"Show me the money" and other leftist dreams

Well, the election is just around the corner. Democrats will now enter the campaign's home stretch with the threat that all of the Bush-era tax rates could expire on January 1. According to The Wall Street Journal, that means the lowest tax bracket would revert to 15% from 10%, the per child tax credit would revert to $500 from $1,000, and millions of middle class families would pay thousands of dollars more in federal taxes. With time running out to plan for 2011, the delay raises uncertainty for small businesses and individual taxpayers over their future liabilities. It also sets up a huge battle over taxes after the election. If returning lawmakers don't pass legislation by Dec. 31, the expiration date of the cuts, tax rates would rise not only on income, but also on estates, capital gains and dividends. Important corporate tax credits and relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax also are up for renewal. This is what the Democrats have given us after two years in charge.

This whole mess reveals a key belief among those on the left. Many of them truly think the country "can't afford" to let Americans keep so much of their own money. Peter Orszag has already admitted this since leaving his post as White House budget director. These Democrats think the only way to pay for their spending plans is by soaking the middle class because that's where the real money is. But they continue talking of taxing just the rich to disguise their hopes of going after the middle class money.

Does “tax the rich” really make fiscal sense? The Journal claims tax data shows that you could have taken 100% of the taxable income of every American who earned more than $500,000 in the boom year of 2006 and still only have raised $1.3 trillion in revenue. That amount would not have closed the budget deficit in either of the last two fiscal years. So why do the liberals keep talking about taxing just the rich if it wouldn’t really solve our budget problems? They know that soaking the middle class is unpopular.

We'll see in November if the American people are truly aware of how hungry the left is for their money.

Our failure of will as reported in The Grand Jihad

Chapter 21 of Andrew McCarthy's book The Grand Jihad is perhaps the most discouraging of all, which says a lot considering how much of the book frightens and discourages me. McCarthy uses this chapter to show the power of Islamists at work in Minneapolis, revealing how weakly we are responding to aggressive actions.

There are something like 100,000 Somalis living in Minneapolis, where they are making great political and legal strides. Unfortunately, these strides are often at the expense of traditional American values. For example, Somali taxi drivers began refusing service to passengers carrying alcohol. This soon expanded to other situations that their sharia law looked down on -- passengers accompanied by dogs and even some people who appeared overtly homosexual. What did the authorities do? They should have told those people to find another job. However, they responded by engaging the cabbies on the finer points of sharia. They suggested it was the consumption of alcohol not its transportation that was a problem.

There are plenty more grim examples of Americans going out of their way to appease Muslims in the Minneapolis area. There's the story of Tyler Hurd, a college student prone to seizures who attended school in the company of his service dog. He was required because of one of his classes to do field work at local high schools. There he encountered Somali students who, because of their faith, taunted the dog and finally threatened to kill it. The student complained to officials at his college. What do you think they did? Did they protect the student and told his antagonists to get lost? No. Instead, the school waved his remaining training hours, giving him credit for the course without doing the work so that they could avoid a confrontation with menacing Muslims.

Want another example? A high school senior had written a paper complaining that Muslim students were not required to adhere to various school rules. The school, of course, should have protected his right to say this. But he and his mother were told he was going to be suspended because school officials feared he would be attacked. After a few days the boy returned to school and was mauled by a gang of at least 20 Somali students. He had to be hospitalized for head injuries.

What else is the state of Minnesota doing to accommodate Muslims? Well, it's using its charter school law to operate an Islamic public school, a benefit accorded no other religious group. It costs taxpayers in St. Paul nearly $4 million per year to keep this school operating.

