Ten Questions About ‘The Grand Jihad’ For Author Andrew McCarthy

Andy McCarthy’s vital new book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, was published last week. The author, a former federal prosecutor, discusses the looming threats both foreign and domestic:

Q. Why did you write this book? Surely, you’re overstating the threat to the American way of life from radical Islam.

We’re 17 years removed from the declaration of a jihadist war against the United States, the bombing of the World Trade Center, and nearly a decade removed from the jihadist atrocities of 9/11. Yet, as recently as last week, we heard President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser insist that Islam has nothing to do with the threat facing us and that because Islam is, by his lights, benign, and so is jihad — merely an internal struggle to “purify” oneself or one’s community. In point of fact, we are facing a movement that is very mainstream among the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims, a movement that unabashedly declares itself as engaged in a “civilizational” war against America and the West. I don’t think I’m overstating the threat; I think I’m reporting the threat precisely as our enemies have stated it, notwithstanding that our political leadership won’t come to grips with the fact that we have enemies, let alone with the ideology that catalyzes them.

Q. You open with the memorable moment when President Obama bowed to the Saudi King. Although you dismiss the notion that Obama is some kind of “Manchurian Muslim,” why else would he do such a thing? In fact, why is he so loath to speak out against any Muslim, anywhere, if on some level he does not share either religious or cultural sympathies with them?

There is a difference between being a Muslim, which Obama is not, and sharing religious and cultural sympathies with Muslims — indeed, adhering to much of the Islamist narrative that blames America for our tensions with Muslims — which Obama surely does. As I explain in the book, based on a comparative study of Islamist and Leftist ideologies (particularly Qutb and Rousseau) as well as on numerous historic and present-day examples of cooperation between Islamists and Leftists, there is immense common ground between these two camps. Both are authoritarian systems, totalitarian in the sense that they want to control every aspect of the individual’s life, and virulently opposed to capitalism and individual liberty. President Obama is the leader of the modern hard Left and King Abdullah — whose title is Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques, Islam’s crown jewels of Mecca and Medina — is the emblem of the global Islamist movement. They share a common goal of radically transforming the West. Even though they part company on the details of what they would transform it into, they both need to topple American constitutional republicanism in order to install their utopias.

Q. The heart of your book is the argument that the Left and Islam have made an alliance of convenience, sharing a common enemy, which is classical Western civilization. Some dismiss this idea with the riposte that the Left will suffer as much if not more than anybody under Sharia Law. How do you answer them?

The Left has colluded with Islamists numerous times in the past: Iranian communists supported Khomeini against the Shah, Nasser confederated with the Muslim Brotherhood against the Egyptian monarchy, the PLO has always combined Leftists and Islamists, the Pakistani People’s Party still regards its program as Islamic socialism (which is also the way Nasser saw his program), etc. This should surprise no one. Rousseau, the father of modern radical movements, was an admirer of Islam — mainly because it rejects the separation between the spiritual and secular realms. And just look around you: Who is al Qaeda’s main lawyer? The Leftist Center for Constitutional Rights. Who is CAIR’s reliable partner in litigation opposing sensible national security measure’s? The ACLU. Islamist groups like the Muslim Public Affairs Council were very active championing Obama’s big-government takeover of healthcare. The Muslim Brotherhood, which is the architect and chief theoretician of the global Islamist movement, is aggressively Leftist in its political and social programs.

So it seems silly to me to rationalize that the Left has lots to lose in a partnership with Islamists — as if we were talking about a hypothetical. The cooperation is happening. The better question is: Why? The easy answer is that the two sides have more in common than they have in opposition. Moreover, to say that the Left would suffer more than anyone under Sharia law misses the point. We are not in a situation where the only ones left are the radical Left and the Islamists — where they would square off against each other. Instead, we are at a point in history when they both have a more pressing common enemy: the culture of freedom in the West. As they have done numerous times in the past, they will work together to try to defeat that enemy. Once that happens — if we let it happen — then they can figure out which one is the crocodile and which one the last appeaser to be eaten.

Q. To what do you attribute the MSM’s reluctance to explore these questions? Does the “narrative” of the First Black President outweigh everything else? Are they lazy? Complicit? Some combination of all three?

