Dr. Andrew Bostom has posted a review of Andrew McCarthy’s new book, The Grand Jihad — How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, at his website:
During an address on Thursday May 27, 2010 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, John Brennan, the Obama administration’s lead counterterrorism adviser, provided a transparently bowdlerized perspective on jihad. Brennan’s statements were breathtaking in their profound cognitive dissonance regarding this uniquely Islamic institution, which continues to wreak daily havoc in our era.
Despite over 15,350 jihad terror attacks by Muslims worldwide, since the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism committed against the United States itself, on September 11, 2001, Brennan insisted,
Nor do we describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.
Closing this willfully blind circle of “reasoning,” Brennan further asserted,
– – – – – – – – –
…describing our enemy in religious terms would lend credence to the lie propagated by Al Qaeda and its affiliates to justify terrorism — that the United States is somehow at war against Islam
Brennan’s views—a dangerous concatenation of hard Left, Islamophilic cultural relativism, and the relentless, successful “Islamic dawa” efforts of generations of jihadists—represent the apotheosis of phenomena analyzed with uncompromising lucidity in Andrew McCarthy’s “The Grand Jihad.”
An accomplished former federal prosecutor, McCarthy convicted the infamous jihadist “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman for his role in orchestrating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and planning other acts of jihad terror. McCarthy recounted this prosecution in a prior book, “Willful Blindness,” which characterized the motivating Islamic ideology, goals, and methods of contemporary purveyors of violent jihad. He juxtaposed their openly declared jihad war campaign to the “conscious avoidance” of this threat by both America’s leadership elite, and its masses, in a game effort “…to expose this suicide ethos as it pertained to maintaining our security against the terrorist threat.” In “The Grand Jihad,” McCarthy extends these previous observations, and focuses upon the more pervasive threat of jihad’s non-violent manifestations, which he describes so appositely, as,
…the wolf, that comes, if not quite in sheep’s clothing, as nothing more dangerous than a sheepdog—is the more insidious one. …Very simply the purpose of jihad is not violence for its own sake. It is to pave the way for the imposition of sharia, the Muslim legal code and the necessary precondition for erecting an Islamic state and society. That is a peril we don’t want to deal with. Doing so would require confronting the brute fact that such a state would be antithetical to American democracy.
Central to McCarthy’s presentation—and containing key extracts eponymous to the book’s title—is a document whose contents were revealed during the Texas Holy Land Foundation jihad-terrorism funding trial. This internal Muslim Brotherhood statement dated May 22, 1991 was written by an acolyte of the Brotherhood’s major theoretician, lionized Qatari cleric, popular Al-Jazeera television personality, and head of the European Fatwa Council, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Entitled, “An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America,” the document is indeed self-explanatory.
The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
The Grand Jihad’s masterful, remarkably compendious narrative elucidates how the Muslim Brotherhood program has taken shape, concretely, in America. McCarthy offers this summary assessment…
Read the rest at Dr. Bostom’s place.
Those who fought and won World War II had the additional necessary determination to then apprehend, place on trial and finally execute perpetrators from within the highest military ranks of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. They knew beyond a doubt that such acts of genocide and mass murder could not go unpunished.
In our haste to celebrate Communism’s downfall, no such effort was made to establish the guilt of its principals and facilitators, either in the Soviet Union or here in the West. Blinded by the Cold War’s unexpected and blessedly peaceful end, hard-learned lessons from Nuremburg were forgotten amid celebrations of what would later turn out to be Russia’s Communist wolves merely donning Democratic sheep’s clothing.
Left unexposed, unpunished and uncorrected were extensive national demoralizations brought about by the systematic infiltration and Politically Correct corruption of Western media and its academic institutions. A totalitarian and anti-Capitalist mindset of almost Luddite proportions somehow managed to remain in place disguised as an unscientific ecological movement questing for “social justice”, whose vague and malleable goals continue to serve Communism’s most basic tenets even today.
Far too many of the Communist politburo’s elite and its apparatchiks were allowed to shed their uniforms and pretend to have adopted the ideals of Greco-European style democracy lately brought to its pinnacle form in America. Similarly, throughout the United States, the immensely harmful acts of openly avowed Communists were simply set aside by those who thought that, with the Iron Curtain’s fall, they were no longer of any consequence.
Only now do we find that Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” has rendered us nearly powerless when confronted by an enemy who combines with an almost perverted finesse the very worst elements of Nazi and Communist ideologies. Worse yet do we find that, even in Communism’s ostensible absence, all of the ground work laid by its operatives in anticipation of destroying the West is humming along with almost clockwork precision.
Should America’s most noble principles manage to survive this ferocious onslaught, it must be hoped that those who re-establish its once great institutions remember the hard won lessons of Nuremburg. Be it through direct complicity or willful ignorance, those of today who continue to propel Islam’s jihadist agenda on Western shores, regardless of where they reside, must be hunted down and taken into custody to be tried for the crimes of treason and mass murder that they have so deliberately abetted or contrived themselves.
The intense irony that is now so commonplace among America’s modern day Liberals manifests in their calls for previous administration officials to be tried for war crimes, even as this current executive apparatus engages in betraying this nation’s electorate in previously unimaginable ways. Left unchecked, the depth of treason that continues apace has every possibility of igniting either civil war or, subsequent to monstrous terrorist attacks, massive mob actions that may well violently oust this current throng of traitors.
People like John Brennan and Attorney General Eric Holder may one day find themselves obliged to exchange any sense of relief at having escaped the rough justice of those enraged mobs for an even deeper apprehension of what awaits them after the trials they so clearly deserve for having misled and betrayed this nation to its very worst enemies.
Should America’s most noble principles manage to survive this ferocious onslaught
I read that as “America’s most noble princes” and did a double take.