Following the terror attacks in Brussels on Tuesday, Ted Cruz compared fighting radical Islamic terrorism in the Muslim community to fighting gang activity through law enforcement. New York’s police commissioner attacked Cruz for these statements, but Muslim doctor and Navy veteran M. Zuhdi Jasser defended the Texas senator, saying building relationships with law enforcement is exactly the right tool for fighting radicalization in Islamic communities.
Jasser, founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and author of A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith, spoke with Fox News on Thursday morning. Jasser defended the substance of Cruz’s remarks:
I’m not ready to give up any of my civil rights, all I’m saying is that as American Muslims, we patriotically want to help our community, help our country be safe. We want to engage and embrace police, homeland security, and if we’re going to engage them, we need to welcome them into our communities, into our mosques: not for illegal wire taps, but for engagement and relationship building. That happens through monitoring, through knowing who the communities are, who the businesses are.
“That’s not unAmerican,” Jasser insisted. “It is, in fact, American for them to do on-the-beat police work where they know us and who we are.”
Jasser argued that the liberal response to Cruz’s call for closer police monitoring of Islamic communities actually fosters radicalism.
Actually, it doesn’t embrace communities. What they’re doing is simply allowing the Council on American Islamic Relations and other grievance groups to dominate the narrative in the Muslim community — that we are somehow under siege. And what that does, actually, is radicalize our community, that we are under siege, rather than embracing American freedom and working against Islamo-Patriotism and the pools that fester the radicals that are created within our midst.
In his response to Cruz, Bratton emphasized the “irony” of Cruz being protected by Muslim police officers. Jasser noted that in this statement, the commissioner “is actually making Cruz’s point.”
We are part of the military, the homeland security, the police, and our mosques are open. … We’re not afraid of relationships with the police, and this type of siege-like response feeds into partisan divides rather than uniting America as one in a community against Radical Islam.
The radicalization takes years, and in order to have a good short-term strategy, we need a long-term strategy about how to defeat the theocrats [supported by] ideas from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and all over the world. You can’d to that, unless you follow the trail of the ideas.
Jasser ended on a sober note, declaring, “Not all Muslims are Islamist, but all Islamists are Muslim.” In order to effectively combat radical Islamic terror, Muslim communities need to team up with law enforcement. This, Jasser argued, is what Cruz meant, and it is spot on.
Watch the video here:
https://youtu.be/LxkCBpg8Utk
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