Jasser: Pious Muslims are needed to defeat Islamists

Pious Muslims are needed to defeat Islamists
Posted by M. ZUHDI JASSER April 30, 2009 6:10 PM

In his first three months in office, President Barack Obama has focused on creating a relationship of "mutual interest and mutual respect" with what he has described as the "Muslim world."

His inaugural address, his interview on Al-Arabiya and his most recent visit to Turkey were all long on platitudes and apologetics toward the religion of Islam and Muslims, and short on specifics. Most recently, the new administration was even discussing making overtures with the "moderate" version of the Taliban in order to achieve a quick solution to the violence in Afghanistan, at the expense of long-term violations of human rights and Western ideals.

While the president's public relations initiative may yield some immediate benefit globally as measured in the public opinion polls of Muslims abroad, this is hardly the kind of real needed "change" that will last generations. Our security is not threatened by the tactic of terrorism, but rather by those individuals who are driven by the political ideology that feeds the mind-set of radical Islamism.



Islamists seek to put into place Islamic states and the associated system of laws best described as governmental sharia. Islamism is to this global conflict of the 21st century what communism was to the Cold War and Nazism was to World War II.

It seems the Obama administration is choosing the same old path of the cold war of appeasing the power brokers, which got us into the mess we are in. Siding with the lesser of two evils is not an option that will ever allow liberty-minded Muslims an opportunity to win a war of ideas against any of the autocrats already in power.

Whether it be the so-called "peaceful Taliban" or the deceptive Muslim Brotherhood, or even the Iranian Islamists who have chosen thus far to keep their fists clenched, they will tell Obama whatever he wants to hear in order to gain legitimacy and ascend to power. Once in power, Islamists will turn around and put into place their signature draconian systems. Obama squandered a rare opportunity in Ankara to reboot the contest of ideas between political Islam and the West.

Militant Islamists are simply more extreme, violent and intolerant than the nonmilitant Islamists. All have the same goal of eventually establishing a theocratic Islamic state. Simply describing their world as the Muslim world feeds into their false collectivization and division of the world by faiths.

Moderation among Muslims today is not gauged by their willingness to denounce wanton violence and the targeting of noncombatants, but rather by a Muslim's willingness to take on the ideology of political Islam in all of its forms from within the Muslim community. We should only empower those Muslims who are willing and able to take on this battle within the House of Islam.

While we are all distracted by valid immediate concerns over the economy, just one terror incident could quickly plunge us even further into defense against a spreading ideology with many metastases. The real threat of Islamist terror did not go away with 9/11. We have seen more than 30 attacks against Americans thwarted since 9/11.

The only ones who can marginalize and defeat the ideas of political Islam are pious Muslims who believe in their spiritual faith, but insist on separating religion and government. It is time to find ways to support an intellectual offensive promoting liberalism, freedom, equality and secularism over Islamism. This should be fueled by a public-private partnership of all faiths and led by Muslims from within the faith.

Government personnel oddly have been asked to strike from their lexicon terms like Islamism, jihad or Wahhabism. This is surrender in the war of ideas. If the language of our enemies is ignored, the needed civil war within Islam will never occur.

As long as this administration ignores ideology and focuses only on superficial public relations, the Islamists will continue to advance the ideas of political Islam while we sleep. It is time for a comprehensive, public domestic and foreign strategy against Islamism. It is time for Muslims to lead this effort with real American support and not just lip service.

M. Zuhdi Jasser is the founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy in Phoenix, Ariz. He spoke April 29 at the Rotary Club of Birmingham.

"At the end of the day, terrorists often are just acting on what they sense the majority really wants but doesn’t dare do or say." --Tom Friedman

December 3, 2008 New York Times
Op-Ed Columnist
Calling All Pakistanis By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

On Feb. 6, 2006, three Pakistanis died in Peshawar and Lahore during violent street protests against Danish cartoons that had satirized the Prophet Muhammad. More such mass protests followed weeks later. When Pakistanis and other Muslims are willing to take to the streets, even suffer death, to protest an insulting cartoon published in Denmark, is it fair to ask: Who in the Muslim world, who in Pakistan, is ready to take to the streets to protest the mass murders of real people, not cartoon characters, right next door in Mumbai?

After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered the imam and his wife at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son — purely because they were Sunni Muslims — where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets.

So what can we expect from Pakistan and the wider Muslim world after Mumbai? India says its interrogation of the surviving terrorist indicates that all 10 men come from the Pakistani port of Karachi, and at least one, if not all 10, were Pakistani nationals.

First of all, it seems to me that the Pakistani government, which is extremely weak to begin with, has been taking this mass murder very seriously, and, for now, no official connection between the terrorists and elements of the Pakistani security services has been uncovered.

At the same time, any reading of the Pakistani English-language press reveals Pakistani voices expressing real anguish and horror over this incident. Take for instance the Inter Press Service news agency article of Nov. 29 from Karachi: “ ‘I feel a great fear that [the Mumbai violence] will adversely affect Pakistan and India relations,’ the prominent Karachi-based feminist poet and writer Attiya Dawood told I.P.S. ‘I can’t say whether Pakistan is involved or not, but whoever is involved, it is not the ordinary people of Pakistan, like myself, or my daughters. We are with our Indian brothers and sisters in their pain and sorrow.’ ”

But while the Pakistani government’s sober response is important, and the sincere expressions of outrage by individual Pakistanis are critical, I am still hoping for more. I am still hoping — just once — for that mass demonstration of “ordinary people” against the Mumbai bombers, not for my sake, not for India’s sake, but for Pakistan’s sake.

