission protecting our nation and our freedoms against the threat of Islamism and its allies across the country and the world.

May we, as brothers and sisters in humanity, use this Eid al-Adha to grow closer to each other and to our Creator, and seize this opportunity to recommit ourselves to the universal values of human rights, individual liberty, and love for all mankind.

At the core of being American is religious liberty to celebrate our most spiritually fulfilling of days. And we hope to continue to live up to our responsibilities to keep our nation free and open to unrestricted worship.

Enjoy your families, communities, and nation on this day and may all of your prayers and supplications be accepted. May the Hajj (pilgrimage) of all those who performed it this year also be accepted.

Yours forever in liberty,

The American Islamic Forum for Democracy

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The Great Coverup: The Murder of Mahsa Amini

To our friends at MRM and AIFD:

You are invited to join Dr. Jasser who will be moderating a conversation webinar,
tomorrow Wednesday, October 5, 2022, from 3:30 pm ET to 4:30 pm ET.

The Great Coverup: The Murder of Mahsa Amini

Webinar link
no registration required
Passcode: 869841
Join leaders from the Muslim Reform Movement for a webinar conversation you will not find anywhere else.

Zuhdi Jasser moderates a conversation with heroes of the women’s rights movement around the world from inside and outside the House of Islam. The men with beards are finally on their heels in Iran.

Listen to what leaders of the Muslim Reform Movement, Asra Nomani, Raheel Raza, and Soraya Deen, joined by special guest Saghar Erica Kasraie have to say about this amazing time in history in Iran and across the “Muslim world”!

 

M. Zuhdi Jasser is president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix and the co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement. He is a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander and former Vice-Chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. He is the author of the book, “A Battle for the Soul of Islam.”

 

 

Asra Nomani is an American author and former Georgetown University professor. She is also a co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement. She is co-director of the Pearl Project and the author of “Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam”.

 

 

Raheel Raza is President of The Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow, founding member of The Muslim Reform Movement, Director of Forum for Learning, award-winning journalist, public speaker, and advocate for human rights, gender equality, and dignity in diversity

 

 

Soraya M. Deen is a Lawyer and an award-winning international activist, and a community organizer. She is the founder of the Muslim Women speakers movement.

 

 

Saghar Erica Kasraie is the Executive Director of LIVING WATER Productions. Fluent in both English and Farsi, she is an Iran-born American and Middle East expert, human rights activist, and voice for vulnerable religious minorities, especially women and children.

 

 

 

Additional options to join:
Or One tap mobile : US: +16694449171,,82461828858#,,,,*869841# or +17193594580,,82461828858#,,,,*869841#

About MRM
The Muslim Reform Movement is a dedicated coalition of diverse western Muslim leaders founded in December 4, 2015. The MRM focuses on opposing a very real interpretation of Islam that espouses violence, social injustice, and political Islam.

About AIFD
The American Islamic Forum for Democracy is a non-profit organization based in Phoenix, Ariz. dedicated to providing an American Muslim voice advocating genuine Muslim reform against Islamism and the ideologies which fuel global Muslim radicalization. AIFD’s mission is to advocate for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty, and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state. In December 2015, AIFD convened and helped launch the Muslim Reform Movement, a coalition of over 12 Muslim organizations and leaders dedicated to reform for values of peace, human rights, and secular governance.

September 9, 2022, White Rose Magazine

PALESTINIANISM IS THE NATURAL FRONT FOR ISLAMISM

M. ZUHDI JASSER

 

ACROSS the planet, radicalization among diverse Muslim-majority communities continues essentially unabated. Most Muslim communities have long ignored, are unaware, or live in fear of the root cause of that radicalization: the ideas of political Islam, or Islamism. There are innumerable opportunities to track and learn about what happens upstream from ideas fueled to send susceptible Muslims hurtling down the river of militant Islamism. But no single idea has given Islamist movements more return on their radicalization investment than “Palestinianism” and the marriage of that national identity movement with Islamism and HAMAS. Understanding this synergy or parasitism is essential to countering the perennially obstructionist and radical elements of the Palestinian leadership establishment.

More globally, understanding this synergy is also essential to translating how the Palestinian front ideology for Islamism—Palestinianism—is then also capitalized around the world to radicalize other Muslims and legitimize Islamist supremacism. From the United States to Indonesia, this is not simply a phenomenon relegated to Palestinianism, but rather no ethnicity or nationality of Muslims is spared the ravages of the supremacist ideologies of Islamism.

“No single idea has given Islamist movements more return on their radicalization investment than “Palestinianism” and the marriage of that national identity movement with Islamism and HAMAS.”

Islamists care nothing about the indigenous ethnicities they conquer. Instead their caliphism steals the grievances of others in order to drive a blinding movement across a people with a common identity. One of the primary worldwide oncogenes of this phenomena is manifested within the Palestinian movement.

First, let us take a look at Palestinianism as an idea and then look at the idea of Islamism, vis-à-vis HAMAS. Last, we will look at how understanding this phenomenon carries within it the only path to defeating the propaganda machine of Palestinianism’s primary fuel—political Islam.

“Islamists care nothing about the indigenous ethnicities they conquer.”

The idea of Palestinianism takes hold

Palestinianism, on its surface, was first described by apologists for the Palestinian movement toward statehood as a “mirror image” of Zionism and part and parcel of a two-state solution. In one of the earliest references to the idea, in 1973, John B. Wolf noted that an outgrowth of the 1967 war had been for Palestinians to recognize their “Palestinianism,” an idea which he noted would integrate them into their lost land and give them a political presence so far ignored. It was a formulation of an idea that essentially legitimized, whether real or not, a deeply seeded concept of a Palestinian state within the Palestinian consciousness. A national identity does not have to be real or even based in an actual existing state for it to quickly become a virulent inspiration of a collectivizing movement.

Edward Said then gave the term new life defining it as “a political movement that is being built out of a reassertion of Palestinian multiethnic and multireligious history.” Said, a Palestinian-American author and Columbia University professor, made an industry out of obsessively blaming the West for their “bias” in framing the ills of the Palestinian movement. His premise was essentially that if the West changed its vantage point to being one primarily through the lens of Palestinian grievances, it would realize that Zionism (often articulated more obliquely under critique of colonialism or orientalism) was the problem and Palestinianism was the solution. His advocacy for Palestinianism inspired other Western Palestinian intellectuals and apologists like Rashid Khalidi to revise history and expand Palestinian identity from the cultural domain into the national and political domain. Khalidi, for example, later tried to counter the history of early 20th century Zionism by claiming that Palestinianism as a national movement existed long before World War I.

This all recently came full circle as growing criticisms of radical Islamist American politicians like Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) were defended last year by anti-Zionists like Peter Beinart, who tried to claim that criticism of these high profile politicians was simply bigoted “anti-Palestinianism.” Beinart and others were feebly attempting to mirror their experience with anti-Zionism with an attempt at equating Palestinianism with domestic American identity politics. Tlaib, an Arab-American, has embraced her identification as a “woman of color.” Beinart made the hysterical claim that “the evidence that the Squad’s critics are anti-Palestinian is far stronger than the evidence that the Squad is anti-Jewish.” In effect, Palestinianism became a central driving force to minimize rank anti-Semitism and normalize the propaganda of Palestinianism. Therefore, clearly diagnosing what Palestinianism actually represents is key.

What exactly is Islamism and how does it inspire Palestinianism?

In short, “political Islam” or “Islamism” is a belief that Muslims have an obligation to promote the public application of their interpretation of sharia (Islamic jurisprudence), and where possible, establish Islamic states. Thus, a political movement embodied by a party or parties whose platform is centered on the advocacy and application of sharia under a collective identity and national flag of Islam is by definition—Islamist.