The MSM has its roots in the modern Left: It is a product of the J-schools and Democratic Party politics. It has fostered our suffocating climate of political correctness in which America is always at fault, Obama is the savior, and Islam is an unalloyed societal good — to the point that even when a jihadist at Fort Hood, while screaming “Allahu Akbar!”, mass-murders twice as many people as were killed in the 1993 WTC bombing, the MSM (like our government) would rather gouge its eyes out than admit that the savage was a Muslim. There is laziness in the journalism biz just like there is everyplace else, but for the most part today’s journalists are invested in the Left’s ascendancy. We are living in their world.

Q. Why are Americans so slow to pick up the concepts of dawa and jihad?

For two reasons. First, our political leadership — including administrations of both parties — has been desperate to suppress Islamic doctrine’s role in fueling terrorism committed by Muslims. Second, though Islam aspires to be much more than a religion (it is an all-encompassing legal, political and social system from which the spiritual elements are indivisible), it is given the label of “religion.” We have an admirable impulse in the West not to pry into other people’s belief systems. Beyond that, no one wants to be accused of religious bigotry by a grievance industry dominated by Leftists and Islamists. Think about it this way: despite the enormity of evil and peril involved in terrorist attacks that have now claimed thousands of lives, we can’t get people to focus on the ideology behind violent jihad. How much more difficult it is, then, to get them focused on the less immediate threat of dawa, which Robert Spencer aptly describes as the stealth (generally nonviolent) form of jihad. Unless people perceive the challenge as truly threatening, they will never pick up on these concepts. The Islamist and Leftist groups are trying to keep them asleep. My book is a modest attempt to wake them up.

Q. Discuss the role of Political Correctness in our apprehension, or lack of it, of Islam.

As I’ve said, political correctness has a lot to do with our lack of apprehension. But so does flat out extortion. When people speak out against Islamist supremacism, they are threatened and sometimes killed — and the reaction of our opinion elites is to condemn the victims for being provocative. So we get to the absurd point where Yale University Press purges depictions of the Danish cartoons in a book about the Danish cartoons that sparked Islamist rioting. In the Flying Imams incident, which I consider in detail in the book, efforts are made to sue the passengers who reported the imams’ reprehensible conduct — and the airline, after some terrible rulings by a judge sympathetic to the Islamists, ends up having to pay a settlement. This is political correctness with some real teeth, and its unmistakable message is: If you see something, say nothing.

Q. Isn’t one of the problems that we continue to think in terms of nation-states, whereas Islam didsdains such a concept in favor of the ummah?

Well, I prefer to think in terms of nation-states because, if we are saved, nation-states will play a major role in that. Nation-states are much more apt to pursue their interests, including their defense, than the alternative: international organizations run by transnational progressives who are a big part of the problem. It is undeniably true, though, that Islamists reject the Westphalian world order — and we should bear that in mind when they prattle about how much they purportedly love America and other Western countries, and how they’re just challenging us to live up to “our values.”

Q. What’s it going to take for us to wake up? If and when an American city is nuked will we even fight back? Or will the lawyers and the JAGs find legalistic excuses for inaction?

It’s going to take a solution from outside of government: the American people have to be made aware of the threat we face — which is much broader and more insidious than terrorism — and they have to demand action. This is not unheard of. Public outrage has been very effective in stopping some of our political leadership’s worst agenda items — comprehensive immigration reform and the closing of Gitmo come to mind; we came very close to derailing Obamacare and we still have a chance of reversing it before it goes into effect. But it is going to take public awareness and passion. I hope it doesn’t take a catastrophic nuclear attack, but — sad to say — 9/11 obviously didn’t grab people like it should have. In many ways, we’re worse off today.

Q. Is there a Martel, a Sobieski or a Kitchener on the horizon, or have we arrived at the Spenglerian end of western power?

The American people are an endlessly resourceful and energetic people. While dependency culture has made alarming inroads, I still believe we are passionate about our freedom, and we will fight for it once it is clear that the fight has to be made. But I admit, it’s late in the day.

Q. There must be one bright spot, right… Right?

It is still possible for us to have this conversation and to be very candid about what we’re up against. In a lot of places, that can’t happen, and if the Obama administration continues canoodling with the likes of the Organization of the Islamic Conference — which wants to criminalize any critical discussion of Islam — we’ll need to worry that America could become one of those places. For now, it’s not. For now, we still have our rights to speak, to persuade, and to act in our defense. There are real points of disagreement between Islam and the Left. They combine because they sense their mutual enemy, our freedom culture, is very potent. If that culture were fatally weak, they’d already have won. They haven’t … and they’re still a ways from achieving their aspirations. To me, that’s a pretty bright spot.