But, we might say, this is just Minneapolis and Minnesota. It's just some local fluke, but the rest of the U.S. is standing firm against Islamist inroads. I wish that was true. But no, Islamicization is seeping into the learning process as well in many other places. History and social studies textbooks routinely indoctrinate our American children of middle and high school age that the prophet of Islam was a trader who "taught equality" and was animated by the desire to "help the poor." The texts also go on endlessly about the contributions of Islam to the arts and science. For example, students are told that music and particularly singing was part of Muslim Spain's musical culture which undoubtedly influenced later musical forms in Europe and North Africa. But then later the text admits this music is lost, so who knows how much influence it really had. Are there any references to the way Islam spread by the sword? You can probably guess the answer is no. The references now says Islam" moved peacefully with traders." The faith is brought to seemingly willing populations and spontaneously spreads throughout the Middle East to people who simply become Muslims. Tolerance is continually referenced. One textbook says "another factor in helping the Arabs in the spread of Islam was their tolerance for other religions." Nothing is said of second-class citizenship or enslavement or its continued piracy. Students are never told that sharia, which blends the state and religion, is far removed from Western traditions of religious freedom. Nowhere are punishments mentioned for petty offenses -- stoning, decapitation, dismemberment.

There are other inroads as well. In increasing numbers, troubled American banks who would like some of that Islamic oil wealth, have set up sharia advisory boards. Why? To avoid Islamic injunctions against interest as well as certain forms of risk and investments in industries whose operations transgressed Muslim law. These industries include ones dealing in pork, alcohol, investment funds, and others. Many of their sharia advisors for these financial dealings turn out to be vehemently anti-western clerics. These schemes legitimize and regularize sharia as part of the American legal and banking systems.

This is a good time to stop. I'm discouraged and disappointed at the American responses to Islamic inroads. But we can't just shut our eyes. We need to take action this November and make sure the people we elect will stand up to Islamic fundamentalists and their attempts to impose their fanatical ideas on our American culture.

The left and Islamists--a case study from The Grand Jihad

Andrew McCarthy in his book The Grand Jihad highlights a sad development in this country -- an election that made Keith Ellison the first avowed Muslim member of Congress. According to the author, Ellison is the embodiment of Islam and the left, which he warned about earlier in the book.

Ellison, like Barack Obama, emerged out of leftist culture. In his case, Ellison was a shock trooper for Louis Farrakhan, the head of the racist, separatist Nation of Islam. He defended Farrakhan's anti-Semitism, which is pretty disgusting stuff. Remember, it was Farrakhan who said Judaism was a gutter religion. It was Farrakhan who said Jews were bloodsuckers, that they controlled the slave trade, that they have no claim to the land of Israel. His rants dealt with spaceships, homosexuals, and whites as devils. While at the University of Minnesota Law School, Ellison wrote a column demanding reparations for slavery. Does this sound like a wise public servant who should go to Congress to represent the American people?

Ellison became a lawyer in 1990, but he apparently had a hard time dealing with the law himself. He scoffed at income tax laws and campaign finance laws. His drivers license was suspended numerous times because he contemptuously ignored parking and moving violations. He became a community activist (does this sound familiar?). How did he spend his time then? He used his time and position to become a fixture at anti-police protests and rallies in favor of thugs and cop-killers.

Ellison has another strike against him, according to McCarthy. Ellison has become quite cozy with CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations). This organization strongly backed him when he ran as a Democrat for the House of Representatives in 2006. He appears regularly at their functions even though the Justice Department identified CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in one trial and later proved the organization had been formed by members caught on a wiretap discussing the need to derail the Oslo peace accords and to somehow support Hamas without being labeled as terrorist.

So, Ellison acts as a living illustration of a connection between the left and Islamists. This is a point that McCarthy tried earlier in his book to warn us about. It’s tough enough to defend against Islamic extremism without being double-teamed. Let’s keep awake. McCarthy’s book can be a big help.

The Cairo speech by Obama continued--his slanted view of Islam

This blog represents the fifth in a series examining Andrew McCarthy's powerful new book, The Grand Jihad. It's an important book every American should read, but if you don't have the time to do that, I hope you will look back at my previous blogs to get an idea of his main points. In this particular blog (the sixth on the topic), I would like to complete McCarthy's review of President Obama's speech in Cairo which he gave in June 2008 as a way to reach out to Muslims.