Islamists believe the Qur’an is the source of law, not a source of law. Argumentation within Islamist governments and parties is based upon clerical interpretations of God’s law, not upon a reasoned deduction of effectiveness of human law. Thus, whatever their interpretation of God’s law is not up for debate or liberty to reject. It is mandated. Citizen rights in the Islamic state are not inalienable from God but rather guaranteed by the “consensus” of the clerics or “ulemaa” (so-called scholars) chosen in this oligarchy to interpret Islam for the nation (or the ummah). No matter how moderate Islamists present themselves, they will always hold on tightly to the notion that a majority Muslim state must be identified as an “Islamic state” with clerical guidance to ensure society’s proximity to the Muslim path. Islamists, when a minority, can often appear to be lawful and to fit within the constructs of minority rights. They will often dissimulate publicly to deceive the population about their long-term intentions.

“Islamists believe the Qur’an is the source of law, not a source of law.”

Islamists will use religion and clerical leaders to wrest control of government, society, and culture from the masses. Their populism, where it exists, is rooted in collective faith identity politics of “majoritocracy.” Terrorists do this by any means necessary; non-violent Islamists do it through patient advocacy and slow societal change and even democracy. Islamists try and run under the radar wherever possible, especially where they are a minority because whether violent militants or non-violent civilizational jihadists, their ends justify any means necessary.

One should read the work of Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and those of other Muslim Brotherhood ideologues such as Sayyid Qutb, (author of the infamous treatise Milestonesto understand the all-encompassing transnational goals of lslamism. The philosophical father of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, spent two years (1948-50) in the United States before going back to lead the founding of the Islamist movement in Egypt with his book Milestones, a short treatise that described the West as the land of Jahilliyah (ignorance) and evil. This treatise listed the ‘Milestones’ for establishment of the Islamic state in order to prevent the descent of society into the evil of the “secularism” he saw in the West. Certainly, the anti-Semitism found in Europe reinforced many of the Islamist constructs he developed for political Islam. The likes of Qutb used whatever constructs they could to advance their Islamist supremacy and discarded as ignorant other constructs that contradicted their Islamist goals.

Islamism depends upon conspiracy to explain away the weakness of the Muslim condition and the need for Muslim collectivism and Islamic statehood and ultimately neo-caliphism. Although the Muslim Brotherhood has reportedly abandoned its open endorsement of terrorism and changed its methods to include democratic means after the Arab Awakening of 2011, its endgame (theocracy) is still anathema to Western liberal democracies. As I testified to Congress in 2018, the Brotherhood shape-shifts frequently, but its published mission has never changed. Its 18-month rule of Egypt again revealed what Recip Erdogan, the over 20-year President of Turkey and head of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), said in 1996 as Mayor of Istanbul. He noted publicly that “Democracy is like a train; you get off once you have reached your destination.”

Democracy obviously is not just about the ballot box. It is about a system of law in which every citizen has access, and minority rights are defended. The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood has flourished over the past century under the toxic atmosphere of despotic dictatorships and monarchies throughout the Muslim world, metastasizing into hundreds of Islamist splinter movements.

“Islamism depends upon conspiracy to explain away the weakness of the Muslim condition and the need for Muslim collectivism and Islamic statehood and ultimately neo-caliphism.”

An Islamic state, whether ISIS, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Turkey (under Erdogan’s AKP) will unite its military as a force fighting for the honor of that Islamic state, fighting for Jihad. The unification of 56 otherwise disparate states under the Organization of Islamic Cooperation is in effect a neo-Caliphate, which is inspired by an attempt to centralize the Islamist collective, whether each state is fully theocratic or pseudo-secular. This is extremely important to an understanding of Palestinianism as there is nothing more convenient to creating a consciousness of an “Islamic Empire” than fabricating and exploiting a national identity that pits Muslim grievances against a ”non-Muslim oppressor.” Islamists exploit this with Palestinians and Kashmiris alike.

In 2005, Laurie Goodstein, in an interview of Zaid Shakir of the San Francisco based Zaytuna Institute, quoted Imam Shakir as saying, “Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country.” The Islamist lens and hijacking of any Palestinian grievances is rooted, not in truth about root causes, but rather in a Machiavellian anti-Semitism that has become an intoxicant not just for young impressionable Palestinian youth but also a rallying cry for Islamists across the planet.

Most important, as long as domestic and global Islamist influences stranglehold the Palestinian communities, the Islamists of HAMAS have little desire to work toward peace and take in any honest brokerage for realpolitik. Their Islamist platform is wholly dependent upon an infinite propaganda of the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic narrative and the global leadership and funding it gives them from countries that may otherwise be their enemies, from Iran to Pakistan.

Lastly, as much as an argument could be made that for the Palestinian Christian minority, for example, the Edward Saids and Hanan Ashrawis of the Palestinian movement, Palestinianism was more about a national, cultural, and historic identity, the reality is that HAMAS’ leadership infused an unmistakable definition which made Palestinianism equivalent to an Islamist theocratic state. The useful idiocy of certain Palestinian Christian leaders notwithstanding.

“The Islamist lens and hijacking of any Palestinian grievances is rooted, not in truth about root causes, but rather in a Machiavellian anti-Semitism that has become an intoxicant not just for young impressionable Palestinian youth but also a rallying cry for Islamists across the planet.”

The link between Islamism and anti-Semitism

The link between Islamism and anti-Semitism is rather simple. It is self-evident that supremacists from within a particular faith community will create and exploit hatred toward another faith community in order to collectively rally their own followers against a common enemy. Islamists utilize anti-Semitic imagery as a tool for their own ascension into power among Muslim-majority communities and nations. Islamists often exploit both the Muslim Ummah and the Jewish minority in order to create a groupthink against the “other.” The demonization of Jews by Islamists is a key signal to all of us, not only because of its imminent threat to all Jews across the world from Islamists who may become violent or oppressive, but also because beneath that hatred lies a more global supremacism that treats all minorities from within the faith and outside the same, as obstacles to their own ascension. These theo-fascists use the demonization of minorities as populist tools to rally populations to their fascism.

In Arab-majority nations, Islamist movements have always set themselves up to fill in the vacuum created by Arab authoritarianism and fascism. Per that playbook, Palestinianism, in its form as a supremacist racial national identity has found itself usurped also by the Islamist movement of HAMAS. HAMAS’ propaganda has always been that they are the “moral and religious” alternative to the secular, God-less, Fatah Party. They insist that their version of Palestinianism is far more moral and protective of Palestinians when, in reality, they are just as corrupt but keep the Palestinians beholden to grander global Islamist movement interests and the strings of every OIC Islamist regime that sends them aid and weaponry.

“Islamists utilize anti-Semitic imagery as a tool for their own ascension into power among Muslim-majority communities and nations.”

The hate created by both the secular and Islamist fascists in the Arab world has also tellingly fueled a mass exodus of the Jewish people that began in 1948 at Israel’s founding when there were more than 800,000 Jews living in Arab lands.  Today, it is believed that there are less than 20,000 remaining.  That exodus has carried over to the Christian community where it is believed more than two million Christians have fled the Middle Eastern Arab community in the last 20 years. This vacuum of religious diversity only fuels the Islamists’ supremacist mentality.

The exploitation of Israel among Islamists is also virtually a litmus test for anti-Semitism. Martin Kramer, a Middle East scholar has noted, “Islamists see Israel as a symptom of a larger conspiracy against them either Western or Jewish or a sinister combination of the two. Many Islamists today do not look at Israel or its policies as their irritant. They look beyond, either to America, symbol today of the power of the West, or to the Jews, dispersed throughout the West where they exercise a malignant influence. These are deemed to be the real forces driving history.”

Kramer highlighted in 1994 that Rashid al-Ghannushi, who later happened to become the Tunisian Islamist leader of the ruling Al-Nahda party (Tunisia’s equivalent of HAMAS) stated then that there existed“a Jewish-American plan encompassing the entire-region, which would cleanse it of all resistance and open it to Jewish hegemony from Marrakesh to Kazakhstan.” This exemplifies the use of conspiracy theories by Islamist demagogues to portray a false narrative against Israel and thus by association, all Jews.

