Sam Westrop

Director of Middle East Forum's counter-extremism project

[M. Zuhdi Jasser @DrZuhdiJasser]

Well, hello, @Danburmawy. Look who now finally knocked on my door, only to be a "takfiri" by essentially calling me and my #colleagues apostates while also giving me to the moral equivalency of Hamas.

In short...

@DanBurmawy, I respect your right to reach your own conclusions about what is and is not "Islam." Many former Muslims have been close friends and allies in our fight against Islamism. But you must afford me and other self-described Muslims the equal right to understand, practice, and reform what we believe to be our faith and our relationship with God. As a naval officer and as a citizen, I swore I would die if needed to defend that right — for you and for us.

The very premise of our Muslim Reform Movement is that the predominant, normative versions of Islam — especially those dominating the Islamic establishment — need deep, revolutionary reform. The word "reform" means the current version is the problem. Hundreds of us have written, spoken, debated, and dedicated our lives to defeating the global scourge of Islamism — sharia supremacism, the Islamic State, and all its interpretations and instruments.

We reformers, dissidents, and anti-Islamists exist whether you engage with our strategy or not. We are just as dedicated to saving the West from theocratic Islam — regardless of the risk to our families. The Islamists will always target us long before they target you, because dissidents within Islam are the greatest threat to their theocratic leadership.

Those who surrender Islam to the Hamasniks and death cults of Wahhabism and salafi-jihadism — who treat patriots like us the way they treat Hamas simply because we disagree with you about our own faith — are surrendering one-fourth of the world's population to theocratic defeat that most of them will never accept. Look at the Iranian people: 80 of 90 million are trying to reject the Islamic state.

This battle against theocracy is profoundly American. It is blind to conclude a priori that Muslims can never do what Europeans did in the Enlightenment against theocratic Christianity. We don't come to this strategy lightly. It involves discarding most of the Hadith, tafsir, and oral traditions, and reinterpreting the Qur'an. My father has published a new translation of the Qur'an, and other modern reinterpretations exist. Yet your deep study conveniently ignores all of it — and instead grants the supremacist clerical establishment full reign over what is and is not Islam. In that, you and the Islamists agree on one thing: that they own Islam. Your acceptance of salafi-jihadism as the only "true" Islam is essentially unAmerican, counterproductive, and hardly strategic.

Your work may be essential to exposing the pathologies — the diagnosis — of the cancers within Islamic doctrine and history. But it offers no treatment. We are the chemotherapy to that cancer. You appear to be only hospice.

Our @CLARITyCoaltion is a large, diverse cohort of leading patriots, scholars, activists, and intelligent, sentient human beings whose ideas you negate and patronize wholesale — never engaging substantively, only repeating "Islam is a monolith" and insisting petro-normative Islam is the only Islam there will ever be. We have been doing this work for nearly 25 years since 9/11, and for decades before. I hadn't heard of you in this space until last year.

I won't relitigate decades of reform work here. You're free to study it — and I'm happy in whatever time permits to debate Qur'anic translations, the illegitimacy of most Hadith, and the need for a 21st-century new school of Islamic thought, a new mezheb. Our work stands on books, testimony, and scholarship — my own "A Battle for the Soul of Islam" among them — alongside Bernard Lewis, Bassam Tibi, Daniel Pipes, Asra Nomani, Raheel Raza, Fatima Mernissi, Abdullahi An-Na'im, Abdolkarim Soroush, Muhammad Said al-Ashmawy, and hundreds of scholars and activists, living and past, marginalized by petro-Islamist millions from Qatar to Saudi Arabia to Iran and Pakistan. My Oxford speech summarizes your intentional blind spot in ten minutes: .https://t.co/GNbTj3KRJw

Yes, the Islamists — the sharia supremacists, perhaps 500–700 million of 1.7 billion Muslims — are a threat. And yes, most of the remaining Muslims are asleep in this internal theological war. But those of us who are awake are not to be dismissed as nominal Muslims or nominal patriots. We oppose jihadism because our reform interpretation is inspired by America's history and its anti-theocratic constitutional framework. To ignore that is to exclude your best intellectual assets in this fight: human beings with a relationship to God who have chosen liberty.