The President spoke of charitable giving. He said he wished to make it easier for Muslims in America to fulfill their religious obligations (zakat) by relaxing rules on charitable giving. The author points out that the Muslim definition of charity is different than what the Western world thinks of. It is the obligation of Muslims to help only Muslims, to help implement sharia, to underwrite anything that helps Islamists further their goals. McCarthy also notes that the United States does not have rules on charitable giving that makes it difficult for Muslims to be generous. What we have, instead, are federal laws against financing terrorism and providing other material support to terrorists. Numerous Islamic charities have proved to be fronts for terrorist activity, at least in part, so it's difficult to see why we should relax these rules.

In another part of his speech, Obama said "Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism -- it is an important part of promoting peace." McCarthy acknowledges that George Bush said the same thing years ago, but he believes both men are wrong. He says Islam is a huge part of the problem in combating extremism. Over and over we have seen Muslims commit terror under the influence of many of their religious scholars, who invoke some of the many parts of the Koran the President decided not to mention in his speech. If Islam wants to be a peaceful religion, McCarthy says, it must purge its savage elements and must compellingly condemn the violence committed in its name. How can this happen if Obama and others tell Muslims everything is fine, that their religion is just terrific the way it is? Islam is in need of a reformation, something that can only be done by Muslims. We cannot rouse them to the task of taking this on if we keep telling them their current religion promotes peace. To help these moderate Muslims, we must fix ourselves unambiguously and immovably against the Islamists, McCarthy says.

I think the author has made a good point here. There is something wrong with a religion in which so many leaders and followers either carry out terror or support it loudly. Christianity today certainly has an element that has committed violence, especially against abortion doctors and clinics. But this group is tiny, it has no support from leading pastors, it cannot find any verses in the Bible to justify its position, and the vast majority of Christians reject it and are horrified by it. As mentioned in a previous book I reviewed called God is Back, Islam has never had a reformation to cleanse it of questionable practices and beliefs. Until that happens, we must stand firmly in opposition to its disturbing elements.

One additional problem with Obama's speech had to do with reference to the number of Muslims residing in the United States. It's common for Islamists to overstate wildly the number for one reason -- to have more of their people here than Jews. There are roughly 6,000,000 Jews living in the United States, so this has become a magic number for the Muslims to equal or surpass. In reality though, the most reliable estimates peg the figure of Muslims in this country as somewhere around 1.5 million. What did Obama say in his speech? He used the number 7 million, echoing Islamists' boasts.

There's still more I would like to report on this book, but I'll wait until another time. Again, I hope you stay alert to the threat that won't go away any time soon.

A look at Obama's speech to Muslims--The Grand Jihad continues

I've been working my way through Andrew McCarthy's book, The Grand Jihad. I wanted to share a section with you that was eye-opening. In June 2008 Pres. Barack Obama took a trip to the Middle East. Why? He wanted to blaze "a new beginning" in the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world. McCarthy analyzes Obama's speech in Cairo, showing how our President sees Islam much differently than most of us do: "The speech was excruciating, combining fictional accounts of Islamic history and doctrine, a woefully ignorant explanation of Israel's claim to its sovereign territory, and an execrable moral equivalence drawn between southern slave owners in early America and modern Israelis besieged by Palestinian terror." Let's see what he means.

He starts by noting Obama's reference to American history. The President quoted John Adams as saying the U.S. had no disagreement with Muslims when he signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796. However, Obama skipped history leading up to this Treaty. The Barbary states of North Africa (Muslim nations) were using the ports to wage a war of piracy and enslavement against all shipping that passed through the Strait of Gibraltar. More than 1 million Europeans and Americans were sold into slavery as a result of this. The United States, with no help from any nation, felt forced to sign this treaty. So, Adams was not complimenting Muslims out of respect and love; he was forced into it to avoid more piracy by Muslims.