These conspiracy theories then spread like wildfire and are exploited by fellow global Islamist movements of all stripes to broaden the conspiracy against all Muslims and provide more excuses for the failures of Muslim-majority nations. When the OIC met in Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahatir told the crowd, “The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.” Reports were that the crowd responded with a “resounding ovation.” This fits with the opinion polls from Pew for those nations.

No one personifies the symbiosis of global Islamism and the HAMAS grievance narrative better than the de facto leader of Sunni Islamism across the planet, Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. Al-Qaradawi is an icon of the Islamist movement. His presence on Al Jazeera, teaching Arab masses about Sharia and Life with more than 60 million viewers, has made him one of the greatest threats to Israel and the West among Islamists. His influence and perch from Qatar upon the Islamist movement and Muslim majority nations is unparalleled. Any review of his work in Arabic would show how deeply central his apologetics for HAMAS and his demonization of Israel are. Again, global Islamism needs the Islamist narrative form of Palestinianism to fuel its continued existence.

HAMAS

HAMAS (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya- Islamic Resistance Movement) is a militant Palestinian spin-off of the Muslim Brotherhood founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in the 1980s. As radical as they were employing suicide bombing and jihad, they tried to portray themselves on the Palestinian street as the only viable alternative to Fatah, and more moderate than the militant PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad). HAMAS took over the Gaza Strip from the other Palestinian political party, Fatah, in elections in 2006. It rightly remains a U.S. designated foreign terror organization (FTO) because of its comprehensive utilization of terrorism underpinned by a charter and ideology that explicitly endorses terror and jihad. It still gets massive material and financial support from Iran as well as political support from Turkey and other OIC nations. Its politburo (governing council elected by its “shura council”) was long led by Khaled Meshal who was perched in Damascus until the Arab Awakening, and now is led by Ismail Haniyeh since 2017, who has operated from Doha, Qatar since 2020.

HAMAS’ rule of Gaza, as it took over Palestinian Authority institutions, has left little doubt of the type of rule their Islamism brings. Its judiciary has empowered authoritarian institutions based in draconian sharia law which is misogynistic, racist, and Islamic supremacist against all other faiths.

In May 2021, HAMAS and Israel entered their deadliest conflict in over six years. HAMAS and PIJ initiated the war firing thousands of rockets into Israel after weeks of tension in Jerusalem. Hamas likely lost standing among Palestinians, and globally, and found that the best way to curry favor with their followers in the Islamist movement was through engaging in armed conflict with Israel. Ten Israeli civilians were killed and more than 300 injured. Evidence showed coordination with the IRGC and Lebanon’s Hizballah. Israel was forced to respond militarily to remove the threat of rocket attacks posed by HAMAS and its terror supporters in Gaza. Soon thereafter a cease-fire was achieved, and Palestinianism only again grew stronger as HAMAS’ aggression somehow bolstered their victimhood narrative.

Palestinians need their own ‘Arab Awakening’

Last year’s armed conflict between HAMAS and Israel, which started with HAMAS’ offensive launching thousands of rockets into Israel aided by the IRGC and other global Islamist interests, only ended with another embarrassing military defeat for HAMAS and its Islamist movement. Yet, the narrative always somehow works out for HAMAS regardless of the reality: a narrative of defense, not offense, of victimhood, not aggressor. Without Islamist supremacism, and its theological underpinnings, their conspiracy-laden fictional accounts would have little traction. Jihadists never lose. Even in suicide, they are the victors. Even in surrender, they will overcome.

Why does all this matter? Palestinianism is a malleable tool that has certainly been useful over the last half-century for its anti-Semitic exploiters of all stripes, whether Islamist or Arabist or otherwise. Its fungible themes of identity politics, tribal collectivism, grievance narratives, and national supremacism have stood at the ready for any willing accomplice. Yet, the underlying fuel that drives the growth of the movement, despite massive losses year after year, is the inspiration of Islamism. Without Islamism, Palestinianism dies on the vine like every other supremacist national identity in the region before it. With Islamism, it carries the imprimatur of God, of Islam, of faith and the Hereafter. When Islamism is parasitizing Palestinianism, any Islamist Muslim can be a “Palestinianist.” It is quite the phenomena that Pakistani Islamists in the Jamaat Islamiya party, Islamist Supremacists in the Iranian Republican Guard Corps, Islamists in Qatar, Egypt and across the West all chant the Islamist mantras of Palestinianism. Regardless of their own national identity, each are conferred honorary citizenship vis-à-vis Islamism.

“Palestinianism is a malleable tool that has certainly been useful over the last half-century for its anti-Semitic exploiters of all stripes, whether Islamist or Arabist or otherwise.”

Invoking Palestinianism can happen literally during any Islamist attack across the planet. As so-called ‘mainstream’ Islamists from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) took up the grievance narrative of Lady Al Qaeda, Aafia Siddiqui, the MIT graduate jailed in a federal prison with an 86-year sentence in Texas for trying to kill American soldiers and planning a terror attack in New York City, they radicalized many including a British national, Malik Faisal Akram. Akram attacked a Colleyville, Texas, synagogue on January 16, 2022, taking hostages and demanding Siddiqui’s release. Thankfully, the terrorist was shot dead and the hostages released. It should, however, come as no surprise that this Pakistani cum British radical Islamist immediately targeted the Jewish community when he decided to get vengeance for his militant hero, Aafia Siddiqui. Siddiqui, like her students, was barbarically anti-Semitic. During her trial she demanded that jurors be tested genetically for their Jewish identity. From Afghanistan to Texas, Islamists find immediate common ground as Palestinianists blaming their ills of the day not on the Islamists but upon Israel and the West.

Interestingly, the Abraham Accords have given new hope to the normalization of relations between some of the Arab gulf states and Israel. They have begun to rupture the once impenetrable front of Muslim-majority nations in the OIC against the state of Israel. But still, Arab monarchies are lower-hanging fruit since as Arabists they will take self-interest and self-preservation over Islamist ideologies every day of the week. While their concessions away from the tired history of anti-Semitism against Israel are a major step forward, it does little to fracture the Islamist hold on Palestinianism.

In the end, the only viable pathway forward will come when the Palestinians themselves marginalize and defeat the global Islamist movement’s stranglehold on their communities vis-à-vis HAMAS, PIJ, and their tentacles. Palestinianism is a natural front for Islamists to work hand-in-glove with Palestinianists. Yet, it matters little to any of them that the Islamists do not have a care in the world about the actual grievances of Palestinians as they, instead, simply create more grievances.

Islamists hijack the consciousness of Palestinians, use it for their own global purposes in jihad and caliphism, and dismiss their own crimes against humanity and the radicalization of coming generations.

“In the end, the only viable pathway forward will come when the Palestinians themselves marginalize and defeat the global Islamist movement’s stranglehold on their communities.”

Reformist Muslims, with our eyes on the target of the only cure, counter-Islamism, are harboring no illusions. The struggle against Islamism is generational but must be realized. Peace and self-determination for Palestinians can only come after they have shed their Islamist masters. With the Arab Awakening marching across the Arab world, many hoped that it would come to Gaza in protests against HAMAS as well as Fatah. But unfortunately, the battle for the soul of Palestinians has yet to be realized.

The only pathway for generational security of Israel from Islamists, whether Palestinianists or otherwise, is to join the West in a systematic, public-private, broad-based anti-Islamist strategy to combat Islamist ideology. All free thinkers and liberal leaders in the West, and across the planet, must take sides within the House of Islam with the dissidents against the Islamists. Our Muslim Reform Movement coalition in the West has the makings of a template of how HAMAS, Palestinianists, and other Islamist supremacists can be defeated.

