| Olde Tyme Religion |
| Islamist Cover-Up? Media Silent After Imam Fired in Sexual Assault Scandal |
| 2019-12-07 |
| [PJMedia] An Arizona imam has been accused of sexual assault, child abuse, misuse of funds, and falsely presenting himself as single in order to pursue female congregants while having two concealed marriages. One mosque quietly fired him after early accusations, but another has continued to employ him. An anti-Islamist Moslem reformer has condemned a media blackout on the story, suggesting that the local Moslem community is protecting a sexual predator due to radical interpretations of sharia. "Here is the story on the imam ’quietly’ fired from our mosque in Scottsdale," M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), tweeted. "Apparently he was also a sexual predator. So tell me again this has nothing to do with their shariah supremacism, radicalism and affinity for radical imams like [Siraj Wahhaj]?" Jasser was referring to a Religion News Service (RNS) article about Moataz Moftah, a holy man who teaches youth at the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix. The article cites an exhaustive report from the victims' advocacy group Facing Abuse in Community Environments (FACE) following an 11-month investigation into Moftah's alleged misconduct. FACE released the report on November 11. |
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| Dr. Zuhki Jasser MD: HRC Didn't Pass Out from Dehydration, It was Cardio or Neurological Disorder (VIDEO) |
| 2016-09-13 |
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser: What she had was a syncopal episode. She passed out. That’s either cardiovascular or neurologic. Now, her team wants us to believe it is dehydration. She didn’t appear to be dehydrated and that doesn’t get fixed in 90 minutes. So I can tell you that it really appears and if I let a patient with the condition of syncope leave my office, and not get admitted, and get evaluated immediately, that would be malpractice. So there’s something going on. |
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| CAIR Trying to Have Anti-Islamist Muslim Kicked Off Religious Freedom Panel | |
| 2014-02-16 | |
| [CNSNews] Having failed in an earlier attempt to scupper the appointment of a prominent anti-Islamist Mohammedan to a statutory international religious freedom watchdog, the Council on American-Islamic Relations ... the Moslem Brüderbund's American arm ... (CAIR) is actively trying to have him removed from the post. CAIR, a controversial lobby group that describes itself as "America's largest Mohammedan civil liberties and advocacy organization," wants the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) to investigate its vice-chairman, M. Zuhdi Jasser, questioning his suitability to serve on a body promoting religious freedom. CAIR has written twice in two weeks to USCIRF Chairman Robert George on the subject of Jasser, president of the non-profit American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD). On Tuesday, CAIR said AIFD receives funding from an independent foundation called the Abstraction Fund (PDF, 1.1 MB) which, it noted, also funds organizations "known for their active role in spreading anti-Islam prejudice." These other "notorious Islamophobes" benefitting from the foundation, it said, included the Center for Security Policy, a 26 year-old Washington think tank; Islam specialist Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum; terrorism expert Steven Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT); and Islam scholar and activist Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch.
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| Moderate Muslims Must Oppose Islamism | |
| 2013-04-24 | |
by M. Zuhdi Jasser
Perhaps Boston's terror may finally be the impetus to begin the long overdue process of retooling America's current counterterrorism strategies. Since 9-11, except for the Fort Hood massacre, we have been fortunate enough to avoid the kind of devastation and loss of life that we saw this week in Boston. That was certainly not for a lack of trying by our enemies, with over 300 arrests on terrorism charges since 9-11. Of these, over 80 percent were Islamists. I've said it before -- after 9-11, after Fort Hood, and after Times Square, this is a Muslim problem that needs a Muslim solution. | |
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| -Election 2012 |
| Radical Islam Joins the DNC |
| 2012-08-25 |
| Starting at the end of this month the Democratic National Convention will open with a focus on Islam. 20,000 Moslems are expected to attend according to the Bureau of Indigenous Moslem Affairs (BIMA), the national Moslem American non-profit coordinating the two days of events they claim are non-political. "Jumah at the DNC" begins August 29 and will start with a Friday afternoon jummah prayer followed by other unnamed programs and events, leading up to the Islamic Regal Banquet. The following day will be an all day Islamic Cultural and Fun Fest which will include discussions on the topics of Islamaphobia, Anti-Shariah, Middle Eastern Crisis, Patriot Act, National Defense Authorization Act and more. The purpose, according to BIMA, is to attract national and international attention to the plight of American Moslems and to hold political parties accountable for issues that affect them. However, a poor excuse is better than no excuse at all... not all Moslems feel that BIMA represents them and M. Zuhdi Jasser M.D., Founder and President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, has expressed serious concerns. |
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| Views Of Islam Clash At House Panel Hearing | |
| 2012-06-23 | |
| The biggest threat to American Moslems comes from extremism in their own communities, not from government surveillance or police profiling, a Moslem activist told politicians Wednesday. "The greatest threat ... is actually a theopolitical ideology that is hijacking my faith: ... Islamism," Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy told a House Homeland Security Committee hearing chaired by Rep. Peter T. King, New York Republican.
