Islamist Quotes

How do we know when someone like Hasan is going to make his move and do we know he's an Islamist until he's made his move? He makes a phone call or whatever, according to Reuters right now. Apparently he tried to contact al-Qaida. Is that the point at which you say, "This guy is dangerous?" That's not a crime to call up al-Qaida, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy? ~ Chris Matthews

I think many thinkers and activists, even in the Islamist parties like the Muslim Brotherhood, and the people who left the Muslim Brotherhood to follow Abou el-Fatouh, these people do have an understanding that the relationship between religion and the state must be re-thought and re-assessed. They're not going to use the concept of secularism in any straightforward way, because the concept of secularism is still far too loaded in that part of the world. ~ Tariq Ramadan

I was in prison with pretty much the who's who of the jihadist and Islamist scene of Egypt at the time, and Egypt was the cradle of Islamism for the world - it's where it began and where jihadism began as well. ~ Maajid Nawaz

One of the credos of my life is taken from Viktor Frankl, a Jewish survivor of Nazi concentration camps, who was a psychiatrist and author. In his highly influential book, Man's Search for Meaning, he related that after the war someone asked him if he 'hated the German race.' He responded that he did not because in his view, 'There are only two races, the decent and the indecent.' That is how I divide the world. Not between Muslim and non-Muslim, black and white, or American and non-American, but between the decent and indecent. The issues I raise about Islam are not about the decency of Muslims, but about whether Islam in its traditional Islamist configuration is more or less likely than the American value system to produce good societies. ~ Dennis Prager

The message was wrong, I knew that now, but maybe the tactics were right. Perhaps we could use the methods of the Islamist groups to create a counter-Islamist movement, to do da'wah for the democratic culture? ~ Maajid Nawaz

The Islamist ideology took decades to incubate within our communities, and it will take decades to debunk. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Identity politics is killings free speech on campus, silencing Muslim women struggle, boosting both Islamism and the far Right and pushing reconciled Muslim voices to the fringes. It makes implicit assumptions about Islam - from an Islamist, Left or Right- perspective - and insists all Muslims must adhere to that definition or be regarded not truly Muslim. It ignores the fact that most ordinary Muslims are not in favour of a violent and that in surveys and polls they support British values more than the general UK population. Yet the myth persists that the ideology of Islamism is the true expression of what it means to be Muslim. ~ Tony McMahon, Sara Khan

America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization. ~ Newt Gingrich

It's a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die. Lest this seem hard to believe, just reflect on the world around you. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is still a part of the United Kingdom, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Chechnya, Corsica, Tamil Eelam, or Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, Egypt, and Uzbekistan are not Islamist theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe, and Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias. The numbers confirm the impressions. ~ Steven Pinker

Growing up in Egypt, I never saw the country as divided as it is today. We now have two main political groupings: the Islamist parties and the civil, or liberal, political parties. ~ Ahmed Zewail

After the dismissal of Hamrouche and until 1999, the state underwent a severe financial crisis and was on the verge of stopping all payments. Loans had to be negotiated with international financial institutions, particularly with the IMF, which required a structural adjustment program. State finances were saved by credits from the IMF and the European Union. Algerian negotiators, who played on the fear of the European states about the Islamist threat, said in effect, "It's either us, with all our defects, or an Islamist republic just one hour's flight from Europe." Alarmed to the point of panic, the West paid up without any conditions on how their credits were to be used. Policy thereafter fluctuated between rhetoric and laxity in letting deficits mount. ~ Ellen Lust

The Egyptian military plays positive and negative roles in Egypt, but the most significant single thing it did under Mubarak was to guarantee an Islamist victory once he left the scene. ~ Elliott Abrams

Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions. ~ Noam Chomsky

Young people in particular need real options to find a decent job and to lift their lives. I'm not sure the new Islamist governments will be the best to promote prosperity and growth. ~ Jose Maria Aznar

I can't just go up to people standing in the snow at the German-Austrian border and ask them: "Are you an Islamist?" When people flee to us from war zones, we first have to help. But we also have to be quick to look very closely at who it is that is coming. ~ Alice Schwarzer

I had a mind inquiring enough to question world events, as well as the passion fostered by my background to care, but I lacked the emotional maturity to process these things. That made me ripe for Islamist recruitment. Into this ferment came my recruiter, himself straight out of a London medical college. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Islamist-jihadist terrorism-a plague that has spread to almost every corner of the world-creates painful dilemmas for the peoples and decision makers who confront it. Its rapid, shape-shifting advance has sometimes confounded efforts to comprehend its origins, motives, and aims. Its sophistication in exploiting liberal values poses challenges and difficulties for the Western world, and for liberal democratic states in general, in attaining effective and balanced counter-terrorism policies. ~ Boaz Ganor