Taking the side of reform-minded Muslims who champion liberty and eschew Islamism, must be the centerpiece of the strategy. Our Muslim Reform Movement is a coalition formed in December 2015, united in our common opposition to theocracy and tyranny, and in the defense of liberty. Our Declaration of the Muslim Reform Movement articulates what we are for and what we are against. No Islamists or Palestinianists would ever be able to honestly sign that declaration. Within its principles and leadership coalition is the makings of the only strategy with an antidote to the poisonous intoxicant of Islamism within Palestinianism.

 

Footnotes

Wolf, J. B. (1973). Black September: Militant Palestinianism. Current History64(377), 5–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45312785

Said, Edward (2007). “The Palestinian Experience (1968-1969)”. In Rubin, Andrew; Bayoumi, Moustafa (eds.). The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966 – 2006. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. pp. 14–37.

Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017. 2020.

Martin, Richard C and Barzegar Abbas Ed. Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam. 1st Edition. Stanford University Press. 2010. Part 2: Political Islam, Liberalism, and the Diagnosis of a Problem by M. Zuhdi Jasser pp. 104-109.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Global Threat. Hearing Before the Subcommittee on National Security of the committee on Oversight and Government Reform. House of Representatives. 115th Congress. Second Session. July 11, 2018. Serial No. 115-90.

The Salience of Islamic Antisemitism: It’s not just about Israel, but neither is it the nature of Islam. Institute of Jewish Affairs Reports.  No 2. October 1995.

Schrag, Carl. Malaysia’s Casual Anti-Semitism. Slate.com.  October 20, 2003.

Jasser, M. Zuhdi. Anti-Semitism: A Growing Threat to All Faiths. Testimony to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations. U.S. House of Representatives. February 27, 2013.

Bartal, Shaul, Rubinstein-Shemer, Nesya, and Karsh, Efraim. Hamas and Ideology: Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi on the Jews, Zionism and Israel (Israeli History, Politics, and Society). 1st Edition.

CFR Backgrounder: What is Hamas. Zachary Laub and Kali Robinson. Council on Foreign Relations. August 17, 2021.

 

May 16, 2022: Jewish Leaders Must Counter Islamist Supremacism

White Rose Magazine

Jewish Leaders Must Counter Islamist Supremacism

by Zuhdi Jasser

May 16, 2022

 

THE first question any American Jew may contemplate asking me, an American Muslim activist is, how does this guy have the chutzpah to tell our diverse Jewish communities what we should or should not do vis-à-vis American Muslim communities, Islamism, and especially anti-Semitism? Anyone who has followed all of our public work in this area of expertise knows that we at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and the Muslim Reform Movement are certainly not delusional and are fully aware and engaged with the hard work necessary to begin change toward long overdue reforms within the Muslim consciousness. We know that this road is arduous and may take a generation. But we also would have never guessed that some of our most significant obstacles to fighting against Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood would come from within the Jewish community.

We know that most, if not all of this work, can only be done by Muslims needing essentially nothing short of revolution after revolution against the Islamist establishments, theocrats, patriarchs, autocrats, and kleptocrats across the planet. However, no one should for a second believe that we can right this ship alone. Our non-Muslim and especially our Jewish community partners play an invaluable role in our success and failures obviously especially when it comes down to countering anti-Semitism. We understand that this condition of endemic bigotry against the Jewish community emanates from centuries old Islamist interpretations of Islam as well as pan-Arab racial supremacism to name a few root-cause afflictions of the majorities of almost a quarter of the world’s population who happen to Muslim.

The reality, however, is that if the Jewish community’s greatest allies within Muslim and Arab populations are in fact the “modern,” “liberal” reformers who stand up within our own faith and ethnic communities against the anti-Semitic, Islamist, and Arabist demagogues—then they must be supported and augmented, not marginalized. If any of us reformers are going to ever make any headway at all, then the leadership of leading Jewish political and religious organizations must make strategic alliances with—eyes wide open, please. The importance of those alliances cannot be overstated as it provides important legitimacy to American Muslim groups domestically and abroad and also contrarily what can be a very dangerous sense of complacency when it comes to Islamist dissimulation and their facades of reform. I am here to tell you that all too often leading Jewish organizations grossly underestimate the profound impact they have in marginalizing their real allies by lifting up the lowest hanging fruit of our faith community’s current Islamist leadership across mosques and activist Islamist organizations in America. The reason the Muslim Brotherhood and Deobandi legacy groups like the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Muslim American Society (MAS), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) to name a few have such a greater audience and bandwidth is because they have had a two-plus generation head start in the West organizing and also being funded by the worst government actors and terror-sympathizers in the Middle East, bolstered essentially across the greater “neo-caliphate” of today with the 56 nations of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Ff the Jewish community’s greatest allies within Muslim and Arab populations are in fact the “modern,” “liberal” reformers who stand up within our own faith and ethnic communities against the anti-Semitic, Islamist, and Arabist demagogues—then they must be supported and augmented, not marginalized.

My goal here is simple. It is to shed the antiseptic of sunlight upon the relationships that many Jewish organizations make with American Islamists. It is one thing to proclaim that anti-Semitism is pervasive and Jewish leadership must make allies wherever they can. It is, however, quite another thing to fall for the dissimulation of Islamists and refuse to acknowledge their core ideologies as they tell groups like the ADL and AJC what they want to hear. It is not even a zero sum game. In fact, the elevation of Islamists by any leading non-Muslims in the West is just another nail in the coffin of reformers. Don’t be deceived.

It is important to truly understand the deep layers upon which the horrifically pervasive anti-Semitism of Muslim and Arab majority populations is based. As wise sages have said, the only way to prevent history from repeating itself is to truly understand it and learn from it. As a faithful Muslim, it is my obligation to be transparent about our own history and make sure that Muslims and non-Muslims alike learn from it and prevent the theocratic and ethnic supremacists from staying in power and ever gaining it again.

In fact, the elevation of Islamists by any leading non-Muslims in the West is just another nail in the coffin of reformers.

First, it is key to understand the history and ideology of Islamism or political Islam. The link between Islamism (also known as Islamist supremacism), and anti-Semitism is fairly simple. It is self-evident that supremacists from within a particular faith community will create and exploit hatred toward another faith community in order to collectively rally their own followers against a common enemy. Much as Jew hatred was a fundamental part of Christianity before the Protestant Revolution and the Enlightenment separated church and state, predominant interpretations of Islam, a much newer religion, promoted anti-Semitic imagery, profiling, and demonization of Jews as a tool for its devoted members’ own ascension into power among Muslim-majority communities and nations, or in Arabic, the Umma. My entire work and our mission at AIFD is founded upon the precept that the primary cancer from which all hate within the Muslim community emanates is the idea of the “Islamic State.” From that theocratic shariah “state” comes obligations to “jihad,” anti-blasphemy laws, and the current oppressive sharia legal system that puts Muslims above all others.

The primary cancer from which all hate within the Muslim community emanates is the idea of the “Islamic State.”

Understanding this inextricable connection between the demonization of Jews and the advancement of Islamist movements whether violent or not, lawful or not, (distinctions without a difference) is essential in order to break the link and finally give reformers the space to even begin the hard work of reforming various Muslim interpretations of the faith of Islam, as we have seen happen within Christianity. And yet, it breaks my heart to see so many in the Jewish community itself actively hampering and preventing such a positive change from occurring. We can all do better than this.