Mainstream American Moslem groups were "in denial" about extremism, "claiming victimization," and disparaging legitimate questions as "Islamaphobia and McCarthyism," Dr. Jasser said. But his views were sharply contested by another witness and even his qualifications to testify were questioned by committee Democrats during a hearing where widely differing views of the relationship between terrorism and Islam sharpened the partisan divide. "A person's ideology or religiosity is simply not an effective means of predicting terrorism," said Faiza Patel, the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice. Is it just me or does that statement make no sense to a rational person? "The best way to keep our country safe is to use facts to drive counterterrorism policy and using religiosity as an indicator [of potential terrorist activity] doesn't work," she added, citing research by the Rand Corp. think tank and the Pentagon. Rep. Laura Richardson, Caliphornia Democrat, volubly questioned the credentials of Dr. Jasser and the other two witnesses -- former news hound and counterterrorism scholar Asra Nomani and New York medical professor Dr. Qanta A. A. Ahmed. The dispute over the witnesses' qualifications was just one of many at a hearing where several points of view appeared to be talking past each other. Polling evidence showing that 5 percent of Moslem Americans actually had a "favorable" view of al Qaeda was cited both by Mr. King and Ms. Patel. Ms. Patel called that percentage "tiny" and noted the data also showed that Moslems were more opposed to the use of suicide kaboom and other violence against civilians than were any other religious group. Mr. King pointed out, however, that a 5 percent approval share "would come to more that 150,000 Americans." | |
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| What's the opposite of a Fifth Column? | |
| 2012-02-14 | |
| A Second Look at 'The Third Jihad' By Jeff Jacoby Did the New York City Police Department use "terrible judgment," as Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, when it showed a documentary about Islamist extremists -- The Third Jihad -- to more than 1,400 officers undergoing counterterrorism training? You might think so if you took your cues from a New York Times editorial calling the documentary a "hate-filled film about Muslims," or from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which declared that it "defiled our faith and misrepresented everything we stood for." Dr. Zuhdi Jasser fervently disagrees.
"As a devout Muslim I saw it as my responsibility to expose the radicals," Jasser says in The Third Jihad, which he narrated. "I resented that they were exploiting the religion I love." After al-Qaeda's murder of 3,000 Americans, Jasser recalls in the film, "I had expected to see Muslims in America taking to the streets and protesting against [Osama] bin Laden. Instead, in the years that followed, we saw many Muslim leaders standing up to defend or support the radicals." So he launched the American Islamic Forum for Democracy to defend American values, promote the separation of mosque and state, and expose the Islamist agenda behind certain influential Muslim organizations. Happily, he is not fighting alone. During the recent furor over the film, New York City Councilman Robert Jackson, a Muslim, refused to toe the CAIR line. "I initially thought from reading about it that it cast a negative image on all Muslims," he said. "In my opinion it does not. It focuses on the extreme Muslims that are trying to hurt other people." Similarly, the American Islamic Leadership Coalition issued a strong statement defending The Third Jihad as "factually accurate and important." You needn't take their word for it. Watch the film for yourself at TheThirdJihad.com, and gain crucial insight into one of the central struggles of our time: the war of ideas within Islam. | |
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| Islamic Group says no C.O. for Muslim Soldiers | ||
| 2010-09-04 | ||
An American Muslim organization is asking the U.S. Army to deny a Muslim soldiers request for conscientious objector status, accusing him of treason and urging the military to punish him to the full extent of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
But the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) says Abdo's claim is patently false. "Muslims serve with distinction throughout the United States Military and AIFD sees Abdos traitorous public assertions as a slap in the face to all American Muslims especially those Muslims who fight in our armed forces for the liberty and freedom guaranteed by the American Constitution," the group said in a statement it issued on Friday.
