Dr. Zuhdi Jasser on yet Another French Tragedy

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome back. I couldn’t be more pleased to say we have in the house, in a virtual sense at least, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, one of the men I admire most in America. He is an anti-Islamist Muslim who is speaking out for what I believe is many, many Muslims in this country who do not abide and do not want to be represented by or misrepresented by the Islamic supremacists of the Muslim Brotherhood stripe and the like. Dr. Jasser is the founder and driving force behind several very important initiatives, including the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and the Muslim Reform Movement. And we catch up with him a day or two after he sent off a very important letter to many of the leaders of the so-called mainstream media and we wanted to have him on to talk a little bit about it. Dr. Jasser, welcome back to Secure Freedom Radio. Great to have you, sir.

ZUHDI JASSER:

Well, it’s always good to be with you, Frank. Thanks for having me.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

So tell us about your letters to these leaders of the, well, I guess, networks and the most prominent of our newspapers.

ZUHDI JASSER:

Well, you know, since we formed our Muslim Reform Movement, we realised that we were bipartisan. Actually, of the fifteen organisations, most of them are left of center. And now, nine months into it, we said, wait a minute, we thought we would break through and have many slots on MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC. Get more interviews with regular on the beat reporters at the Washington Post, New York Times. And really, nothing has changed. Basically, we get about one out of a hundred interviews compared to the Islamists. And we said, you know, enough is enough. And I, at the American Islamic Forum, penned a letter that we sent overnight to the presidents and chief editors of these newspapers and networks and said, listen, you know, you may want to continue to air the grievances and the grievance narrative of the Islamists, but at least give us reformers equal time. At least recognise that we exist and there is diversity. It’s amazing to me that this so-called mainstream media that considers themselves to be all about diversity is really only about racial and ethnic diversity, but not about ideological diversity. And they’ve let one community, which are the Islamist lobby in Washington and New York speak for our faith community. And it’s a crime.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Let me ask you, who are these – these so-called Islamists? I mean, looked at from within the Muslim-American community, as you do, what banners do they fly under and what is their agenda, as you see it, and how, if at all, does it really differ from that of groups like the Islamic State or al-Qaeda?

ZUHDI JASSER:

Well, these groups operate under the premise that their faith identity is all about a political movement in which they are not necessarily bought into the social and legal contract of the American legal system of the constitution. But rather they see their Muslim identity as a party. So they’re all evolved from the Muslim Brotherhood movement, many of them. Some from the Wahhabi movement. And others from the Khomeinist movement. And they came here as immigrants, sometimes second generation, and they formed organisations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, all hatched initially by petrol Islamic dollars. And have since continued to operate almost as an evangelical Islamist movement to try to spread their ideas to the West and dominate our community by using the mosques as a venue not for spreading the faith, but for spreading this political movement and to put the West on defence. So while al-Qaeda and ISIS use militant, barbaric means to achieve the same ends of a caliphate, of an Islamic state, these Islamic organisations, under the banner of Islamic law and the banner of a platform of a political party, do so not by calling themselves, like they do more honestly in the Middle East as a Muslim Brotherhood or a Jamaat Islamiyya party, in the West they are deceiving us by calling themselves American-Islamic relations, Muslim Public Affairs Council, when in fact they’re simply political parties that want to put America on the defence, constantly be about a grievance narrative, say that Muslims are one voting bloc and that we are not ideologically diverse, that reject the ideas for reform. And lastly, most importantly, they work very closely with the OIC, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Those fifty-six countries that have very potent lobbies, each of them, in Washington and our voting bloc at the UN. These organisations here, rather than work to reform those governments and work for the liberals that are in jails in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, actually do their bidding in Washington and New York and in the UN.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

You just enumerated, I think very well, many of the agendas that the so-called human rights and Muslim advocacy organisations engage in. Is there not one other overarching agenda that I know as a former naval officer sworn to defend our constitution you find as outrageous and unacceptable as do I, namely, the imposition of what these guys call shariah in – as the code under which all of us, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, must live?

ZUHDI JASSER:

Absolutely. And the deception that they wreak is that they say, well, as a minority in America, they are not anarchists, they follow the law, but it is democratic in a Muslim majority country to put forth Islamic law. And what they expect Americans to be ignorant of the fact is that Islamic law, as Andy McCarthy and so many others have talked about, is 13^th Century law. The Reliance of the Traveller and books distributed by ISNA and other Islamist groups in America says apostates should be killed, says that women should be beat, other things that are just not compatible with our society. So when Nidal Hasan kills our officers, when Chattanooga shootings happen against our Army guard centers, our military are targets because the Islamic law that these Islamist groups believe in looks at a national identity loyalty of jihad based on loyalty to the global movement of Islam. And they reject loyalty to America, to secular militaries. And this is why we formed our American Islamic Forum for Democracy. And one of the primary tenets of AIFD, the support of the American military.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Zuhdi Jasser, when you interact with Muslims in this country and try to determine where their sentiments lie, my sense is that there is this phenomenon in our own community here as well as in their counterparts elsewhere, of this – Osama bin Laden called it the strong horse phenomenon. Would you speak to the importance, as a reformer within the Muslim community, interacting with other Muslims, trying to help them express the same sorts of sentiments you’ve just talked about, when you have the mainstream press and, for that matter, the government of the United States, promoting, if you will, as the strong horse, these Islamic supremacists.

ZUHDI JASSER:

You hit the nail on the head. And I mentioned this on FOX last night when I was asked, well, Zuhdi, you’ve been saying the same thing for years. What’s happening? Where are Muslims? Well, we’re the weak horse. We don’t have the platforms. We’re rejected. The reformists don’t have the control and the influence in media, in universities, in government. So we’re looked upon as the weak horse. And all surprised, by the way, why is Hamza bin Laden resurfacing this week? Because they have ISIS envy. They see that the strong horse is ISIS, so they’re trying to get back the brand of al-Qaeda. And so they see the West as retreating in defence, not even naming Islamism or shariah as the problem, calling for the head of Qatar and Saudi Arabia to work with us as allies rather than really what they are as our enemies. So the bottom line is, is that until they start to see us – just like, you talk to Natan Sharansky who’ll tell you that he knew he’d be free when he heard Reagan declare the evil empire the Soviet Union. So the bottom line is, is until these Islamist supremacists hear us begin to engage their neo-caliphate of the OIC as the evil empire of today, and engage reformists as the head of this sphere, they’re going to continue to hit us and hit us again and again. And yes, there actually, maybe one of the reasons ISIS is acting out is because we are targeting them in Raqqa and elsewhere, but it’s very ineffective. And more terror acts breed more of them because they find it to be effective in putting us on the defence and we need to change our strategy to a long term one that works that recognises honestly that Islam needs reform, but we’re going to take sides within the house of Islam.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Zuhdi Jasser, we appreciate all your work at the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, the Muslim Reform Movement, and in so many other ways. Keep it up, my friend. Come back to us. Stay safe in the meantime. Next up, we’ll talk with Bill Gertz. Right after this.