If the public goal is to simply fill dining halls with thousands of Muslim supporters and do “photo ops” with what appears to be large Muslim populations, then go ahead, the Islamist dissimulators of moderation are the only way to go and the only Muslim “partners” that can give you that today. They have summarily dismissed anti-Islamist dissenters from the ranks of the Muslim communities they control. But Muslims who may simply, for example, recognize the horrific realities of the Holocaust and condemn Holocaust denial while certainly exemplify a very good step forward, are far from reformational. That was the apparent low bar required by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) with their Islamist partners at ISNA. Sadly, many Islamists cannot even do that, but when they do, all they are doing is dismissing a radical conspiracy theory. It does nothing to treat the primary cancer of political Islam, the religious legitimacy of the Islamic state, and its theological underpinnings across all schools of current day Islamic jurisprudence in both the Sunni and Shia traditions.  I would submit that such a low bar is insulting to those of us with the honesty to address the more deep-seeded fundamentals of Islamism and its anti-Semitic jihad.

Unlike the other Abrahamic religions, Judaism has always had a strong liberal streak running through it, encouraging questions and varied interpretations. The Talmud makes this fact crystal clear. And this liberalism has carried through into politics, with the majority of Westernized Jews voting Democrat. That liberal history influenced by query, reform, and the politics of immigration has had an impact on the partisanship of various Jewish organizations in America. As such, the tendency toward “politically correct” approaches with sensitive issues of race and identity even when Muslim leadership conflate Islamist ideologies with race and identity in such contrived notions like “Islamophobia” is mind-numbing. The avoidance by leftist Jewish communities of the pervasiveness of such deep-seated ideological threats like Muslim anti-Semitism has been at their own peril.

Instead of tackling the phenomena head on, acknowledging how widespread it is and how increasingly problematic it has become given the recent influx of millions of Arab and Muslim refugees into Western Europe, many leaders in the Jewish community, in line with the media, academia, and the majority of Western governments, have preferred the nebulous and generic concept of “violent extremism” in developing targeted solutions against this domestic and global threat. But programs that only counter violence address the means of those who threaten the Jewish community while wholly ignoring the ideology or the ends that their movements seek. The common ideological thread running through the security threat that comes from Islamist extremism is the inherent supremacism of Islamism or political Islam. As I’ve testified to Congress many times, our programs should be entitled “Countering Islamism.” Full stop. Legitimate partners of Jewish communities should be anti-Islamist at best and non-Islamist at worst.

The avoidance by leftist Jewish communities of the pervasiveness of such deep-seated ideological threats like Muslim anti-Semitism has been at their own peril.

Anti-Semitism should not be viewed as just another “radical” symptom that arises from the supremacist mentality of Islamism. It is far more than that. It is its foundation. Translations and interpretations of our Holy Qur’an and Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Mohammed) distributed by virtually all Islamist governments are rife with anti-Semitic narratives, including translations and interpretations of some of the most commonly recited verses. Educational materials teach blatant Jew hatred, with children throughout the Muslim world raised to believe that Jews are the enemies of the believers and the descendants of apes and pigs. For example, the most repeated verse in the Qur’an among faithful Muslims in their daily prayers is the short opening “Sura al-Fatiha.” It states, “Guide us in the straight path. The path of those upon whom you have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked your anger or of those who have gone astray.” The only Saudi version approved by its Wahhabist regime footnotes the phrase in that Sura, “or of those who have gone astray” with *not like the Jews and Christians. Modern reformist Muslims interpret those in the “straight path” in an egalitarian way among all believers in God of all faiths. However, Wahhabists, Islamists, and other Muslim supremacists read this as exclusive to Muslims. This small example, repeated many times a day, is but one of thousands of examples of explanatory interpretations that radicalize Muslims away from more moderate interpretations and toward the supremacist Islamist ones. Genuine Muslim-Jewish discourse should demand transparency over apologetics about the grim realities of these interpretations and so many more.

Anti-Semitism should not be viewed as just another “radical” symptom that arises from the supremacist mentality of Islamism. It is far more than that. It is its foundation.

The importance of the underlying role of anti-Semitism and its rot in our communities here cannot be overstated. A Pew poll confirmed that “Anti-Jewish sentiment” is endemic in the Muslim world. If Islamists are a plurality, upwards of 30 to 40 percent of the population as was proven in the Arab-Awakening, pan-Arabist supremacists are another 30 to 40 percent giving many of these nations astronomical rates of anti-Semitism—up to 80 to 90 percent plus when their theological and racial hatred is combined. “In Lebanon, for example, virtually all Muslims and the majority of Arabs say they have a very unfavorable view of Jews. Similarly, 99 percent of Jordanians have a very unfavorable view of Jews. Large majorities of Moroccans, Indonesians, Pakistanis, and six-in-ten Turks also view Jews unfavorably.” As many of these nations slide back and forth from one fascism to the other, from secular fascism to Islamist fascism or theo-political fascism, one has to plainly see how the anti-Semitism long fueled for generations by Arab dictators like Hosni Mubarak, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Saddam Hussein, Bashar Assad, Muammar Qaddafi, or King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz was a harbinger of the type of violent and hate-filled societies they were sowing. These predominantly secular fascists and kleptocratic monarchs effectively used national media to propagate anti-Semitism in an “us versus them” mentality. They also effectively demonized Zionism in order to lift up pan-Arabism as a Machiavellian tool to keep the masses from questioning their authority. Their media propaganda machines made this happen.

For example, and there are thousands, under Egyptian President Mubarak, Egypt annually aired the virulently anti-Semitic and czarist Russian forgery, Protocols of the Elder of Zion. State media regularly denied the Holocaust while at the same time irrationally labeling Zionism as a new Nazism. Conversely, in April 2001, the government-sponsored newspaper Al-Akhbar published a paragraph extolling praise on Hitler for the Holocaust and complaining that it did not go far enough stating: “Thanks to Hitler, of blessed memory, who on behalf of the Palestinians, revenged in advance, against the most vile criminals on the face of the earth. Although we do have a complaint against him for his revenge on them was not enough.”

That propaganda and threat continue today in state-run media throughout the Middle East including the Al Jazeera media group. During the Obama administration, Qatar state media purchased potential access to more than 40 million American homes through its acquisition of Al Gore’s Current TV for $500 million. Only a few years later that venture, Al Jazeera America, failed miserably and is now defunct unable to get high-level journalists or viewer traction. However, their goal of influencing the American government, media, and academia continues unabated. Their strident Islamist correspondents like Mehdi Hasan are now anchoring leftist news media like MSNBC. When one of the Al Jazeera Arabic journalists posted a horrifically anti-Semitic “news report” in April 2019, rather than deal with the root cause, Al Jazeera Arabic unleashed its lawyers across the planet to threaten anyone who hosted the video, claiming they “fixed the problem by suspending the rogue journalists.” Our American Islamic Forum for Democracy was one of the sources that broke the story and still has its translation online.

The hate created by the Arab secular fascists also tellingly fueled a mass exodus of the Jewish people that began in 1948 at Israel’s founding when there were over 800,000 Jews living in Arab lands. Today, it is believed that there are less than 20,000 remaining. That exodus has carried over to the Christian community where it is believed over two million Christians have fled the Middle Eastern Arab community in the last 20 years. This vacuum of religious diversity only feeds the Islamist supremacist mentality.

The exploitation of Israel among Islamists is also virtually a litmus test for anti-Semitism. Apparent is the use of conspiracy theories by Islamist demagogues to portray a false narrative and fiction against Israel and thus by association all Jews. These conspiracy theories then spread like wildfire and are exploited by fellow global Islamist movements of all stripes in order to broaden the conspiracy against all Muslims and provide more excuses for the failures of Muslim-majority nations. When the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the neo-caliphate umbrella group of 56 Muslim majority nations, met in Malaysia, Prime Minister Mahatir told the crowd, “The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.” Reports were that the crowd responded with a “resounding ovation.” This is consistent with the Pew opinion polls in nations like Malaysia. Nothing short of revolutions will change this entrenched bigotry. Muslims who are anti-caliphism, anti-Islamist, and anti-jihadi should be the only partners that rise to an acceptable level of reform, modernity and respect for their Jewish brothers and sisters to embrace.  

