Liberals are "facilitating a denial" by neglecting to call the recent jihadist attacks around the world Islamic terrorism, said Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.
"It appears the Left needs an intervention, and they just want to continue the apologetics, because they want to push the narrative that it's not a problem. It's just a crime issue, and that they haven't failed," Jasser told
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum" on Thursday.
"The bottom line is they're facilitating a denial."
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Jasser said he was "flabbergasted" to hear former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean downplay the role of radical Islamist ideology in the Paris attack on Wednesday, where masked gunmen with purported ties to al-Qaida killed 12 people in the offices of a satirical magazine.
Dean told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that the "Muslim" label should stop being attributed to terror incidents, saying he thought of the Islamic State more like a "cult, not an Islamist cult."
"I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They’re about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect whatever for anybody else’s life. That’s not what the Koran says," said Dean, who was also a former Vermont governor and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate.
Jasser countered that the left had changed the narrative to "the fact that we have surrendered to radical Islam," and maintained that "appeasement isn't working" and actually worked against moderate Muslims.
"The comments from Gov. Dean marginalized the work of moderate Muslims that want to reform our faith, because once you say it's not Islam, you'll let the Islamists dominate our faith community," he said.
Some leaders in the Middle East who helped fuel radical jihadists were now implementing reforms because they understood the militants were "coming to bite them," Jasser said, adding the isolationist strategy of the Obama administration was "exactly what the Islamists want."
Jasser said there were people with close connections to the Obama administration who were sympathetic to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The people, he added, were "obviously affecting the policy, because that's what we see ... a pro-Islamist policy that's marginalizing the need for reform and to engage the issues of jihad and Islamism as being the greatest threat of the 21st century."
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