In his speech Obama later played up Muslim cultural achievements. But McCarthy says these achievements actually occurred despite Islam (especially in the areas of literature, art, and music). It was the conquered people who produce the accomplishments, not the Muslims who were invading their territory. The President claimed Islam single-handedly "carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment." But this is a myth, according to the author. It is not true that Muslims alone preserved the works of Aristotle, Galen, Plato, Hippocrates, and other pillars of Western Enlightenment. The truth is, arrested development in the Islamic world over the last several hundred years is due to a strong anti-intellectualism that is so prevalent today. Many Islamic authorities say that no education beyond the study of the Quran is necessary.

Then Obama began quoting from the Koran to show how peaceful this religion is. He took one verse (Sura 5:32) and read it: "Whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind." But Obama failed to read the very next verse, which is well known by Muslims: "The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and his messenger... is execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land." Obama also neglected other verses which command Muslims to violence, dehumanized Jews as children of monkeys and pigs, and order Muslims not to take Jews or Christians as friends and protectors.

Later in the speech, Obama talked about a Jewish homeland. He made a basic argument that the Jewish nation was established to sooth the guilty consciences of Europeans who are embarrassed about the Holocaust. He makes it sound like the Jews have no legal, historic, or moral rights to the land of Israel. McCarthy says this is false. Jews have a claim upon the land because they are the only people for whom Israel was ever their nation, which it was for hundreds of years -- centuries before the Arabs and Muslims came on the scene area, so, according to the author, legal, historical, and moral claims of Jews predate Adolph Hitler by many centuries. In fact, the League of Nations in 1922 did not endorse the creation of the Jewish state but rather the reconstitution of it.

Coupled with this reference to the Jews, Obama then talked about the Palestinians and their problems. He, of course, stressed that they were poor people struggling in refugee camps waiting for a life of peace and security. The truth is different; the Arabs could easily have created a Palestinian state during the twenty years (1948 -- 1967) that Jordan and Egypt held the West Bank and Gaza, respectively. But the Arab states decided not to do this. Before that, the Palestinians had been offered a homeland in 1936 and 1947, and Israel renewed the offer in 1967 and 2000. Why do the Palestinians turn down these offers? McCarthy says their goal is to destroy Israel, not to coexist in peace and security.

There is more to this speech that Obama gave in Cairo. But this is important material, and I don't want to rush past it. I'd rather you had a chance to read this, digest it, and think about it. More to follow.

The Grand Jihad-- its view of the left and radical Islam

Andrew McCarthy, in his book The Grand Jihad, has a powerful section which shows the connection between Islamist organizations and the left. For example, they both share a dislike of small government. One prominent Muslim group called the Muslim Brotherhood talks about their aims to "increase the power of government through entitlement programs, increased taxation, and restricting free markets whenever and wherever possible." No wonder the Muslim Public Affairs Council strongly urged passage of Obamacare. Islam's central imperative is a communal obligation to establish and spread sharia, Allah's law, throughout the world, to build Islamic societies, to re-create and expand the Caliphate. The individual must be made to fit the corporate aspirations of the Muslim nation.

The author says leftist revolutionaries and the Islamists have never really been the enemies they are often presumed to be. In fact, with their collectivist philosophy, transnational outlook, totalitarian demands, and revolutionary designs, Islamists are natural allies of the radical left. McCarthy gives several examples of leftists and Islamists working together over the last 50 to 60 years, all around the world.

He then looks closely at the values of both the Western world, Islam, and communism. Here in the United States, the people are the sovereigns. Our social compact is our Constitution, which expressly protects individual liberty and private property. This emphasis on private property, entrepreneurial risk, and the potential for profit or loss are the elements that make our system dynamic and spread prosperity to more people than any system in the history of man. However, Islamists believe capitalism enflames people and makes them greedy. What is their solution? A familiar answer -- the redistribution of wealth. They do not believe in protection of private property rights since all property belongs to their God Allah. We've heard a variation of this in the left wing of the Democratic Party. Islam and communism are united in achieving social justice by compulsion if necessary. Of course, their goal is social justice in which the individual is subordinated to the collective. Both Islam and communism are diametrically opposed to the core assumptions of American constitutional democracy -- individual liberty and free-market capitalism.