In the end, I don't expect you to agree with us about Islam. I've now read the tone of your work since it appeared in the past year. Our point for those of us in these spaces for decades is about strategy, about respecting Muslim dissidents, about the human reality of our relationships with God — and most importantly, about the Constitutional reality of Americanism. Our First Liberty was essential to defeating Western theocracy in the Revolution. There is nothing more American than this debate.

-- @DrZuhdiJasser

@marklevinshow @glennbeck @SelfForCongress @ChipRoy @CLARITyCoaltion @Tyler2ONeil @YasMohammedxx @AsraNomani

[Sam Westrop @samwestrop]

More on the network in which Camp Arafah operates here: https://t.co/N1fmZXnPnz

[Sam Westrop @samwestrop]

Camp Arafah, a registered U.S. 501(c), claims to collect khums [a tithe] on behalf of the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, an act for which it must have expressly secured a license from Khamenei’s office. Is this not a sanctions violation?

[Texas Public Policy Foundation @TPPF]

Texas has a right and responsibility to protect its institutions from hostile foreign influence.

TPPF's new Defeating Islamist Radicalization initiative lays out a bold plan to do exactly that.

“Texas should aggressively identify and combat organized efforts to undermine our laws, radicalize vulnerable populations, or import foreign ideological conflicts into Texas communities.” - @Mariah_Selene

Read more here 👇
https://t.co/pg0qQtDQhz

[Texas Public Policy Foundation @TPPF]

Safeguards are overdue.

Texas schools should educate students, not serve as platforms for foreign-backed ideological influence.

Islamist networks and regime-linked organizations continue to build influence on American campuses.

[Texas Public Policy Foundation @TPPF]

Two Houston men pleaded guilty to helping move money to Iran.

One is already back on the streets and speaking at regime-linked events.

That's just one piece of a much larger story.

Read more from @samwestrop :

https://t.co/cKdhd1RqHL

[Sam Westrop @samwestrop]

How did a Houston Shia imam who worked with a designated terrorist organization in Iran acquire a U.S. visa?

And is the federal government tracking this Iranian-controlled Pakistani Khomeinist network operating all across Texas?

https://t.co/ToEUJ2gKFN

[Sam Westrop @samwestrop]

Baitulmaal is not the only Hamas-aligned Western charity tolerated by the Israeli government https://t.co/x3yrkoLVO6

[Sam Westrop @samwestrop]

Texas terror charity worker and anti-Semite Yousef Abdallah is in Haifa and Jerusalem. Why do the Israelis continue to let Western Hamas operatives enter so easily?

[Sam Westrop @samwestrop]

sources here: https://t.co/ogwSXS04SI

[Texas Public Policy Foundation @TPPF]

Unaccredited. Terror-linked. Foreign-backed. Running influence ops on Texas politicians.

That's TexAM — and Counter Extremism Islamist expert @samwestrop has the receipts.

Read the full investigation. 👇

https://t.co/0hegici1ZQ

[Sam Westrop @samwestrop]

@MaryEliseOBar FYI: https://t.co/i3RZIIJICN

[Sam Westrop @samwestrop]

@MQSullivan It's worse than we realized @MQSullivan : TexAM directors involved with terror support, violent foreign extremist movements, foreign political influence and even a stalking and "revenge porn" incident: https://t.co/i3RZIIJICN

[Sam Westrop @samwestrop]

FYI @TexasScorecard @TXHigherEdBoard @bwaltens

[Sam Westrop @samwestrop]

Uncovered by @TPPF : TexAM founder, when not publishing love poems to a Hamas terror leader, was apparently arrested twice for stalking, faced "revenge porn" lawsuit.
https://t.co/i3RZIIJICN