Universities are the most anti-Israel mainstream institutions in America. And Westerns journalists nearly always use militant or gunman to describe Islamist terrorists. For Reuters, BBC, the Associated Press, CNN, and nearly all newspapers, it violates moral neutrality to label even a man attempting to smash a bomb-laden car into a nightclub a terrorist. ~ Dennis Prager

Islamist terrorism has declared war against us, against France, Europe, the entire world. ~ Francois Hollande

Launching more drone strikes than Bush ever did and compiling a secret "kill list," President Obama's administration took the view that al-Qaeda was like an organized crime gang - disrupt the hierarchy, destroy the gang. Theirs was a concerted and dogmatic attempt at pretending that al-Qaeda was nothing but a fringe criminal group, and not a concrete realization of an ideological phenomenon with grassroots sympathy. They took this view in part because of how successful Islamist "fellow-traveler" lobbies had been in influencing Obama's campaign after the mistakes of the Bush years. For Islamists and their allies, the problem was "al-Qaeda inspired extremism," and not the extremism that had inspired al-Qaeda. ~ Sam Harris

In Egypt, a civil state means a modern nationalist state that is compatible with Islamist provisions. ~ Ali Gomaa

The driving force behind today's terrorist threat is Islamist fundamentalism. The struggle we are engaged in is, at root, ideological. During the last century a strain of Islamist thinking has developed which, like other totalitarianisms, such as Nazi-ism and Communism, offers its followers a form of redemption through violence. ~ David Cameron

What we have seen with Islamist extremism, whether it is in Mali or Somalia or Afghanistan, is that the disease is not necessarily the individual country. The disease is the Islamist extremism, and that's what we have to fight; that's the narrative that we have to beat. ~ David Cameron

The bigots, whether they are of the Islamist variety or the anti-Muslim variety, essentially agree on a few matters. One is their belief that Islam itself - not Islamism - is a supremacist ideology that is here to take over the world; another is that, therefore, Muslims and non-Muslims can never live equally and peacefully together, but must separate into religiously defined entities. ~ Sam Harris

For us, the idea was not to get involved more than necessary in the fight against the Russians, which was the business of the Americans, but rather to show our solidarity with our Islamist brothers. I discovered that it was not enough to fight in Afghanistan, but that we had to fight on all fronts against communist or Western oppression. The urgent thing was communism, but the next target was America ... This is an open war up to the end, until victory. ~ Osama Bin Laden

Any Westerner can now buy a Koran for a dollar and burn it, while any Muslim with a platform can transform that act into a fighting offense. As passions rise on both sides of the divide, Western provocateurs and Islamist hotheads have found each other, as confrontations occur with increasing frequency. ~ Daniel Pipes

The way to tackle Muslimphobia is to tackle prejudice against Muslims. What it is not is to pretend that Islamist extremism does not exist. ~ Maajid Nawaz

I have for some time now been deeply troubled by the growing difficulties faced by Christian communities in various parts of the Middle East. It seems to me that we cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are increasingly being deliberately targeted by fundamentalist Islamist militants. ~ Prince Charles

Radical and violent manifestations of Islamist ideology, which sometimes appear to threaten Pakistan's stability, are in some ways a state project gone wrong. ~ Husain Haqqani

Our country since its inception has been at war, every 15 or 20 years. But the war that we are fighting against radical Islamist jihadists is one that we must win. Our very existence is dependent upon that. ~ Benjamin Carson

I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate territory gives territory away to radical Islamist attacks against Israel. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

The fact that this organisation is called the Islamic State reveals something even deeper. In fact, it implies that every single Islamist party in Egypt, Iraq or Tunisia are not really representing Islam and Muslim people. Nowadays, political Islam is going through a crisis, however this crisis is necessary, for it will lead to a changing way of thinking. In order to make it out of this dead-end, reviewing political Islam becomes mandatory. ~ Tariq Ramadan

Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Remember, the Islamist view of democracy is: one man, one vote, one election, and that's it. ~ John Fund

On behalf of those you killed, imprisoned, tortured, you are not welcome, Erdogan!

No, Erdogan, you're not welcome in Algeria.

We are a country which has already paid its price of blood and tears to those who wanted to impose their caliphate on us, those who put their ideas before our bodies, those who took our children hostage and who attempted to kill our hopes for a better future. The notorious family that claims to act in the name of the God and religion - you're a member of it - you fund it, you support it, you desire to become its international leader.