This is just another reason to be vigilant these days. Islamists threaten our way of life in so many areas, certainly more than just in our freedom to worship.

The imam threatens us--build it or else

Sharon made me aware of something said last night by the imam who is planning to put a mosque at Ground Zero in New York City. It's a stunning statement that threatens us and hints at a protection racket. See if you agree.

After spending a month overseas supposedly "building bridges" with the Muslim world (using our money to do it), Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf had an interview on CNN last night.

Here's what he had to say. If he could start over, he would propose a different site for his project. "If I knew this would happen, that this would cause this kind of pain, I wouldn't have done it . . . My life has been dedicated to peacemaking."

So far, so good. Seems like he might consider moving the mosque to honor the feelings of so many in the U.S. But Rauf said he intends to go ahead with the "multifaith" center near the site where Islamic terrorists killed nearly 2,800 people because not doing so would unleash fury abroad.
"If we move from that location, the story will be that the radicals have taken over the discourse," Rauf told CNN. "The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack.

"There is a certain anger here [in America], no doubt," he said later in the interview. "But if we don't do this right, anger will explode in the Muslim world. If we don't do things correctly, this crisis could become much bigger than the Danish cartoon crisis [over images depicting the Prophet Mohammed], which resulted in attacks on Danish embassies in various parts of the Muslim world. And we have a much bigger footprint in the Muslim world."

Think about what he said. We have to build it or else the crazies will go nuts all over the world. Here's my thought--Great nations act in their self-interest from strength rather than worrying about what others might say. It also made me think of some key questions: Do we give veto power to the intolerant Islamists? Are they going to love us if we let them put a mosque at Ground Zero? Did we win World War 2 by appeasing Hitler? Do we have the courage of our convictions any more after years of schooling where students are told how bad we are as a nation? Do we have moral clarity after hearing repeatedly that all cultures are the same and we can't criticize anyone?

Rauf's outrageous comments ought to erase all doubt that the construction of the Ground Zero mosque would be a victory for terrorism.

The enemy within--more from The Grand Jihad

In a new, disturbing book called The Grand Jihad, Andrew McCarthy talks about threats from radical Islam and the West's weak, politically correct way of fighting it. In this blog I'd like to give examples of his points that we in the West often don't really understand what we're fighting, we allow Islamists to bully us into accepting their way of life, our very different worldviews, and the ways in which these people successfully maneuver in our world through setting up various organizations.

Part of his book discusses what is going on in Europe regarding Muslims. Gradually they are capitalizing on their unity and growing strength to pressure European nations into adopting sharia, bit by bit. Already there are "no-go" zones: Muslim neighborhoods are policed no longer patrol, sovereignty having been effectively surrendered to the local imams, Muslim councils, and Muslim gangs. In France, for example, police estimate some 8 million people live in these sensitive urban areas. In England, police officers are enforcing sharia judgments on domestic violence complaints, meaning there have been instances of investigations dropped after the Islamic authority sided with accused husbands, in deference to the Koranic endorsement of spousal abuse. Get this -- hate speech laws in Britain have been used to ban what is called "racism" such as the raising of the Union Jack. This has been repeated in other countries--the Netherlands, Sweden, France. At a popular sports club in London there have been "Moslem men only" sessions for swimming, and Christian clerics have been attacked in the same city. Even a country such as Sweden is not immune. In Malmo, the country's third largest city, police concede they are no longer in control; Moslem immigrant gangs rule the streets.

