The American Islamic Forum for Democracy sends its prayers and blessings to all those who lost loved ones in the horrific attacks of 9/11. We will never forget! And we will always stay vigilant. May God always bless the United States of America. Below for your review are a few of our media items from today available on the web.
1] (AIFD in the Media) Muslim Americans Post 9/11, Channel 3 KTVK TV, Good Morning Arizona with Scott Pasmore…VIDEO LINK at Channel 3.
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, AIFD President is interviewed on “Being a Muslim American in this country today — even eight years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks — has its trials. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix physician and founder of American Islamic Forum for Democracy, talks about it with azfamily.com’s Scott Pasmore.”2] (AIFD in the Media) Not Over Yet , The Washington Times, by Jennifer Harper (from Inside the Beltway) September 11, 2009
NOT OVER YET
Consider that the 9/11 attacks occurred 2,922 days ago. That’s about 70,000 hours. Are memories less visceral? Among some people, perhaps. Among others, an intense vigilance remains.
“The Muslim Brotherhood is on record as wanting to destroy Western civilization from within. While this thought may seem paranoid or farfetched, we have to remember that these organizations take a long view of history. The destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11 is just one tool in their arsenal,” Dr. Zuhdi Jasser tells Inside the Beltway.
The founder of the Arizona-based American Islamic Forum for Democracy cautions against militant threats – along with “soft cultural jihad … Terrorism is just a tactic. This is a long war, a long ‘contest of ideas’ between political Islam and Western liberty-based societies.”
Dr. Jasser adds, “Americans should mark this eighth anniversary of 9/11 by dedicating ourselves to being vigilant on all fronts – academia, government, media, business, and the interfaith community in the protection of our individual liberties and the founding principles of America. … Until Muslims can lead a movement of reform which separates mosque and state the Islamist threat will only continue to increase.”
3] (AIFD in the Media) Wariness linked to 9/11 has faded, but is that wise?
Editorial Board. The Arizona Republic . September 11, 2009 Wariness linked to 9/11 has faded, but is that wise?
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Sept. 11, 2009 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic
The eighth anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, has arrived and, thankfully, we have other things on our minds than mass death.
Yes, we should be thankful that, as a people, we are on to other things. But, in so many respects, the wariness has dissipated almost entirely. Can that be wise?
For years after 2001, air travelers did everything in their power to avoid traveling on Sept. 11. Today, slippage in airline traffic is almost entirely related to the flagging economy, not to passenger fears of being hijacked. OAS_AD(’ArticleFlex_1′)
The touchtone concerns of our post-Sept. 11 world are becoming cultural artifacts. Who anytime recently has bothered to mock the most current “threat level” color of the day? The once-burning racial/religious debate over radical Islam in this country has evaporated. Concerns about terrorists filtering in across porous borders rarely come up.
Things have changed. A long, bloody war in Iraq has come and effectively gone since Sept. 11, 2001. Iraq sparked countless spot fires of division and distrust, possible recriminations against officials in power in 2001, and the creation of a still-thriving subculture of conspiracy theorists who will never be convinced that Sept. 11 wasn’t a murderous inside job. But it too is moving, slowly, into the past.
Officially, the federal government doesn’t even recognize a “war on terrorism” anymore.
It is telling, too, that the president of the United States, on the eve of Sept. 11, would engage the public and Congress on a debate over health-care reform, a matter wholly unrelated to terrorism or the war against it.
Alive though Osama bin Laden may be in the hills of Afghanistan, the nation has lost its once single-minded conviction that hunting down the perpetrator of the Sept. 11 attacks is the most important national purpose.
Terrorists are patient in their awful work, of course. Al-Qaida agents spent five years watching and planning for their attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. And bin Laden spent eight years mulling the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City before trying again. Terrorists view time differently than we do.
M. Zuhdi Jasser of Tempe, the post-Sept. 11 embodiment of moderate Islam, worries we may be forgetting far too much.
“The disease (of radical Islam) is not going to go away,” said Jasser, who worries that leaders in the U.S. and Europe are beginning to accept the radicals as the face of Islam.
“I think there is a blindness to the ideas we are fighting,” he said.
Perhaps that is the fundamental question to ask ourselves now: Are we merely relaxing from the tensions immediately following Sept. 11, 2001?
Or are we, to our detriment, becoming blind to them?
4] (AIFD Commentary) Family Security Matters Editors Remember 9/11 Eight years later
September 11, 2009
by M. ZUHDI JASSER
As an American Muslim, the terror inflicted on America on September 11, 2001 struck me on many levels. The terrorists hijacked planes and my religion to attack my country and killed over 3,000 of my fellow Americans in the process. For me, it quickly matured my life-long mission to preserve the principles that founded the United States, and it made far more urgent the need to demonstrate to my fellow Muslims that the tenets of genuine liberty and freedom as they exist in America are integral to our faith.
Now, eight years after the attacks we, as a nation, continue to ignore the writing on the wall only to fall further and further behind in the contest of ideas. There seems to be a spreading denial over the threat and yet, it is obviously not going away. Just in the past few months, we have seen homegrown terror cells arrested in North Carolina and New York. And, over 30 attacks have been prevented since 9/11 – all of which have only one thing in common- the ideology of militant Islamism which fuels the radical Muslims who plotted them.
What has been lost in the public debate since the attacks is that terrorism is just the symptom of a much larger ideological struggle. American families need to realize that on every front from government, to media, to education, and business, today we face a national and global conflict between individual liberty and political Islam. Make no mistake: Islamists are at odds with Western civilizations and will use all the tools available to them to dominate. The militant Islamists will hijack planes and detonate bombs while the lawful Islamists will institute Sharia courts in Great Britain or exaggerate the victimization of American Muslims. Ultimately, Americans are then taken off course of our advocacy for liberty and against Islamism while the Islamists’ advance their own agenda seeking to erode public confidence in our institutions and our way of life. Their dreams of an Islamic state stand in stark contrast to the American dream which we should be teaching our families. It may sound farfetched to some, but read the writings of the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamists are patient and take a long view of history. They know that while death by a thousand cuts is not quick, it still is death.
Islamism is growing in America. In 2009, we saw Hizb ut-Tahrir go public with their convention in Chicago and actively and openly recruit followers to bring an end to our way of life. Yet our government is still quibbling over the language we will use to describe our efforts against their ideology which fuels terrorism.
The Obama Administration has naively called for a “Day of Service” this 9/11. At AIFD, we are calling for a “Day of Remembrance and Vigilance.” Americans must remember the horror of 9/11 and must be vigilant in not allowing Political Islam to wear down the principles that built our country. American Muslims in particular must be vigilant in protecting our faith from Islamists and act upon our responsibility to lead the national effort against Islamism while providing our own families an alternative to political Islam.
-M. Zuhdi Jasser is the founder and Chairman of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix, Arizona.
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