Photo: Basiyr Rodney, left, an education technology professor at Webster University in St. Louis, meets May 1, 2015, in the Capitol with Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas. Rodney is vice president of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association and Poe is co-chair of a caucus working on behalf of the Ahmadiyya Muslims, a minority Muslim group that has itself been the target of Islamic extremists. .
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| Photo by Chuck Raasch, St.Louis Post-Dispatch. |
Source/Credit: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
By Chuck Raasch | May 1, 2015
WASHINGTON -- For Basiyr Rodney, it’s become less difficult to make the case that most Muslims like him oppose extremist groups such as Islamic State, even as the world has arrived at a “somber and seminal moment” in the struggle against terrorism.
“As we speak, the forces of ISIS have disrupted the lives of Muslims and non-Muslims in a large region of territory between Iraq and Syria,” said Rodney, an education technology professor at Webster University, at a meeting Friday between members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association and two members of the House of Representatives who support them.
The Ahmadiyya are a minority Muslim group consisting of a few million members scattered around the globe. Like Christians and members of other non-Muslim groups, Ahmadiyya have been persecuted, attacked and killed by Islamic extremists in Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere.
The Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association is a 75-year-old organization dedicated to religious freedom and community service that has chapters in about 70 American communities, including St. Louis. It has sponsored anti-radicalization programs aimed at Muslim youths on about 30 college campuses and waged similar campaigns on social media.
About 125 of its members — all men under age 40 — spent Friday meeting with members of Congress or their staff. One goal: passage of a congressional resolution directing the State Department to expedite refugee status for people in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East who are being persecuted by Islamic State.
The Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association annually conducts a blood drive on Capitol Hill on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks.
In an interview, Rodney said that as those attacks recede into history it becomes less challenging to make the point that a vast majority of Muslims condemn Islamic State, al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations.
Attacks on Ahmadiyya Muslims, which include the killing of 94 worshipers at a mosque in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2010, have aligned the Ahmadiyya with persecuted religious minorities, including Christians, around the globe, he said.
“It is a caricature of Islam, a political aspiration that is parading itself as a religion,” said Rodney, of Islamic State and other extremist groups. “It is not too difficult now, with social media, everybody has a squawk box (to make the distinction). I would say that it is easier than it has been in the past. People are aware. Good-minded people, fair-minded people, just-minded people are willing to listen, and they are hearing that message.”
In a speech to a group that included Reps. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., and Ted Poe, R-Texas, the co-chairs of the newly reformed Ahmadiyya Caucus, Rodney said that his religion’s belief “that the rights and property of Christians and others should be protected are not based on revisionist or moderate interpretations.”
Since its creation in the seventh century, the Quran “unequivocally says we should stand in support of all people, whether we know them or whether we do not know them,” said Rodney, who joined the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth in 1996 at age 16.
Speier and Poe thanked the organization for its work with young Muslim Americans.
“Your efforts to denounce and stop the radicalization of young Muslim men and women is deeply appreciated by all of us in this country,” Speier said. “The religious intolerance that we see today is frightening, and it then foments, I think, some of the militaristic actions that we have seen by some and that we must put down.”
Poe said that “efforts like this are a great way to expose the brutality of ISIS and to eliminate that philosophy that a lot of people throughout the world have: that all Muslims are the same, with a broad-swipe blame all Muslims for the conduct of a radical group of Muslims.”
Read original post here: St. Louis leader of Muslim group says battle against extremism at 'somber and seminal' moment
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