http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/293482/syria-debate-i-didnt-miss-totalitarian-angle-i-wrote-book-it-andrew-c-mccarthy
Syria Debate: I Didn’t Miss the Totalitarian Angle; I Wrote the Book On It
There is not much with which to argue in Michael’s last salvo, but I do think I’m entitled to grouse a bit.
The subtitle of my last book (The Grand Jihad), which Michael has been characteristically kind in praising, is “How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.” My central thesis is that, while there have been periods of militant Islamic supremacism as long as there has been Islam, the most recent iteration is uniquely threatening due to two factors. First is the propagation of fundamentalist ideology by the unimaginable oil wealth of a few Islamic countries (mostly Saudi Arabia), amplified by the unprecedented communications capabilities of our age. Second is the alliance between Islamic supremacism and the revolutionary Left.
As Michael will recall, I took no small amount of guff over this, particularly from my usual allies on the Right. Some of it was just uninformed — the sort of thing you get from people who’ve heard that a provocative argument has been made but haven’t bothered to familiarize themselves with it (Are you saying Obama is a covert Muslim? That Obama wants to impose sharia law? That Obama supports al-Qaeda?). Some of it was the craven preening that has become too familiar: The opposition, having been nailed, is certain to fight back with its bread-and-butter, character assassination; so the brave conservative pundit — posing as Bill Buckley purging the Birchers — shows how thoughtful and nuanced he can be by fretting over the “Islamophobia” and ideological “extremism” he perceives in the suggestion that one’s political adversaries sympathize with the nation’s enemies. And finally, some of it was strategic: Many on the Right are, alas, heavily invested in the Islamic democracy project; I counter that this enterprise is not only a national-security mirage but a means by which the progressives who dominate U.S. foreign policy (in the State Department, the military brass, the intelligence community, and elsewhere in government) export not our constitutional culture of individual liberty but their preference for Big Government. (Three years ago, I wrote about “democracy building” as a pretext for spreading statism, after reading commanding general Stanley McChrystal’s outline of what I saw — and see — as the tragically flawed U.S. mission in Afghanistan.)
IF YOU HAVE NOT ALREADY DONE SO…PLEASE READ ANDY McCARTHY’S BOOK…”THE GRAND JIHAD”
1.
Product Details
The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America by Andrew C. McCarthy