Yet, sadly, apart from the Israeli government, virtually nothing is said to Muslim audiences by the Jewish diaspora about the central need to combat the institutional ideas of anti-Semitism. In fact, far-left progressive Jewish groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and Bend the Arc, have expressed sympathy and made common cause with anti-Semitic Muslim groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) or murderously hateful regimes such as Iran. These groups go so far as to partner with and regularly feature anti-Semitic speakers at their webinars, conferences, or national conventions. Except for notable exceptions due to how rarely they happen, larger groups like the ADL have sat on the sidelines as American Islamist groups born out of the Muslim Brotherhood have radicalized American Muslims and poisoned the discourse against reformist groups like the Muslim Reform Movement. Choosing party over substance when it comes to combating Islamist anti-Semitism, the likes of Keith Ellison (D-MN), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) receive little to no critique while instead their bandwidth is filled with other priorities like attacking the American right.

Yet, sadly, apart from the Israeli government, virtually nothing is said to Muslim audiences by the Jewish diaspora about the central need to combat the institutional ideas of anti-Semitism.

Nothing epitomizes the damaging nature of their silence more than the response of Democratic Party leadership to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s (D-Il) deceptive “Combating International Islamophobia Act,” which just a few months ago was a patently obvious Islamist influence operation to put into place a legislative proposal that sought to establish in the Department of State the “Office to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia.” A more appropriate name for this proposed legislation would have been “The American Caliph Act.” They simply wanted to empower a government official with the ability to label criticism of Islam hate speech—basically an anti-blasphemy czar in our own government. The endorsement of this legislation by groups like the ADL and silence from established groups like the AJC says everything one needs to know about how far off the mark so many American Jewish organizations are from identifying what is the best interests of America, modern American Muslims, and dare I say, their own Jewish communities.

And it was not just about this one act. Since day one, the Biden administration began peppering its rolls with Islamists and their sympathizers in all its corners with Palestinian Islamist sympathizer Reema Dodin at the White House to CAIR fundraiser Khizr Khan at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and now even an attempt to place the long controversial Rashad Hussain as Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom at the State Department. All of these appointments are flagrantly pro-Islamist and thus by definition facilitating anti-Semitism.

What these groups dominated by universalist and collectivist Jews fail to understand is that to patronize Muslim societies and communities with a different set of human standards than those embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a moral relativism that insults every Muslim and citizen inclined otherwise in those nations. It also expects less of Muslims living in the West who remain silent against the obvious intimations of anti-Semitism that beset so much of the Arabic and Muslim-dominated media.

Tough love is the highest form of respect. Demanding a minimum standard of nonviolence is by no means enough.

Moral relativism is exactly what the theocrats of the Muslim Brotherhood want in order to widen rather than close the divide between the ideas of liberty and Islamism.

That the Jewish community does not confront the scourge of Muslim anti-Semitism also makes it more challenging for those few Muslim imams, scholars, or activists with the courage to publicly take on the anti-Semitism of Islamist leaders. When these brave reformers arise, instead of being embraced by their Jewish brothers and sisters, they are either silenced, or not given sufficient attention or support. The examples of Islamist-inspired anti-Semitism leading to terror against Jews are sadly too numerous to list.

Common among Islamist thought of all stripes is the utilization of hatred of Jews to marginalize their antagonists from within and thus avoid substantive debate about their own theological authenticity within Islam. Islamism depends upon conspiracy in order to explain the weakness of the Muslim condition and the need for Muslim collectivism and Islamic statehood and, ultimately, neo-caliphism.

That the Jewish community does not confront the scourge of Muslim anti-Semitism also makes it more challenging for those few Muslim imams, scholars, or activists with the courage to publicly take on the anti-Semitism of Islamist leaders.

Anti-Semitism has long been a tool utilized by Islamists in order to invoke common sympathy from secular nationalists, who also fostered a hatred for Jews, in order to avoid national introspection. In fact, anti-Semitism is the one ideological litmus test shared by both secular autocrats and Islamists across Muslim-majority nations. At the UN, the radical far Left and the Islamists work hand in hand to turn the world community of nations against Israel and all Western values. When Venezuela, China, and Russia work together with Iran, Syria, and Qatar, this is the global version of the Red-Green Axis.

And at home, the Red-Green Axis is epitomized by the likes of radical progressive Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) working together with radical Islamist Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). They normalize anti-Semitism and its anti-Zionism. Through 2020 and 2021 too many American Jewish organizations stayed silent as the Black Lives Matter movement used the politics of identity and race in order to stifle free speech and destroy the foundations of America, essentially lifting a page right out of Islamist movements across the Arab world. Rewriting history is their goal. Whether it is the Taliban destroying statues of Buddha in Afghanistan or BLM rioters destroying statues of our founding fathers in the U.S., the goals are similar. The affiliation of BLM leaders with deeply anti-Semitic movements like the Nation of Islam and the Blank Panthers is hardly a coincidence. How can we Muslims, ready to combat them within our communities, do so when they are blindly tolerated or even endorsed by essentially everyone on the American Left, including leading Jewish organizations?

And despite all of this, too many American Jews have failed to develop the understanding and conviction to directly confront the anti-Semitism of global Islamist movements and unravel the very fabric and platform through which Islamist leaders spread their ideas. Because where anti-Semitism thrives, so too does the eventual threat against other faith minorities and the very foundations of democracy. Only with bold new partnerships that lift up honest allies and confront the dissimulators will our chances of victory against Islamists be realized.

where anti-Semitism thrives, so too does the eventual threat against other faith minorities and the very foundations of democracy.

Here are a few obvious things that Jewish leaders who care about the threats to their community (and to America) from Islamist anti-Semitism should do:

  1. Stop participating in the cover-up of instances of Islamist anti-Semitic activity.
  2. Educate the Jewish community about the history, nature, and extent of Islamist Jew-hatred and the specific threats posed by Islamists who seek to radicalize America’s Muslim community. Don’t fall for the absurdity that it is somehow anti-Muslim bigotry (so-called “Islamophobia”) to expose the anti-Semitism and separatism of Islamist leaders. In fact, accepting Islamists as de facto leaders of what are far more ideologically diverse communities is far more anti-Muslim.
  3. Monitor and expose anti-Semitic speeches and sermons of radical Imams across the country, much of which is already available online at Memri.org.
  4. Ask your local Muslim dialogue partners about what they teach their communities and congregations about who the Jews are. Ask them to show you the materials they use to educate their youth about America, democracy, women, gays, Jews, and Christians.
  5. Ask your local Muslim dialogue partners what they feel about the Declaration of the Muslim Reform Movement and if they would sign on to it. If not, their explanation should be very revealing. Therein are core principles regarding a rejection of the Islamist shariah state and the foundations of the modernity of the West. Do they reject the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights and support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
  6. Ask if they would allow Jews to address their communities about Jews, Judaism, and Israel.

4/19/2022 GEICO Blundered With Invite to Islamist, Will it Fix the Mess?

By Zuhdi Jasser
April 19, 2022

GEICO Blundered With Invite to Islamist, Will it Fix the Mess?

If anyone has reason to be furious about GEICO’s decision to invite Linda Sarsour to participate in a diversity seminar honoring Middle Eastern and North African Heritage Month for the company’s employees in early April, it’s the company’s corporate owner, Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway.

For a company whose entire raison d’etre is to mitigate risk, GEICO’s selection of Sarsour is bewildering. Without meaning to, GEICO provided a clinic on how companies can make gross errors in partnerships when they move forward without an iota of research or an eye toward actual risk for the company, its communities, and our country. Even a few moments with that elusive search engine, Google, would reveal Sarsour’s incendiary and divisive rhetoric is hardly the message that a national insurance company in the business of risk management should promote.

