Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, former U.S. Navy commander and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), said Islam remains frozen in medieval political theology incompatible with Western democracy and warned that a global Marxist-Islamist axis is using the same radicalization playbook that produced the assassination of Charlie Kirk to destroy America from within.
“Islam, 1,445 years old, still has some reformation and separation of mosque and state, and that’s why I dedicated my life to that separation,” Jasser said on the Restoration Spotlight Podcast by Restoration News. “The historical process that the Judeo-Christian tradition went through ultimately culminating in what our founding fathers understood took a while, and I want to learn from that Americanism. It is not compatible today in normal Islam, and that’s why we need deep reformation. Islam has been stuck in its ossified 10th and 11th century interpretation for over 1,200 years.”
Jasser said the line between peaceful Islam and the most dangerous force in the world today is the line between a personal faith and a political movement that makes the Quran the constitution of the state.
“Political Islam has to do with the Islamic State, the identity where the Quran is not just a personal book but becomes the constitution,” he said. “It can be a source of law, but not the source of law. When they get into power, they see themselves as God. They see themselves as the adjudicators of what is God’s law and what is not. And therefore, we are simply slaves to that. It’s inhuman.””
The Trump administration signed an executive order in November 2025 directing the State Department and Treasury to designate multiple Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organizations, citing the Egyptian Brotherhood’s direct coordination with Hamas to recruit fighters into Gaza and the Jordanian Brotherhood’s role in manufacturing rockets, explosives, and drones, according to the White House.
Jasser said the term Islamophobia is not a defense of Muslim people but a legal weapon designed to criminalize free speech across the entire Western world.
“Islam is an idea,” he said. “It doesn’t have any rights. Human beings have rights, but ideas don’t have rights. They call it Islamophobia because they want to make free speech into blasphemy and thus create anti-blasphemy laws for the rest of the West. It’s trying to insulate Muslims from real, appropriate criticism.”
Jasser said the global alliance between Marxists and Islamists is not a coincidence but a coordinated strategy uniting 70 percent of the planet against Western freedom.
“That Marxist jihadist axis has united globally from the UN across the world, and 70% of the planet is either Muslim majority or Russia and China. They have a common enemy,” he said. “We need to understand that the infusions, whether it’s coming from billions from Qatar or billions from China or billions from Soros and the far left, they have a common means. We have to understand that radicalization is one and the same.”
The Muslim Brotherhood has affiliates in 70 countries with membership in the millions, operates openly in London, where it maintains a physical office, and has been designated a terrorist organization by Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, while the Trump administration has now begun systematically designating its branches as foreign terrorist organizations, according to congressional testimony and Treasury Department records.
Jasser said the assassination of Charlie Kirk followed the same radicalization playbook as jihadist terrorism and warned that DEI identity politics and Islamic extremism are two branches of the same anti-Western tree.
“The radical that assassinated my friend Charlie Kirk was radicalized through an identity movement,” he said. ” Whether it was online with transgenderism and other DEI-type issues, the bottom line is it’s right out of the book of jihadist radicalization — anti-Western conspiracy theories. They want to stop free speech. They want to destroy American ideals.”
Jasser said London is not a cautionary tale but a preview of exactly what awaits American cities that refuse to enforce assimilation and border security.
“We just look over to what’s going on in London, where you have this fusion 25 years down the road between open borders activists with very ultraviolent Wahhabists and Islamists,” he said. “You see how the secular government of Britain is even arresting people who defend themselves from Muslim rape gangs. These are people squeezed into cities where they’re having no contact with regular everyday Britain, where they might assimilate.”
A British government-commissioned inquiry found that grooming gangs sexually abused more than 1,500 victims in Rotherham alone between 1997 and 2013, with authorities repeatedly failing to act for fear of being accused of racism, and a 2025 national inquiry found similar patterns of abuse and institutional cover-up in at least 50 towns and cities, according to the BBC.
Jasser is the founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and author of A Battle for the Soul of Islam (Simon & Schuster). A first-generation American Muslim and 11-year U.S. Navy veteran, he has testified before Congress multiple times on radical Islam and served as vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Restoration News is an investigative outlet affiliated with Restoration of America, covering cultural issues, political funding, and border policy for conservative readers, with an emphasis on stories it says receive limited mainstream media coverage.