AIFD on Friday called Abdos claim a cowardly attempt to use his faith to make a political statement and said it belies the religious experience of the vast majority of Muslim-American troops who have found the time to perform their spiritual rituals. | ||
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| Extremist Conference in Chicago |
| 2010-07-01 |
| Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamic extremist group working for uniting the world under Sharia law, is scheduled to hold its second annual conference on July 11 at the Chicago Marriott Oak Brook. The theme of the event is, "Emerging World Order: How the Khilafah Will Shape the World." The organization has chosen the home of President Obama, the leader of the free world, to pursue its anti-democratic agenda by taking advantage of the freedoms it seeks to vanquish. "HT recruiters use religious language to pull the confused Muslim youth to their side in an effort to undermine American democracy. The danger of this conference is that it legitimizes HT as a mainstream organization and allows it to further spread its hate-filled message that divides Muslims and non-Muslims," Zeyno Baran, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, told FrontPage. Hizb ut-Tahrir has accurately been described as "a conveyor belt to terror" by Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, the moderate Muslim leader of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. Although the group condemns terrorism and doesn't publicly support violence, several of its members have gone on to become major terrorists, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The group may not embrace the tactics of Al-Qaeda but their goals are the same. Hizb ut-Tahrir's first conference in the U.S. was held last year in Chicago and was titled, "The Fall of Capitalism & the Rise of Islam." It was attended by between five and six hundred people, and one speaker openly called for throwing out the U.S. Constitution and putting Sharia law in its place. |
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| Olde Tyme Religion |
| Symposium: The World's Most Wanted: A Moderate Islam' |
| 2010-05-27 |
| In this special edition of Frontpage Symposium, we have invited four distinguished guests to discuss the question: Is there a moderate Islam? Our guests today are: Timothy Furnish, a former U.S. Army Arabic interrogator, he is a consultant and author with a Ph.D. in Islamic History. Tawfik Hamid, an Islamic thinker and reformer who is the author of Inside Jihad: Understanding and Confronting Radical Islam. M. Zuhdi Jasser, M.D. is the President and Founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD). and Robert Spencer |
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| US government doesn't know how to handle Islamists |
| 2010-02-07 |
 After the worst military base massacre in U.S. history, officials acknowledged that they failed to "connect the dots" -- the shooter had been corresponding with an imam tied to al-Qaeda and had condemned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a war against Islam. But Fort Hood gunman Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan wasn't the only one working on a Texas Army base the day of the shooting who had links to radical Islamists.At Fort Bliss, an experienced military trainer was teaching soldiers about his Muslim faith. He, too, had denounced government counterterrorism efforts, and public records show he and some of his closest associates had ties to terrorism suspects. But when The Dallas Morning News first inquired about the instructor, Louay Safi, military officials praised him. Only later did they say that Safi had been suspended from working on military bases pending a continuing criminal inquiry. Safi is a senior official of the Islamic Society of North America, the country's largest Muslim organization. ISNA has been consulted for years by Washington and is described as a partner in the fight against terrorism. In addition to serving as ISNA's communications director, Safi runs its program certifying Muslim chaplains for work in the U.S. military and prison system. He publicly denounces terrorism and advocates peace. Safi was also named by government prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in one terrorism case in 2005. His last two employers were implicated in other government terrorism investigations while he worked for them. He was never charged, nor included among the targets of those investigations. But Safi has called the widespread raids on Muslim organizations after 9/11 "a campaign against Islam" -- a term that 9/11 Commission director Philip Zelikow says is part of "the jihadi narrative." Safi has also complained that Muslims are treated differently from Christians and Jews when they do wrong. They are unfairly identified by and questioned about their religion, he says, treatment that can lead to isolation and aggression. "The extremist ideology responsible for violent outbursts is often rooted in the systematic demonization of marginalized groups," Safi said in an Internet posting after the Fort Hood shooting. Some view Safi's rhetoric as incendiary. Zuhdi Jasser is a Navy veteran who founded