Secure Freedom Radio Sits Down With Dr. Zuhdi Jasser

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back and joined by one of the men I admire most in America these days. He is Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, medical doctor by training, specializing in nuclear medicine. A lieutenant commander, now retired from the United States Navy, in whose service he also practiced medicine. But he’s best known as a leader and extraordinarily inspirational force within the Muslim community for a pro-American, anti-Islamist policy approach and sort of organizing effort, notably expressed, recently, in something he co-founded, called the Muslim Reform Movement. He is the author of a terrific book, A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith. Dr. Jasser, welcome back. It is so good to have you with us, sir, as always.

ZUHDI JASSER:

Thank you, Frank. It’s always great to join you. Appreciate it.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We had a very important hearing last week chaired by Congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania in the homeland security committee of the House of Representatives. You were one of the featured witnesses. Describe for our audience kind of the major themes and outcomes of that hearing and, in particular, what was said by the administration witness, a fellow by the name of George Selim, in particular.

ZUHDI JASSER:

Well, the hearing was basically called about the issue that in order to begin to target our enemy we need to identify them. We need to identify radical Islamist terror. And my position was simply that the CVE program, which is the center of axis for all homeland security and also globally right now with who we determine who our allies are to help us in the fight against violent extremism, and we can’t identify what that is. That’s a tactic and I – my position is that we should shift that to a center of axis of countering violent Islamism. And the witness for homeland security, when asked who were his partners, he – on one very problematic level, identified basically all these Islamist groups that are Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups. But on the other, basically then exposed that – not just violent extremism, there’s a cognitive dissonance in an administration that on the one hand labels and identifies all of its partners as being Muslim and yet once they deny the fact that Islam or, the way I see it, Islamism has a role in radicalizing Muslims, so you know, I think we exposed that. And I also exposed the fact that the underbelly of this is not only the domestic organisations whispering into the administration’s ear that you can’t target Islam, that that’s bigotry, but on the other side of the spectrum is all of these countries that are shariah states, that are part of the OIC who we supposedly call our allies and we let them basically guide and control the way we approach homeland security and we can’t hold homeland security accountable for the precursors of radicalization, which every case has the same way, which is Islamist ideologies, adherence to groups like the Taliban, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, etcetera, and we can’t hold them accountable to that unless we start identifying the enemy as radical or even political Islam.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Let me just drill down on one aspect of it. It’s not just violent Islamism that is a problem as you’ve really described and experienced first-hand. You have these Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups, as you call them, that are engaged in their own form of jihad, I guess they call it civilization jihad. Whether they’re influencing and subverting American policy or whether they’re creating networks that are used by the violent jihadists, they are part of the problem, too, are they not?

ZUHDI JASSER:

Oh, absolutely. Basically, the point of my testimony was that we are not calling for the outlawing of the precursors. And whether it’s hate speech or not, most of it is hate speech, whether it’s antisemitism, misogyny, as long as they’re not calling for violence, in this country we do not outlaw hate speech. Be it the Nazi party, the communist party or others. However, we cannot ignore that the civilizational jihadists that believe in enclaves of shariah law based in shariah courts, that believe in treating women as second and third class citizens inside the mosques, that have sermons that call for the eradication of gays and Jews and are profoundly and deeply anti-Semitic, those things are protected speech. But yet, I can’t believe it’s not on the radar of homeland security. When you talk to homeland security, it really is and yet they don’t want to admit it because they’re afraid of being labelled Islamophobic and bigoted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and all of their masters in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Just one last question about the hearing. The Democrats on the dais made much of the fact that they were unhappy with this so-called Countering Violent Extremism program that he administers in the Department of Homeland Security. This seems to reflect a bit of a pivot that many of these Islamist groups you’ve been discussing, including CAIR, have made in recent years. They engineered this approach to saying it’s not jihad, it’s not shariah, it’s not Islamism, it’s violent extremism that we got to focus on. And yet now they seem to be all about trying to undermine that program that they helped build, CVE program as it’s called. What’s going on with that, Zuhdi, as you understand it?

ZUHDI JASSER:

Well, it’s the classic denial where their strategy is always initially, as policies are being set, to say that Islam has nothing to do with it. And then when the reality starts surfacing, which is ninety-nine percent of the work has to end up being around radicalisation, whether it be in Boston or Chattanooga or San Bernardino by Salafi jihadist groups and homeland security ends up dealing with, for the most part, Muslim groups, these then apologists end up saying, oh, look, you’re targeting Muslims. I mean, Minneapolis is a great example. We’ve dumped tons of resources into the quote-unquote CVE program there, and you still have over fifty radicalised jihadists that have gone to fight for al-Shabaab, ISIS and other groups. We just had the mall stabbings, etcetera. And yet the groups, the Somali-led groups, not the reformers, but CAIR and others that are led by Somali immigrants are saying, oh, it’s anti-Muslim, it’s bigoted, they’re constantly keeping us that are trying to keep America safe on the defence and even though it’s a program that they helped set up, the reality hits them in the face, which is we end up focusing on Muslim groups. And I would tell you, actually, it creates more bigotry by not being specific about Islamists because then they have to have this bigger net that does end up focusing on a lot of Muslim groups, etcetera, that they may not need to instead of focusing on the ideology, which is Islamism.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And I’m struck – I’m looking here at a large poster that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, this group established, we now know, by Hamas to wage political war inside the United States and raise funds for Hamas and so on, they got a publication in 2016 entitled Confronting Fear: Islamophobia and Its Impact in the United States and they insist that you, Dr. Jasser, are part of what they call the inner core of the US Islamophobia network. Tell us what’s up with that, quickly, if you would, and why, you know, this is evidence of a serious misplaced priority inside our government.

ZUHDI JASSER:

CAIR’s entire strategy as part of the lobbying arm of the OIC is to make sure that the West never gets savvy to the connection, connect the dots directly between political Islam and militant Islamism. And so what they do – the biggest threats to them are Muslims that really expose the truth of the battle within the house of Islam. So they commit takfir, they will say who is and who is not a good Muslim. No different than president Obama a few days ago on CNN explain that the Muslims of Baghdadi and ISIS are not real Muslims, that’s not real Islam, so they peddle this idea that they can determine who is and who is not Muslim and what is and what is not Islam in order to control the narrative and thus control the situation, which is the establishment of the Muslim leadership, domestically and globally, is Islamist, it is the – the power structure is those who are theocrats and they will do anything to malign, slander, and libel any Muslims. I’ve had it – I’ve suffered it in my own mosque, nationally. They don’t deal with the issues, the fact that we’re actually pretty orthodox, we love our faith, we fast and pray. This doesn’t matter to them. They want to label us irrelevant, not scholars, because we are actually the biggest threat to their legitimacy. And therefore they want to destroy our brand as being Muslim and Islamic and they want to dominate the monopoly of what is and what is not Islam.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Dr. Jasser, thank you for your time today. Come back to us again very soon. Next up, Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler joins us. We’ll talk with her about Gitmo and more, straight ahead.