In 2017, Sarsour called for “jihad” in America, comparing Donald Trump, an elected president, with unelected authoritarian tyrants in the Middle East. And at the height of the George Floyd riots during which protesters were destroying storefronts and setting buildings on fire in cities throughout the country, she declared that reforming law enforcement practices in the United States was impossible. “Burn it all down, start over,” she said.

In both instances, Sarsour said she wasn’t promoting violence, but given the realities of intergroup conflict in the U.S., it’s hard not to conclude that some of her listeners would interpret her words as license for attacks on property owned by GEICO customers.

It just doesn’t make sense for an insurance company to promote such a speaker, but that’s what GEICO did when it asked Sarsour to speak at a celebration of Middle East and North African Heritage Month.

GEICO officials did the right thing by canceling Sarsour’s presentation, but the company put itself into the proverbial Islamist frying pan and is not yet out of trouble. GEICO is facing an onslaught of bad publicity from Islamist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its allies who now absurdly claim that its change in programming for its employees is surely a sign of “Islamophobia.”

Many Muslims would argue that the only anti-Muslim bigotry seen so far from GEICO officials was their perception that civilizational jihadists and Muslim Brotherhood legacy group sympathizers like Sarsour somehow represent “diversity” among the Arabic and Muslim communities. If events proceed as has other Islamist bullying episodes, CAIR and its allies will not stop until they force the company into apologizing for canceling Sarsour’s presentation and admitting to the sin of Islamophobia.

I’m certainly not a fan of cancel culture, as the Islamists have targeted me on a number of occasions. When I was targeted, however, I was booked to speak on the very principles our reform-minded Muslim organization promotes.

In this instance, GEICO did the right thing. When GEICO realized it booked the wrong person for the event they were hosting, the corporation changed direction.

By anointing Sarsour as a representative of Arab Americans with its invitation, GEICO unintentionally portrayed this community as being at war with the country where they live, and that’s simply not how it is, not to mention the venomous antisemitism that Sarsour embodies in her support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel.

Most Arabs and Muslims living in the U.S. are not interested in promoting “jihad” in the streets of the cities in which they live, nor are they interested inflaming tensions in a country that has endured so much violence in recent years. They want to live in peace with their neighbors and have little tolerance for Sarsour’s inflammatory and self-aggrandizing rhetoric.

Sarsour also brings Islam into undeserved disrepute with her antics. The cycle is all too predictable. First, she engages in divisive rhetoric that incites tensions. And then, when people complain, she calls them white supremacists and Islamophobes, transforming Islam from a pietistic faith that changes people’s lives into a club with which to abuse her opponents in the public square.

GEICO didn’t know how unpleasant Sarsour was, but they did the right thing upon finding out.

The company needs to do more.

In particular, GEICO needs to promote the work of moderate, reform Muslims on the American scene. Not only will this help improve intergroup relations in the U.S., but will preempt attacks from CAIR and its allies to portray GEICO as a bastion of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry in the U.S.

First off, GEICO should contact the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), an organization founded to advocate for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state.

GEICO could also contact the Muslim Reform Movement which seeks to “reclaim the progressive spirit with which Islam was born in the 7th century to fast forward it into the 21st century.” The organization’s website declares, “We support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by United Nations member states in 1948.”

The company should consider hosting a talk by Asra Nomani, Raheel Raza, or Soraya Deen. They are all Muslim Reformers and women’s rights activists outspoken against the separatist Islamist ideas Sarsour touts. Soraya praised the company for canceling Sarsour’s talk and confronted Sarsour’s rhetoric directly, declaring that she is “is proud of her hate of Israel, Israeli Jews, and Muslim reformers and atheists, not to mention conservatives, cops and the US military.”

GEICO made a terrible mistake by inviting Sarsour to speak at a “diversity and inclusion” seminar. Sadly, the cancelation of the event where she was slated to speak rendered the company vulnerable to attacks from Islamist groups like CAIR. The damage can be minimized and the attacks countered by highlighting Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. who love their country and want to see it succeed.

If GEICO does the right thing, it will help the U.S. turn a corner and start to heal from the ugly divisiveness and hostility that has dominated its public square for far too long.

It will also perhaps learn its own actuarial lesson in loss prevention.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser (@DrZuhdiJasseris a physician, a former US Navy Lieutenant Commander and founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) and co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement. He is also a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy. His weekly podcast, Reform This! can be heard on the Blaze Podcast Network.

 

{AIFD Commentary}” Biden bungles America’s final lap in Afghanistan”, by M Zuhdi Jasser & Karys Rhea, Washington Times, August 25, 2021

Washington Times
– – Wednesday, August 25, 2021

For 50 years, Joe Biden’s had a reputation for being on the wrong side of foreign policy. Not weeks after his decision to continue withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan absent sufficient strategic planning, the Biden-led departure has proved unthinkably horrific.

Defying many of his aides, who warned of the risks of withdrawing under such circumstances, America’s commander in chief has now subjected the Afghan people to an unrelenting, radicalized force of terror. Ryan Crocker, Obama’s former ambassador to Afghanistan, called Biden’s first decisive foreign policy act as President “damning.”

Reminiscent of how the allied powers in World War II left Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, Mr. Biden’s shameful moral abandonment of America’s responsibility will have drastic ramifications, not only in Asia and the Middle East but globally. Few argue that the United States should have stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years, let alone interminably more. Still, our incompetent evacuation and America’s subsequent collapse as a reliable partner will have 2nd and 3rd order consequences. And as our superpower status continues to erode, millions of innocent men and women in Afghanistan will now be enslaved under Islamic law. Vacuums will be filled and fought over by Russia and China as Iran continues to gain ascendancy in the region. China will take advantage of America’s weakened status and make seminal moves against Taiwan, as they have already threatened to do.

A civil war will erupt between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, whose leaders have already begun rallying to fight the terrorist outfit. Al-Qaeda, which the Taliban has been harboring for decades, will be reinvigorated throughout the world, as will Pakistan’s extremist forces. This, while Mr. Biden continues to pretend the nuclear-equipped country is an ally of the West. There will likely be another attack on our soil by Al Qaeda, in which case we will likely re-deploy to Afghanistan. Isn’t irony a gas? And as the balance of terror in the region shifts, Israel will be even more existentially threatened than they currently are. Perhaps for the first time, the Gulf Cooperation Council will also be existentially threatened, as will the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Consider the absurdity of America’s position now. There were only 2500 troops in Afghanistan. To assist with the evacuation, Biden is sending in roughly 6,000 more. A fully equipped Taliban now surround these brave soldiers. Instead of bombing military bases before the Taliban could acquire guns, ammunition, vehicles, and Black Hawk helicopters, we have allowed the jihadists a full-blown military, not to mention access to multiple biometric databases containing information on the identities of Afghan allies who aided coalition forces. Even worse, there are still an estimated 20,000 to 80,000 Americans and their Afghan supporters trapped there. How are they getting out?



The worst part of all of this is that it could have easily been prevented. That’s not to say we had to remain in Afghanistan to avoid the disaster we’re in now. Quite the contrary, American troops could have vacated once it became known that Osama Bin Laden was in Pakistan all those years ago. But to withdraw in this manner, foregoing an orderly transfer of power and public engagement of a transition process, with no formal handoff to the Afghani government and no reserve force, is shameful, especially when you consider that American still has a contingent of 700 troops in Kosovo, 28,000 in South Korea, and God knows how many in air force bases in Germany. Long after the Iron Curtain has come down, we are still “protecting” Europe, allowing them to skirt defense spending as they take advantage of the world order. Fine. But we should have learned early on that a Marshall Plan wouldn’t work in the Middle East. We saw it in Lebanon. We saw it in Iraq. And we’re seeing it again now. Instead of working with genuine Muslim reformers to develop a forward strategy of ‘muscular liberalism’ against the international threat of political Islam, we repeat the same mistakes, emboldening our enemies.

