Odd bedfellows: Islam and Left
At some future date, when what Andrew C. McCarthy calls “the freedom culture” is again secure (we hope), the jihad-opposition will see itself divided into two camps in histories written about our current time.
1. Those who ineffectually supported efforts to stop “terrorism” and other supposedly generic outbreaks of violence in such lands as Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. Those, currently far fewer in number, who recognized terrorism as but one aspect of the civilizational assault emanating from expansionist Islam.
If No. 2 (the freedom culture) wins, it will be because it grew in influence. And if that happens, it will be due to such books as McCarthy’s ground-breaking “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.” McCarthy was the federal prosecutor who won convictions against “the blind sheik” and his accomplices in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Islam and the Left? The notion will raise some eyebrows. I asked McCarthy to elaborate on this and some other related questions.
Q: Why are Islam and the Left, as you demonstrate in “The Grand Jihad,” really not such strange bedfellows after all?
A: “For all their disagreements on matters like women’s rights, gay rights and abortion, Islam and the Left are in harmony on big-picture matters. They are authoritarian... virulently anti-capitalist.... Historically, Islam and the Left ally when there is a common enemy. But I’d stress that what I am talking about here is an alliance, not a merger.”
McCarthy’s book highlights the interweaving principles of Islam and the Left, the ummah (Islamic community) and ACORN, both of which “bore from within,” in Saul Alinsky’s phrase, to hollow out what we might think of as “the Unum” — as in E Pluribus Unum.
Linking these points, having documented President Obama’s career as a community organizer — his embrace of ACORN, his radical associations — McCarthy writes:
“The common denominator (throughout Obama’s career) is a purpose to break down the Unum at its foundations, what he (Obama) called the ‘grass roots’.... It fits hand and glove with Yusuf Qaradawi’s...enclave strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood...(which ) smothers the individual freedom and enterprise that have defined the American character, replacing it with welfare states that prize dysfunction and reward the rabble-rousers.”
But we ignore the assault through “willful blindness,” to borrow the title of McCarthy’s first book about his prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers
Instead, he says, our policy-makers obsess over “one tactic, terrorism” while ignoring terrorism’s goal: Islamization through the implementation of Sharia (Islamic law).
“From the beginning of my involvement in counterterrorism in the early nineties, I’ve been struck by the government’s portrayal of terrorists as beasts who kill for no better reason than to kill — as if the fact that they are brutal means that they are insane,” says McCarthy.
Government does this as part of its narrative that terrorists couldn’t possibly be accurately representing a well-grounded interpretation of Islam, and therefore must be “perverting” or “hijacking” Islam, or must be traitors against “true Islam,” he says. He continues:
“There is a logic to terrorism. It is jihad, the purpose of which is to implement, spread, defend or vindicate Sharia, the Muslim legal code. Sharia is deemed in Islamist ideology to be the necessary precondition to Islamicizing a society. Once you realize that, you quickly realize that the same Sharia-driven campaign can be waged, and is being waged, by non-violent means, and that the violent and non-violent methods are inextricably linked.”
—Author and syndicated columnist Diana West can be contacted via dianawest@verizon.net
1. Those who ineffectually supported efforts to stop “terrorism” and other supposedly generic outbreaks of violence in such lands as Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. Those, currently far fewer in number, who recognized terrorism as but one aspect of the civilizational assault emanating from expansionist Islam.
If No. 2 (the freedom culture) wins, it will be because it grew in influence. And if that happens, it will be due to such books as McCarthy’s ground-breaking “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.” McCarthy was the federal prosecutor who won convictions against “the blind sheik” and his accomplices in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Islam and the Left? The notion will raise some eyebrows. I asked McCarthy to elaborate on this and some other related questions.
Q: Why are Islam and the Left, as you demonstrate in “The Grand Jihad,” really not such strange bedfellows after all?
A: “For all their disagreements on matters like women’s rights, gay rights and abortion, Islam and the Left are in harmony on big-picture matters. They are authoritarian... virulently anti-capitalist.... Historically, Islam and the Left ally when there is a common enemy. But I’d stress that what I am talking about here is an alliance, not a merger.”
McCarthy’s book highlights the interweaving principles of Islam and the Left, the ummah (Islamic community) and ACORN, both of which “bore from within,” in Saul Alinsky’s phrase, to hollow out what we might think of as “the Unum” — as in E Pluribus Unum.
Linking these points, having documented President Obama’s career as a community organizer — his embrace of ACORN, his radical associations — McCarthy writes:
“The common denominator (throughout Obama’s career) is a purpose to break down the Unum at its foundations, what he (Obama) called the ‘grass roots’.... It fits hand and glove with Yusuf Qaradawi’s...enclave strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood...(which ) smothers the individual freedom and enterprise that have defined the American character, replacing it with welfare states that prize dysfunction and reward the rabble-rousers.”
But we ignore the assault through “willful blindness,” to borrow the title of McCarthy’s first book about his prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers
Instead, he says, our policy-makers obsess over “one tactic, terrorism” while ignoring terrorism’s goal: Islamization through the implementation of Sharia (Islamic law).
“From the beginning of my involvement in counterterrorism in the early nineties, I’ve been struck by the government’s portrayal of terrorists as beasts who kill for no better reason than to kill — as if the fact that they are brutal means that they are insane,” says McCarthy.
Government does this as part of its narrative that terrorists couldn’t possibly be accurately representing a well-grounded interpretation of Islam, and therefore must be “perverting” or “hijacking” Islam, or must be traitors against “true Islam,” he says. He continues:
“There is a logic to terrorism. It is jihad, the purpose of which is to implement, spread, defend or vindicate Sharia, the Muslim legal code. Sharia is deemed in Islamist ideology to be the necessary precondition to Islamicizing a society. Once you realize that, you quickly realize that the same Sharia-driven campaign can be waged, and is being waged, by non-violent means, and that the violent and non-violent methods are inextricably linked.”
—Author and syndicated columnist Diana West can be contacted via dianawest@verizon.net
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