The Third Jihad and Syria: A wide-ranging Interview with Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser

by Jerry Gordon (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 the New 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 author Andrew 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). 

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.

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 5^th New York Police Plaza rally.

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