Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, said Saturday on Newsmax that Australian officials blaming a deadly attack on gun access are misidentifying the threat, calling it "an issue of Islamic terrorism" that governments and Muslim leaders must confront directly.
Klein, speaking on Newsmax's "The Count," pointed to what he described as the global scope of Islamist violence and said Western governments should stop avoiding religious and ideological labels.
"This is a Muslim issue and we have to call it out and stop talking about the nonsense that this is gun control," he said.
Debate over high-profile attacks often turns quickly to questions of firearms access and public safety policy, while critics of that framing say authorities downplay ideological motives when the perpetrators cite extremist causes.
Klein also said the solution requires change inside the Arab and Islamic world, including education reforms.
"We have to change the education systems in the Arab [and] Islamic world, where they teach hatred and violence," he said, adding that major Muslim-country leaders should deliver public condemnations of Islamist terrorism.
He cited comments he attributed to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi during a speech at Al-Azhar University as an example of the kind of message he wants amplified.
Klein quoted el-Sisi as saying, "Is it possible that 2 billion Muslims should want to kill the rest of the world's inhabitants? That is 7 billion people. We are in need of a religious revolution. You imams are responsible before the entire world is waiting."
Asked about appeasement and references to recognition of a Palestinian state, Klein said creating a Palestinian state would increase instability and danger in the region.
"A Palestinian state, first of all, would this be a larger Gaza, which would make it even more dangerous for the Jews in that area and would destabilize the entire area? It's a terrible, terrible idea," he said.
Klein said he wants leaders across the Muslim world to condemn Islamic terrorism in coordinated, high-profile statements, naming countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan, India, Pakistan, and Qatar.
"This culture has to be dramatically transformed, and it has to start with the leaders of the Muslim world, the imams," Klein said, adding that Western leaders should also publicly identify the problem as "Islamic terrorism."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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