Islamism is your livelihood

Islamism, which is your livelihood, is our misfortune. We will not forget about it, and you are a reminder of it today. You offer your shadow and your wings to those who work to make our country kneel down before your "Sublime Door." You embody and represent what we loathe. You hate freedom, the free spirit. But you love parades. You use religion for business. You dream of a caliphate and hope to return to our lands.

But you do it behind the closed doors, by supporting Islamist parties, by offering gifts through your companies, by infiltrating the life of the community, by controlling the mosques. These are the old methods of your "Muslim Brothers" in this country, who used to show us God's Heaven with one hand while digging our graves with the other.

No, Mr. Erdogan, you are not a man of help; you do not fight for freedom or pri ~ Kamel Daoud

If you trace the history of Islamist terrorism, you see that its founders were great admirers of European fascism. They read the texts of European fascism, they quoted them in speeches and letters. This is not from the Koran - the Koran doesn't teach you how to repress people; there's nothing in there about women having to cover their faces, there's certainly nothing about suicide bombing. ~ Bernard-Henri Levy

When I returned to the United Kingdom, I found that I could no longer justify Islamist extremism as the antidote. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Some Westerners [ ... ] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise. ~ Samuel P. Huntington

During my teenage years as an Islamist recruiter, I moved to live in self-contained communities in the London boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets. ~ Maajid Nawaz

We have to render Islamist extremism as unattractive as communism has become today. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Well, human rights defenders, freedom of speech advocates, lawyers that we spoke to said this is really an expansion. After the military ouster of Egypt's unpopular, but elected Islamist president in 2013, we saw political opponents being arrested by the thousands, really. Then we saw a popular comedian go off the air out of fear of retribution. ~ Leila Fadel

President Barack Obama and many liberal-minded commentators have been hesitant to call this Islamist ideology by its proper name. They seem to fear that both Muslim communities and the religiously intolerant will hear the word "Islam" and simply assume that all Muslims are being held responsible for the excesses of the jihadist few.

I call this the Voldemort effect, after the villain in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. Many well-meaning people in Ms. Rowling's fictional world are so petrified of Voldemort's evil that they do two things: They refuse to call Voldemort by name, instead referring to "He Who Must Not Be Named," and they deny that he exists in the first place. Such dread only increases public hysteria, thus magnifying the appeal of Voldemort's power.

The same hysteria about Islamism is unfolding before our eyes. But no strategy intended to defeat Islamism can succeed if Islamism itself and its violent expression in jihadism are not first named, isolated and understood.

From: Maajid Nawaz's article titled, 'How to Beat Islamic State', December 11th, 2015. ~ Maajid Nawaz

What we're seeing at the moment is people being radicalised or adopting Islamist, murderous Islamist ideology very, very quickly so that you have people that are not on the counterterrorism radar screen who then often, as a result of mental illness, will then attach themselves to this murderous ideology and then act very quickly. ~ Malcolm Turnbull

An Islamist is a Muslim who seeks to impose Shariah on others, including many 'cultural' or secular Muslims. ~ Dennis Prager

The greatest threat facing humanity is a radical Islamist regime meeting up with nuclear weapons. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

You can gesture at the transnational problem of Islamist terrorism all you like, but it's just hot air unless you invest in proper security on the ground in your own country, with the right safeguards to civil liberties. ~ Giles Foden

Not even a single German was murdered in Germany by an Islamist despite the fact that many Muslims were murdered by far-right Germans. ~ Jurgen Todenhofer

Increased sympathy for an Islamist cause, lack of integration, and the absence of acceptance of Muslims into British society makes it harder for Muslims to challenge Islamism and tough for non-Muslims to understand it. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Britain has become a net exporter of Islamism and jihadism. My former Islamist group didn't exist in Pakistan until we exported it from Britain. ~ Sam Harris

Ever since taking office, the Obama administration has sought to accommodate Islamist demands that freedom of expression be curbed, lest it offend Muslims and stoke violence. For example, in 2009, the administration co-sponsored a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution along those lines. ~ Frank Gaffney

Back when I was an Islamist, I thought our ideology was like communism - and I still do. That makes me optimistic. Because what happened to communism? It was discredited as an idea. It lost. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Saddam Hussein was not an Islamist. He's not a radical jihadist. He's not a radical Muslim. I mean, he was a - he was a Baathist. He was a secular - even though he professed to be a good and devout Muslim. ~ Rick Santorum

Progressives and Islamists are indeed on the same side. Their common disdain for Christianity explains why left-wing judges in America find any inkling of Christianity in the public square unconstitutional, while Islamist judges in the Middle East deem it executable. Their common view that life is expendable explains the left's embrace abortion-on-demand and why the Islamists don't hesitate to deploy their own children for homicide bombings. ~ Gary Bauer