ANDREW McCARTHY’S BOOK REVIEWED

Posted By Ruth King on May 26th, 2010

  This review appears in the June Outpost http://www.mideastoutpost.com/   AND AN ADAPTED VERSION APPEARS TODAY AT:   http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.6313/pub_detail.asp  

THE GRAND JIHAD: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America

Andrew C. McCarthy (Encounter Books May 2010)

 

Ruth King

 

“The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend”

                                                                                    Marcus Tullius Cicero

 a reviewAndrew C. McCarthy’s remarkable new book The Grand Jihad—How Islam and the Left Sabotage America  puts the Obama administration, U.S. agencies tasked with maintaining our security,  Islamism and the hard left on trial.

McCarthy honed his prosecutorial skills as Assistant United States Attorney for the southern district of New York. From 1993 to 1996 he was in charge of the successful prosecution of  Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and other jihadists for plots to bomb the World Trade Center,  the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the United Nations complex, and possibly the FBI’s downtown Manhattan headquarters.

Long before 9/11 focused our attention on Islamic terrorism, McCarthy connected the dots between the 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane–the first jihad murder committed on American soil–and the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. He described this in devastating detail in his first book Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter, 2008).

In his new book, McCarthy lays out his case with scrupulous care, backing his arguments with solid research, including an impressive knowledge of radical Koranic doctrine and its guiding principles of jihad, sharia and  conquest.

The book opens with a bang. “And so he bowed. Barack Hussein Obama swept into the royal reception hall. With the election won and power assumed, it was suddenly alright to hype ‘Hussein’ again, and the new President had adjusted accordingly.”

The leader of the free world whose treatment of Great Britain bordered on rudeness bowed reverentially to a tyrant whose munificence has contributed to slavery, terror, sharia laws against women, jihad and a systematic infiltration and weakening of America’s institutions and values. Swiftly, McCarthy presents the accusation:  “The subversion of those values is Obama’s fondest wish: the work of his presidency, the Hope behind the Change: the President was bowing to a shared dream.”

McCarthy rejects the notion that Obama is a crypto Moslem. Instead he describes the President’s real faith as neo-communism, “…feverishly spiritual in its zeal to tear down the existing order under the banner of its all purpose rally cry ‘social justice’.” He argues that the hard left and the global Islamic project have shared purposes and seemingly irreconcilable differences are shelved for the greater goal. The so called “progressive” left engages in a masquerade with regressive Islam to sabotage the west which is conveniently packaged as “ fundamental change “

Islam and its ubiquitous apologists present their faith as  a“Religion of Peace” but  in this book the author revisits the bloody legacy of Jihad including  the PLO’s nouveau pacifist and “peace partner “ Abu Mazen/Abu Abbas ‘s participation in the murder of women and children and focuses on the Arab lionization of the “brave leaders and model warriors” who carried out the most brutal attacks. He is scornful of those who see the “root cause” of Moslem hostility to the United States in the Israel/Arab conflict. McCarthy writes: “Israel serves as the commentariat’s unified field theory for explaining all Islamic hostility.” Along with the formidable Diana West, McCarthy was one of the few who took General Petraeus to task for his recent echoing of the “unified field theory” on Arab hostility.

Under the heading “The Sabotage Campaign in Action” the author details the escalating defiance by Moslems and their representative organizations and the craven response by our institutions  including the Transportation Security Administration, the Pentagon, Congress, and Homeland Security. The Justice Department’s inability to distinguish between common criminals and terrorists gets the special scorn it deserves.

In the chapter “On Language” McCarthy demonstrates how talking about Islam morphed into the equivalent of a capital crime and he does not spare Obama’s predecessor George Bush’s efforts to expunge the word “Jihad” and absolve Islam. In spite of these efforts Moslems have escalated demands by intimidating publishers and the media. Terrorists and their enablers can get university tenure and high school students  will be indoctrinated in classrooms  as the American Textbook Council now recommended in a recent study “Islam in the Classroom.”

On immigration which is now a national obsession McCarthy cites the cautionary case of Somali refugees who are now naturalized citizens but are a locus for intense recruitment by Al-Shabaab (the Somali Al Qaeda affiliate) in mosques and schools. 

Chapter by chapter McCarthy indicts those who air brush the enemy; those in the academies,  the courts and the media and  our financial system who resolutely see no jihad;  who ignore the sedition emanating from mosques, madrassas and Moslem charity and fraternal organizations; who seek to destroy our institutions and values from within.

He courageously takes the indictment right up to the White House and the administration’s “lone isolated extremist” knee-jerk reaction to every terrorist outrage. He excoriates President Obama for his delay in making a public statement and the Justice Department for its rush to offer Miranda rights to the Christmas Day bomber Abdulmutallab who almost brought down an airliner over Detroit.

McCarthy displays a great knowledge of Islamic doctrine, but I leave it to other scholars such as Andrew Bostom to explain the myriad hadiths and suras of the Koran which drive the jihad. It is his methodical indictment of the enemy within and the scrupulously researched and documented evidence of the willfull blindness of our present leaders that is most compelling.

Since the book went to print we have had another episode with the Times Square terrorist. Even New York’s mayor Bloomberg speculated that the terrorist was “a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health-care bill or something.” Something indeed!

McCarthy concludes with this about American reponse: “No Yemen, no Britain, no Islam, no ideology. Most of all, no Grand Jihad. A lone ‘isolated extremist.’ Just like Nidal Hasan, the Christmas bomber had spontaneously combusted without rhyme or reason, impossible to predict, impossible to prevent. From this kind of threat America could not and would not defend itself.” And, writes McCarthy, “A half a world away, King Abdullah smiled. He knew a bow when he heard one.”

The morning news presents almost daily assaults to our sense of security by government and cabinet officials charged with our safety, and Andrew McCarthy is like an instant deployment force who responds in columns and blogs almost instantaneously.

This book is the most damning response of all and the best book on the subject I have read and I have read most of them.

Buy it and read it and make sure it gets to libraries and academies and legislators and the media. Encounter Books deserves kudos.

The enemy is within the gates.

 

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