Why? Because it takes a village. The best defense against this kind of murderous violence is to limit the pool of recruits, and the only way to do that is for the home society to isolate, condemn and denounce publicly and repeatedly the murderers — and not amplify, ignore, glorify, justify or “explain” their activities.

Sure, better intelligence is important. And, yes, better SWAT teams are critical to defeating the perpetrators quickly before they can do much damage. But at the end of the day, terrorists often are just acting on what they sense the majority really wants but doesn’t dare do or say. That is why the most powerful deterrent to their behavior is when the community as a whole says: “No more. What you have done in murdering defenseless men, women and children has brought shame on us and on you.”

Why should Pakistanis do that? Because you can’t have a healthy society that tolerates in any way its own sons going into a modern city, anywhere, and just murdering everyone in sight — including some 40 other Muslims — in a suicide-murder operation, without even bothering to leave a note. Because the act was their note, and destroying just to destroy was their goal. If you do that with enemies abroad, you will do that with enemies at home and destroy your own society in the process.

“I often make the comparison to Catholics during the pedophile priest scandal,” a Muslim woman friend wrote me. “Those Catholics that left the church or spoke out against the church were not trying to prove to anyone that they are anti-pedophile. Nor were they apologizing for Catholics, or trying to make the point that this is not Catholicism to the non-Catholic world. They spoke out because they wanted to influence the church. They wanted to fix a terrible problem” in their own religious community.

We know from the Danish cartoons affair that Pakistanis and other Muslims know how to mobilize quickly to express their heartfelt feelings, not just as individuals, but as a powerful collective. That is what is needed here.

Because, I repeat, this kind of murderous violence only stops when the village — all the good people in Pakistan, including the community elders and spiritual leaders who want a decent future for their country — declares, as a collective, that those who carry out such murders are shameful unbelievers who will not dance with virgins in heaven but burn in hell. And they do it with the same vehemence with which they denounce Danish cartoons.

Sheikh Qaradawi unmasked is no moderate

Leading [Muslim] clerics urge Muslims to learn about other faiths in drive to promote harmony Riazat Butt in Mecca June 7 2008 The Guardian [excerpt]

. . . There were signs that dialogue with other believers, specifically Jews, would be problematic….

Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi said he would only talk to Jews who denounced Zionism… His impromptu speech, lasting 15 minutes, garnered the loudest applause, proving his popularity among fellow clerics even if the west views him with suspicion.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Who is Sheikh Qaradawi? Hamas, as the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, has for many years looked to Qaradawi as a religious authority and relied upon his rulings

What does Sheikh Qaradawi say?

The unexpurgated views of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi about Israel, Jews, Zionism and Palestine have been revealed for the first time in an English translation [released in Britain] of a book he wrote in Arabic four years ago. [Jewish Chronicle article]
-----------------------------------

“Qaradawi personifies the combination of theological anti-Judaism, modern European antisemitism and conflict-driven Judeophobia that make up contemporary Islamist attitudes to Jews. “ .

..Qaradawi's classification of 'every Jew in the world' (p. 42) as an enemy may refer to contemporary events for its justification, but it has a deep theological purpose.

A chapter of the book is devoted to a discussion of the hadith [a record of a saying or deed of Muhammad] that reads: "The last day will not come unless you fight Jews. A Jew will hide himself behind stones and trees and stones and trees will say, 'O servant of Allah – or O Muslim – there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'"

This hadith is used by many radical Islamist groups to incite conflict between Muslims and Jews. It is quoted in article seven of the Hamas Covenant... Qaradawi refers to the hadith as 'one of the miracles of our Prophet' (p. 76) and then goes on to describe how this battle between Muslims and Jews is one of the preconditions that needs to be fulfilled before the Day of Judgement can come. He carefully explains, though, that the current fighting between Israel and the Palestinians is a start, but is not sufficient to fulfil the requirements of the hadith:

Quote from Qaradawi: “ [W]e believe that the battle between us and the Jews is coming … Such a battle is not driven by nationalistic causes or patriotic belonging; it is rather driven by religious incentives. This battle is not going to happen between Arabs and Zionists, or between Jews and Palestinians, or between Jews or anybody else. It is between Muslims and Jews as is clearly stated in the hadith. This battle will occur between the collective body of Muslims and the collective body of Jews i.e. all Muslims and all Jews. (p.77)

...Fatawa on Palestine includes Qaradawi's standard line on Palestinian suicide bombing, which is now well known. Suicide bombings are, in Qaradawi's words, '[O]ne of the greatest types of Jihad … valid heroic martyrdom operations and very different from suicide.' (p. 6) The suicide bomber '[H]as sold his soul to Allah and placed his heart on gaining martyrdom and purchasing Paradise.' (p. 7) Women suicide bombers '[A]re doing a remarkable deed that is blessed by Almighty Allah and considered an act of Jihad for the sake of Allah.' (p. 21)

From http://www.spectator.co.uk/print/stephenpollard/734631/alqaradawi-in-his-own-words.thtml

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It’s worth reading the following review by Gardner and Rich of Qaradawi’s book, Fatawa on Palestine, in its entirety. http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=172