America must wake up to threat of Sharia

Should we hold that people are no longer free to govern themselves, to make their own law irrespective of any religious code?Should we abandon the republican democracy our Constitution guarantees in favor of a theocracy?

Should we no longer guarantee freedom of conscience and of speech, personal privacy, economic liberty, and protections against cruel and unusual punishments?

Should we turn our backs on the bedrock principle of equality and skew our law to favor men over women and the members of one religious creed over all other believers and nonbelievers?

Islamists, the proponents of Sharia, Islam’s authoritarian legal and political system, insist not merely that we should but that we must. And we are not merely talking about terrorists, not by a long shot.

Members of the world’s most consequential Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, speak bluntly of conducting a “grand jihad” to “eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within.”

That’s how the top Brotherhood official in America put it in a 1991 memo to the organization’s global leadership — a campaign he described as “sabotage.” Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s canonical inspiration — and probably the world’s most influential Muslim cleric — brays that Islam will “conquer America” and “conquer Europe.”

The Islamists could not be more serious, or determined. To be sure, their sabotage campaign exploits the atmosphere of intimidation created by jihadist terror. But their “grand jihad” is mostly a nonviolent affair, marching through our institutions: government, academe, media, the courts, the financial sector — all aspects of society.

That is the conclusion of a group of national security experts that recently released its study “Shariah: The Threat to America.” Modeled on the “Team B” of a generation ago, which questioned the folly of detente as a strategy for dealing with the Soviet threat, the new study takes issue with government’s regnant security policy, premised on the theory that the threat to our way of life comes only from a tiny group of “violent extremists.”

To the contrary, Islamism is a mainstream ideology to which millions of Muslims — only a bare fraction of whom would ever participate in terrorism — are beholden. Islamists and Muslim terrorists agree on the goal: the implementation of Sharia to strangle individual liberty and foster Islamicized societies.

They differ only on methods and pace. Islamists are not moderates even if they don’t kill in order to get their way, and they target not only the West but millions of Muslim moderates everywhere who embrace Enlightenment principles.

One needn’t believe the United States is in danger of imminent conquest to see that the patient Islamist approach can work. Just ask recent observers of Europe about its countless “no go zones” — communities police no longer patrol, effectively transferring sovereignty to the local Muslim leaders.

Our nation needs to understand the breadth of the Islamist challenge. President Obama instead accommodates it. Although the Brotherhood is banned in Egypt (where it has a history of terrorism), and although the Justice Department had only recently proved that the organization and its American offshoots were at the core of a conspiracy to finance Hamas, the administration took pains to invite Brotherhood members to Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech on Islam and the West.

Moreover, Islamists are welcomed by government policymakers, sponsored on State Department “outreach” junkets, and even invited to advise our national security agents on how terrorism should be investigated.

The administration has even collaborated with the Organization of the Islamic Conference — a bloc of Muslim governments that promotes Sharia — on a U.N. resolution that imperils free speech under the guise of combating “hostility” against religion.

The Islamist promise to conquer America sounds far-fetched. We are not talking, though, about raging armies or terror cells. The threat is the steady erosion of our liberties and capacity to defend ourselves. That is only too real.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at National Review Institute, is author of “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.” This essay is drawn from a pamphlet he wrote for Encounter Books’ “Broadside” series: “How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda.”