A wide-ranging Interview with Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser
by Jerry Gordon, NEW ENGLISH REVIEW (March 2012)
On March 5, 2012, an unusual rally was held at One Police Plaza in lower Manhattan. The rally was held in support of the NYPD’s counterterrorism program and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who were the objects of ridicule in a media campaign initiated by the New York chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). The attack was supported by articles, op-eds and editorials from the liberal media which included theNew York Times, the Associated Press, The Nation and The Village Voice. The rally in support of the NYPD was organized by Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and the American Islamic Leadership Coalition. CAIR and the liberal media were outraged by the showing of a three year old film, The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America, produced by the Clarion Fund.
The film, narrated by Dr. Jasser, detailed the support of CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups for what former Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and authorAndrew C. McCarthy had called The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. The “grand jihad” that McCarthy had written about was detailed in a Muslim Brotherhood document unearthed at the Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial in Dallas, Texas in 2008. The document revealed how the Muslim Brotherhood seeks to undermine the foundations of our constitutional democracy by eventually supplanting US law with Shariah. The defendants in the Holy Land Foundation trial were convicted of funneling upwards of $35 million to the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas. The Third Jihad threw a spotlight on the leaders of CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups who were unsurprisingly caught on film supporting Hamas (the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood affiliate designated by our State Department as a foreign terrorist organization).
The New York Chapter of CAIR was outraged by the release in December 2011 of findings from a Freedom of Information Act request by the Brennan Law Center at NYU Law School. The FOIA findings indicated the NYPD had allegedly shown
The Third Jihad to thousands of police officers and cadets. CAIR had previously criticized a 2007 NYPD counterterrorism report on radicalization at fundamentalist mosques in New York. The findings from the NYU Brennan Law Center unleashed a media campaign by
New York Times and the Associated Press against the NYPD, the Clarion Fund that produced
The Third Jihad and the film’s narrator, Dr. Jasser. Just before the March 2012 rally, the
Timespublished an editorial, “
Surveillance, Security and Civil Liberties” which alleged the NYPD engaged in “spying on law-abiding Muslims in the US.” CAIR-New York was emboldened to hold rallies before City Hall in Manhattan by the fact that the FBI, under pressure from CAIR, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and other Muslim Brotherhood groups,
purged alleged “Islamophobic” documents from counterterrorism training materials. Moreover, there was further support for their demands on view in a
press conference held in Chicago with local CAIR Chapter leaders, the Chicago Police Chief and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former White House Chief of Staff, rejecting the counterterrorism efforts pioneered by the NYPD regardless of their success.
Among the speakers in the 2009 production of The Third Jihad were former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former CIA director R. James Woolsey, NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. The narrator, Dr. Jasser, is a Muslim, though he is considered to hold and espouse heterodox beliefs by the mainstream Muslim community. These beliefs include respect for the laws of this country, separation of mosque from state, political democracy, liberty and freedom, and rejection of Shariah law in the US as not being based in reason. Adding to that, has been his support for America’s valued ally in the Middle East, Israel. Jasser has been in the forefront of endeavoring to awaken American Muslims to support these bedrock Western values against the threat of the seditious activities in support of violent jihadist doctrine which is propounded in texts and sermons preached in many American mosques. Such activities have given rise to several instances of homegrown terrorism, most notoriously, the Fort Hood Massacre in November 2009 by Maj. Nidal Hasan, a Palestinian American. For his views, Jasser had been labeled a “devil” by al Qaeda. Jasser testified about this threat in March 2011 before a US House Homeland Security Committee chaired by New York Congressman, Peter King. That hearing convened to investigate the connection between radical Islamic doctrine and homegrown terrorism. King was one of the prominent speakers at the Manhattan rally in support of the NYPD. Also included were representatives from the 9/11 Families, Former Muslims United, the Lawfare Project of the Middle East Forum, Interfaith Groups and the Center for Security Policy.
Jasser, a medical doctor and former US Navy Lt. Commander, is the son of political refugees from Baathist Syria who came from Aleppo and settled in America in 1963. Jasser was raised in the traditions of the diverse population of mid-century Aleppo that included Kurds, Alawites, Christians, Druze, Shia and fellow Sunnis. Jasser’s upbringing in his transplanted family’s American environment fostered his appreciation for the democratic values and tolerance under US laws. Given the rise of the revolt in March 2011 in Syria, Jasser founded
Save Syria Now! and became the spokesperson for the
Syrian Democratic Coalition (SDC). SDC is an emerging group of ethnically and religiously diverse Syrians who want to create a secular federal republic in Syria. Jasser hopes the SDC might emerge as a third way between the secular fascism of the Baathist Assad regime and its likely replacement by the theological fascism promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood and fundamentalist Salafist preachers leading the Sunni majority there should Assad fall.
Against this background we had the opportunity to interview Jasser just prior to the March 5th New York Police Plaza rally.
Watch this You Tube Video of Dr. Jasser’s testimony in March 2011 before the House Homeland Security Committee.
Jerry Gordon: Dr. Jasser, thank you for consenting to this interview.
M. Zuhdi Jasser: Thank you for inviting me.
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