M. Zuhdi Jasser is the founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD). A former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, a physician currently in private practice, and the author of The Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith, Jasser in an interview with National Review Online reflects on what happened in France, freedom, terrorism, and Islam. — Highlights:
· Militant Islamists are religious supremacists with a global mandate to subjugate minorities. Jews were the primary victims for the past century, but the past decade has seen a horrific level of persecution against Christians and other minority faiths as well as dissident Muslim voices. This latest mass execution of Egyptian Coptic Christians is another in a series of genocidal acts by Islamist savages.
· The October issue of their Dabiq magazine is a story called “Reflections on the Final Crusade,” in which they threaten to fly their black jihadist flag of death over Saint Peter’s Square at the Vatican.They mention Rome twice in “A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross,” the barbaric video they issued last weekend.
· Their ideology is spreading like wildfire, and they just increase the number of fronts whenever they begin to get cornered.
· These videos, each more grotesque and horrifying than the previous one, are actually for jihadist recruitment, declarations of war on Christians, Jews, and non-Muslims but addressed to militant Islamist Muslims all over the world, including the West. They are contributing to a rising call for genocide against Christians in order to gather various militant jihadist movements — al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc.— under the banner of ISIS.
· The war against Christians is being waged not just by ISIS but by its ideological Sunni forefathers of the Wahhabi Islamist movement, nurtured by the house of Saud and the Muslim Brotherhood and fed by Islamist benefactors from the Gulf.
· The fate of Christians is tied to the abysmal fate of all minorities, including dissident Muslims — of all victims of persecution under political Islam and its militant fascist offshoots.
· Simply, Islamist bullies will continue hammering their enemies — free thinkers and the free world in general — harder and harder into submission. They will stop only when they have something to fear themselves. Our weakness on every level has encouraged them. Islamists have now seen us cower from military fights across the world, while we also run from any ideological confrontation.
· We Muslims need to acknowledge that there is no difference between the militant Islamists who assassinated the staff of Charlie Hebdo and the imposition of sharia in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Pakistan. All the OIC countries have varying forms and degrees of repressive blasphemy laws enacted in the name of protecting Islam and the image of the Prophet.
· The centralization of Islam in the Islamist mafia that is the OIC, the neo-caliphate, has suffocated the diversity of voices that are needed to reform the faith.
· We need a new consensus across the globe: Islamists are the enemies of freedom, while Muslims who believe in liberty are our allies.
· On Egyptian president’s going to the Coptic cathedral for Christmas Mass: That was a good move to help repair the sectarian divisions that widened in Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood. The Copts are central to Egyptian identity, and President Al-Sisi is demonstrating that he would like to unify his fractured nation under a common nationalism for Egypt, not just for Muslims but for all Egyptians of all faiths.
Read interview: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414160/muslims-against-islamism-interview