the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and has spoken publicly about the dangers of politicizing Islam. He said Safi's "separatist mindset of the world against Muslims" is the "mindset that created Hasan." Safi would not answer most questions from The News. But in a brief interview, he said the legal assaults on him and his associates even as Washington sought their advice represented the government's divided approach to Islam. "There are those who are prejudiced and would like to deny Muslims their rightful place in this country," Safi said, "and there are people who are more open-minded. It's as simple as that." Safi's case, however, is anything but simple. It illustrates not only the divisions in dealing with Islam but also the difficulty in knowing which dots to connect. "You have a schizophrenic government and a schizophrenic institution," Zelikow said, referring to ISNA. "The schizophrenia cuts right into how the government views the whole Fort Hood affair. We don't know whether to treat him [Hasan] as part of an international conspiracy or as a lone wolf who happened to have gotten solace from a radical imam." Much, much more at link. Well worth reading. |
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| Ariz. Muslim leaders face increased FBI scrutiny |
| 2008-11-18 |
| The FBI has sharpened its scrutiny of some Phoenix-area Muslim leaders because of their links to two controversial incidents and a federal probe into the financing of terrorist groups. No Arizonan has been accused of supporting terrorist groups or actions. However, a Mesa man was charged with lying to the FBI during the financing investigation. The events that triggered the stepped-up scrutiny were the federal probe into a Muslim charity accused of funneling money to the Palestinian group Hamas; a target-shooting episode in Phoenix this year involving a large group of Muslim men and boys firing hundreds of rounds from AK-47s and other guns; and the high-profile removal in 2006 of six Arizona-bound imams from a jetliner after passengers and crew complained of their behavior. Although some Islamic leaders say they understand the scrutiny, they also view it as another sign that innocent Muslims unjustly fall under suspicion because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "Whoever did Sept. 11, go after them and see who they are. I'm not going to pay for them. I'm not going to be guilty," said Marwan Sadeddin, one of the Valley imams who sued US Airways after being removed from a jetliner in Minneapolis. Like the others, he was questioned by FBI agents after the incident, in addition to being questioned about the arrested Mesa man. The FBI is monitoring the family and community ties among Valley residents involved in the jetliner, shooting and charity probes, said John Lewis, who runs the FBI's Arizona office. "All of these things come on our scope," said Lewis, the agency's former head of counterterrorism operations. The FBI routinely watches communities and groups that show patterns of radicalism seen in terrorism cases in the U.S. and Europe; those include radical Islamic theology, anti-Western political rhetoric and fundraising tied to terrorist groups. Lewis declined to discuss any details of the agency's monitoring activities. The only Arizonan arrested by the FBI is Akram Musa Abdallah of Mesa. He was indicted by a grand jury in August on one count of lying to FBI agents. The government contended in court documents that Abdallah falsely told agents he had not raised money in the 1990s for the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim charity that President Bush shut down in 2001. Five founders of the Texas-based charity are on trial in Dallas on charges of steering $12 million to Hamas after the U.S. declared it a terrorist group. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix physician and Muslim who founded an organization to counter radical Islamic teachings, said Abdallah's arrest, the target-shooting episode and what he says are the imams' extreme views bear vigilance. "You can't help wonder where this is going," he added. Shortly before noon on a sunny Sunday in March, two Toyota SUVs rolled to a stop along a dirt road in north Phoenix. About 20 young Muslim males climbed out, armed with assault rifles, a shotgun, a sniper rifle and handguns. The location near Happy Valley Road and 51st Avenue is a desert recreation site for off-road motorists, hikers and bikers, dozens of whom were enjoying the spring-like weather. For more than an hour, the shooters blasted away at a granite rock and empty cans in front of a hill. Officials estimate the fusillade totaled 500 to 1,000 rounds. Some shooters left before police arrived and detained 10 adults and five boys, including an 11-year-old. The young men and boys told officers the weapons belonged to their parents. They said they were not aware it was illegal to use firearms in the residential area. Six were arrested and charged with felony weapons violations in Maricopa County Superior Court. Among them were the 20- and 21-year-old sons of two imams at Phoenix-area mosques, as well as the 20-year-old son of Abdallah. More at link |
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