Andrew C. McCarthy, a decorated former federal prosecutor who won convictions in the 1995 World Trade Center bombings, has issued a warning to America: Beware of the Islamist intent to Muslimize the Western world through jihad.
Mr. McCarthy says he wants to alert the public about the Islamist challenge to Americans’ freedom in his book “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.” The book was released last month.
“While Islamists carefully execute their plans to impose Allah’s law, which directly contradicts the bedrock principles of American society, President Obama and the Left are not only asleep at the wheel, but complicit in the effort. Simply put, the prognosis for liberty could not be more dire,” he writes.
The alliance between Mr. Obama’s hard-left followers and radical political Islam, also known as Islamism, has its roots in a relationship that has been around since at least the last century, Mr. McCarthy said.
He said that people are now afraid to say anything negative against Muslims or Muslim groups because they think they would be perceived as racist.
A contributing editor at the National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, Mr. McCarthy, 51, is no stranger when it comes to dealing with the threat of Islamist terror. He was the lead prosecutor in the trial of “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman and 10 other Muslim terrorists who were convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
He served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York for 18 years. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he supervised the Justice Department’s command post near ground zero, and in 2004 he worked at the Pentagon as a special assistant to the deputy secretary of defense. Mr. McCarthy also received several commendations, including the Justice Department’s highest honors.
Mr. McCarthy said that his goal in writing “The Grand Jihad” is to help Americans see that while the ideology of those on the hard left and those of the Islamist party do not overlap, they conveniently align on several important issues. Both Islamism and the hard left are centered on authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies, Mr. McCarthy said, which is, each party wants to impose regulation on its people.
Even more important to the current threat is their rejection of capitalism as a corrupt and corrupting system, Mr. McCarthy said. Because of this, they share a common enemy and find an anti-America alliance convenient.
“They both need to eradicate the freedom culture [of America],” he said.
This shared need has meant a growing support for Islam among the hard left in the U.S., Mr. McCarthy said.
Working with Islamists, Mr. McCarthy said, are two kinds of people: progressivists, who fear that acknowledging the link between Islamist doctrine and terrorism will start a war, and the hard left, which finds a strategic advantage in denying the real threat and attributing the root cause of terrorism to those policies and political parties it dislikes.
Mr. McCarthy said the truth of Islamist doctrine will not start the war that progressivists fear, but is necessary in the fight against the spread of jihad in the U.S.
“I think people like me need to do a better job of convincing people the sky won’t fall” if we state the truth, he said. Jihad properly defined, he said, is “always and everywhere the mission to implement and defend Shariah,” which is necessary groundwork for Islamization.
Mr. McCarthy isn’t alone in his thinking.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born former Muslim who has publicly denounced Islam as a dangerous ideology, stated a similar message in her book “Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations.” In it, she writes about her experience with Islam and why she thinks it is a dangerous system that must be fought with strong competing ideas.
“The mainstream Americans, especially on the liberal side of things, seemed to think [jihad] is a problem Europeans have, this is not a problem that we [Americans] have,” Ms. Hirsi Ali said in a June 2 speech at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. “I noticed a naivete that I had seen in Europe years ago in America about the presence of radical Islam.”
The West is reluctant to embrace anything that might make it appear to reject Islam, Mr. McCarthy said. He said the uneasy desire not to offend Muslims is a clear symptom of the problem.
Mr. McCarthy said he sees moderate Islam as another possible contending force, put forth by those who claim Islam is a peaceful religion and that the violence comes from radical Islamist factions. He said he hopes the moderates can contend with their radical counterparts, but that Islamists have made a case rooted in the Koran for their position.
“The moderates are not going to win until they can come up with a cogent, compelling, rooted-in-the-scriptures moderate Islam,” Mr. McCarthy said.
• Michal Elseth can be reached at melseth@washingtontimes.com.
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