It’s no secret that our “nation-building” in Afghanistan largely satisfied the elite – scores of people got wealthy, including contractors parasitizing off the American military and the executive corps of the military themselves. So too did the Afghan president, acquiring four cars and cash flowing out the window, while our own government deliberately ignored his corruption. Contrary to Biden’s repeated lie that the Afghans were simply unwilling to fight and un-amenable to being trained, roughly 57,000 Afghan soldiers have died in combat hunting the Taliban since 2015. This includes more than 2,600 this year. So, what went wrong? What Mr. Biden isn’t telling you is that the Afghan army depends on American intelligence, on our ability to feedback information when they are out on missions. They also depend on American airstrikes, particularly in the eastern and northern provinces, where the Taliban has been hiding. Taking away air support and American input, essentially overnight, after creating tense facts on the ground, has, no doubt, eroded the Afghan soldier’s sense of purpose to defend his country.

On the training front, what Mr. Biden failed to tell us is that there is usually significant turnover when training an army. In this case, out of an Afghan force of 185,000 men (Mr. Biden initially lied and said there were 300,000), 25 percent did not stay, for a whole swath of reasons, including not wanting to be separated from their families, being frightened of treacherous encounters, or secretly sympathizing with the Taliban. Mr. Biden also hid from us that part of the two trillion spent in Afghanistan included educating Afghanis in gender identity politics – woke programming that the locals inevitably resisted, creating tension with their American overseers.

It’s hard to make any excuses for Mr. Biden’s old age and cognitive decline at this point. His lack of planning and disregard for those who have fallen undermine his efforts to push an agenda on any other front. He certainly can no longer make any serious claim to be concerned for the universal principles of human rights. He has lost the moral high ground, creating a deficit of trust among even our smallest allied nations.

What a moment this is in our history.

Remembering our friend – Courtney Lonergan

You may have heard that on Thursday, June 12, 2021, around 3:45PM, three shining beacons in our lives and our world, Courtney Lonergan, and her two oldest children Ali and Almira were dimmed, to only be brightened, more than ever, in Heaven above.

This has all been so unspeakably hard for all of us to fathom and understand for our family, at home, our activist family in our passion at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and our family globally at the Muslim Reform Movement. Courtney literally facilitated, led, and made productive every important meeting we had for almost 15 years. She also served selflessly on our Board of Directors at AIFD for the last five years. I know that forever, I will still continue to try, out of habit to pick up the phone and dial her Alaska area code or DM her (twitter @AlaskanMuslim) in order to ask her for advice in human relations, goal setting, life, and so much else. She had a treasured wisdom and righteousness.

Courtney, Ali and Almira are survived by Aracelli (14) who was at home when the horrific accident happened Thursday afternoon. Aracelli will especially need all of our prayers and support. Everyone who knew them loved them deeply. Ali shared his story with Pat McMahon as the Golden Rule Student of the Month. You can see it here: https://www.aztv.com/…/novembers-golden-rule-student…

A clip from a recent global Muslim Reform Movement webinar of ours is also below. Here’s a link literally weeks ago to our full discussion in one of our most recent discussions with Courtney and Asra Nomani from April where we talked about “Angels on Earth: Why Muslims should embrace Dogs as Pets”. See: https://youtu.be/ZKk3o-Yrajw

How will we continue do all this without her? We must. For. Her. Her family. Her faith. For God.

Every one of us at the Muslim Reform Movement (MRM) will testify to how much she loved her family, humanity and her faith of Islam. She taught us every day how to be loving, faithful, unbiased, fair, genuine, and humane. Each and every day as we continue to live by her example in humanity and her spirit, she and her children will look down on us in their infinite smiles.

AIFD has set up a dedicated Memorial Fund in Courtney’s family name. If you’d like to contribute any amount, you can donate at this link https://aifdemocracy.org/take-action/donate/ and please email us at info@aifdemocracy.org to confirm and/or just note in the submission note that funds are intended for the:

**Courtney Lonergan Memorial Fund

We will ensure that 100% of that donation is provided to her surviving daughter Aracelli for her support.

We will do our best to keep you apprised of any further information. There will be a celebration of life planned with many of her communities in the coming weeks.

Ramadan Kareem from AIFD— Tuesday, April 13, 2021

To all our Muslim friends and supporters on the occasion of Ramadan

Tomorrow, Muslims around the world will begin our observance of the holy month of Ramadan. During this month, the ninth month of the Muslim lunar calendar, all who are physically and mentally able to do so will abstain from all of both food and drink from dawn until sunset.

This fast is not one of sorrow, but of thankfulness: the month of Ramadan reminds us to give thanks for our blessings, while keeping the suffering in our prayers and doing what we can to help them. The ability and physical capacity to fast is a reassurance of the blessing of health. Often the first signs of illness is a loss of appetite and thirst. We honor and hold sacred the fact that Ramadan symbolizes equality among Muslims and among all human beings.

Each Ramadan, we at AIFD are keenly aware of the sanctity and safety of this great nation which we call home, and which gives us the comfort and freedom to sincerely engage in the humble spiritual renewal that is Ramadan.

After what seemed to be the neverending stressors of the pandemic, we are thankful for the blessings of emerging from 2020 in health and pray for those who who suffered any losses.

This Ramadan, just as we do every year, we also will reaffirm our commitment to advocate for all those persecuted on the basis of their faith or their choice to reject religion; those suffering from gender and honor-based violence; and to take firm action to end these injustices. We remain eternally committed to ending the suffering of those who remain suffering in Syria, and in other places where the diseases of fascism or of theocracy keep innocents oppressed. We are especially keenly aware this year of our continued and sadly ever increasing demand to confront the root causes of radical Islamism and its jihad. We will continue to pray this month to strengthen our resolve and empower our advocacy for freedom within all our communities.

For all those who fast out of free will and with sincere intention, we find common goodness and reward in it, and for all those who choose any way to commemorate this spiritual holy month of Ramadan we share with you in this communality.

May all your prayers and wishes for atonement that you seek form God through your fast and worship be heard and fulfilled.

>May we pray to end forever the attacks against people of faith at home and across the planet. May our prayers and fasting build a wall of protection around all sentient human beings across the planet. We are blessed to take this opportunity to wish Muslims worldwide a blessed and safe Ramadan, and a spiritually fulfilling fast.

Blessing always,

From your team at the …

American Islamic Forum for Democracy

AIFD Christmas Wishes “We send our Christmas wishes and prayers to all our supporters”- December 25, 2020

To all of our friends, members, and supporters, 

We at the American Islamic Forum For Democracy (AIFD) wish you a very Merry Christmas on this special holiday!

We pray that your day is filled with love, friendship and laughter.

We also pray that our friends in the Jewish community had a blessed Hanukkah. May you have enjoyed the peace and joy that the season represents and are able to look forward to the New Year with hope and excitement for what’s to come.

We know how stressful on so many fronts, 2020 has been for all. May this Christmas holiday bring your family’s yet closer far above and beyond the isolation that this year imposed on all of us. May we pray together for a healthy, open, and prosperous 2021, and may this holiday inspire us to increase our awareness of and gratitude for the many blessings we have been given as well as the enormous responsibility we have to serve and aid others. The battles that we fight for all Americans here at AIFD have continued through the pandemic, virtually and on all platforms. Please know that we are poised to continue to lead the fight for national security and for reform against political Islam (Islamism) and its byproducts.

May we, as brothers and sisters in humanity, use this holiday to grow closer to each other and to our Creator, and seize this opportunity to recommit ourselves to the universal values of human rights, individual liberty, and love for all mankind.

May all of your prayers be heard and your hearts filled with joy, as this year for the history books comes to a close and we re-commit to all our happiness, strength and challenges.

Yours in liberty,

Your friends at AIFD

American Islamic Forum For Democracy