One well-known Muslim American reformer says Donald Trump’s plan to destroy radical terror group ISIS has a major problem – it depends too much on the thugs in charge of countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Trump earlier this week made a speech televised nationwide, in which he outlined his plans for destroying ISIS – the doomsday Islamist cult that has torn up vast swaths of the Middle East and launched attacks all over the world. Trump said if elected he would employ the help of “our friends in the Middle East,” and would also find common ground with Russia and its ultra-macho President Vladimir Putin.
But the problem is that these oppressive regimes are polar opposites to U.S. ideals of freedom, liberty and democracy, Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, told Borderless News Online.
Just like ISIS, U.S. allies the Saudis chop off people’s heads for saying the wrong thing about Islam, and not much hard evidence is needed to prove this in a Saudi court. People can also be executed for cheating on a husband or wife – in a public circus of an event in which crowds gather and TV cameras are present to watch victims have their heads hacked off by a masked swordsman (Incidentally, it is usually the wives, not husbands, who are more severely punished for sleeping around).
And as for teaming up with Russia, Putin runs a country where dissidents can be thrown in jail on the whim of officials and where there are state laws against gays. There’s no real freedom of speech either, just ask the Russian punk rock group Pussy Riot.
“(Trump) wants to …have our military work hand-in-hand to defeat ISIS with governments and militaries that don’t share any of our values,” Jasser said. “Trump said he would find common ground with Russia…All those things are extremely concerning to me.”
The coalition of a dozen Muslim-American leaders to which Jasser belongs – the non-partisan Muslim Reform Movement –is calling for a worldwide reform of Islam, including freedom of religion, speech and gender equality in Middle Eastern nations that have none of these liberties. Jasser added that his comments are neither a positive nor negative endorsement of Trump.
Jasser is especially concerned over Trump’s desire to team up with U.S. “friends” in the Middle East, as Trump called them, such as Saudi Arabia. The country is the birthplace of Wahhabi Islam, a radical ideology built on the subjugation of women, who are not allowed to work outside the home, freely mix with men or drive a car, and must by law cover themselves in public from head to toe (although this varies in different parts of the country). They also must have a male “guardian” to make decisions for them their entire lives, and need his permission to travel abroad and travel inside Saudi as well.
The Saudis export their radical brand of Islam around the world, and the country’s ideology has influenced groups like ISIS, the only difference being that the Saudis have palaces and chop off people’s heads, while ISIS doesn’t have that kind of wealth, critics say.
The root cause of radical Islam is the not only the 13th century Islam coming from the Saudis, but the many Middle Eastern dictators the U.S. thinks are its allies, but yet create environments where radical Islam festers and grows, Jasser said, calling Saudi Arabia and Qatar the “cauldrons of radical Islam.”
In his speech, Trump said he would require that new immigrants to the U.S. be thoroughly vetted, contending that “we must also screen out any who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles.”
But Jasser said no U.S. ally in the Arab world could pass such a test, as they are tyrannical human rights abusers.
“A more muscular vetting of refugees – which I agree with – does not fit with a foreign policy that calls for a continuation of the Assad regime and the Russian client states of Syria and Iran,” Jasser said.
Breaking from the viewpoint of the Obama administration, Trump in his speech emphasized that the fight against ISIS is a battle against the radical Islamist ideology that drives that group and other terrorists to kill innocent people. Jasser said that part was refreshing to hear, since Jasser has slammed Obama in the past for not connecting terrorism with radical Muslim ideology.
However, Jasser blasted Trump because Trump, in his opinion, suggested the Arab world had been more stable under tyrannical dictators who ruled nations like Iraq and Libya, but who have been overthrown in recent years.
“Trump’s position…in the speech was somehow that Syria was stable or that Libya was stable,” Jasser said, referring to how those countries were before war broke out, as each were ruled by violent dictators.
“(Trump) even made it clear that he would not have supported the Iraq war, that somehow it’s worse today than it was,” Jasser said, referring to vicious dictator Saddam Hussein, whose regime tortured, raped and murdered scores of innocent civilians. Saddam’s son Uday even had the country’s Olympic athletes tortured and beaten up by his bodyguards for not winning gold at the Olympics.
“(Trump) talks about thuggish, tyrannical dictators as somehow being more stable and that they have nothing to do with the cauldrons of radical Islam that were brewed in Saddam’s Iraq or Bashar Assad’s Syria,” he said.
Indeed, ISIS has not only been influenced by radical Saudi ideology, but the group also grew out of the civil war in Syria.
It started with Syrian President Bashar Assad’s brutal treatment of his own people, which sparked protests in March 2011 that saw demonstrators demanding more freedom and an end to corruption. Assad’s security forces opened fire into crowds of protesters, which drew even more protesters, and this eventually became a full-blown civil war.
It’s understood that Assad’s brutality was one of the main reasons foreign fighters came to battle against the regime, some of them joining up with terrorists in a hodgepodge of groups fighting against Assad. As ISIS began to form, the group started to frame the fight as a sectarian war. Assad belongs to the minority Shia sect known as the Alawites, and Iran is one of its main backers. ISIS are radical Sunnis, and they’ve convinced their supporters that they are fighting a holy war for the future of Islam.
Jasser said he has a big problem with Trump telling the American people he can find common ground with Russia, whose leaders back Syria’s Assad and turn a blind eye to what many bill as Assad’s genocide against his own people.
“I was very sad not to hear Mr. Trump talk about the evil of Bashar Assad, as he talked about ISIS, that somehow he could get rid of ISIS by leaving Assad in power. As a Syrian American, I can tell you that is complete nonsense,” Jasser said.
Jasser said any candidate for president needs an overarching vision of how not only to defeat ISIS, but one that would focus on the possibility for more freedom in Arab countries ruled by dictators.
“When a candidate for president lays out a prospective vision of foreign policy, I would hope…that it would include a vision for the possibility of democracy and liberty and freedom,” Jasser said.
It’s time for the president to have a vision how to defeat radical Islam both inside and outside the U.S., he said.
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