In a later section, McCarthy talks about the idea of charity when it comes to Muslims to show how they see the world differently than we do. In January of this year, Haiti had a devastating earthquake. The Western world, led by the United States, came through with large contributions of money and time. What about the Islamic world? It contributed one tenth of one percent of the total donations committed by governments. Not much. But doesn't Islam stress charity? Well, they have a different understanding of the term. Charity is defined as Moslems supporting Moslems. Like other Islamic beliefs, charity serves the overarching cause of promoting Islam to the exclusion and at the expense of nonbelievers.

McCarthy has a short section which captures the heart of the problem for us. He says the official position of the United States government is this: "our only concern is terrorism; there is no nexus between terrorism committed by Muslims and Islamic doctrine; Islam must in fact be twisted and perverted to justify terrorism; and, therefore, the propagation of Islam has utterly nothing to do with the promotion of terrorism." Our government overlooks Islamic schools, conventions, and institutions which produce arabidly anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-western ideology that rejects core American precepts. So we are allowing this cancer to grow within us. He gives example after example of different Muslim organizations that have started in the United States and have effectively seized control of most of the mosques now operating here. He devotes an entire chapter (seven) explaining how these organizations got started, their funding, and their philosophy.

The author later exposes the world of the terrorist group Hamas. The title for this group is an acronym meaning "Islamic Resistance Movement." Notice the use of the word "Resistance." Saudi Arabia and other Islamists often condemn terrorism, but only as they define it. Their definition does not include the defensive use of force whenever "Islam is under siege." That brand of savagery is called "resistance." Of course, Islamists reserve the right to decide for themselves what constitutes "defense" and when "Islam is under siege." So, the way this game works, any act of terrorism, no matter how offensive and brutal can be rationalized as resistance." Here's the chilling charter of Hamas: "The purpose of Hamas is to create an Islamic Palestinian state throughout Israel by eliminating the state of Israel through violent jihad." That seems pretty simple to understand, doesn't it? Remember that the self-professed moderate imam who wants to build the proposed Ground Zero mosque has refused to describe Hamas as a terrorist group even though the State Department does. Seems like their charter says it all. And how does Hamas carry out its mission? Indoctrination starts at the cradle. Palestinian children are reared in Islamic supremacism and a dehumanizing hatred of Jews. They are schooled in the glories of martyrdom and go to summer camps that imitate paramilitary camps for older people. Is this schooling paying off? Recent polling found that up to 93% of young Palestinian adults deny Israel's right to exist.

Because Hamas became well known for its hatred of Jews, radical Muslims decided they needed a new group in America. They wanted a group posing as a civil rights organization while soft-pedaling its jihadist sympathies to snow the American political leaders. What did they come up with? It was called the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Numerous figures associated with this group have been convicted of federal felonies, including terrorism offenses. Too many government officials and mass media people have treated it as a "civil rights" group; instead, it is an Islamist spearhead says McCarthy. It has consistently defended indicted terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. In addition, it vigorously opposes efforts to improve and maintain the capacity of law-enforcement and intelligence agencies to prevent and prosecute Islamist terrorism. It was a leading opponent of the Patriot Act. By the way, there was such an uproar over the Patriot Act when, for the most part, it merely extended to national security agents the same powers prosecutors and police have been using for years in run-of-the-mill criminal investigations.

I feel this book is important enough to continue summarizing it in another few blogs. I hope you share my concerns.

The Grand Jihad--an important book

There is a powerful, disturbing new book out called The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. The author, Andrew C. McCarthy, is the former federal prosecutor who convicted the notorious "blind Sheikh" and other jihadists for waging a terrorist war that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In a book published in 2008 called Willful Blindness, McCarthy explains how our government consciously ignored the terrorist threat, making us vulnerable to mass-murder attacks. In this current book, the author tells how Islamists (his name for those Moslems who advocate jihad and sharia law)seek to create enclaves in our midst and gradually foist Islam's repressive sharia law on American life.

The Grand Jihad is long and complex, but I think it's important enough that I need to share some of it with you. My hope is that it will encourage many of you to read it for yourselves and share what you discover with friends and neighbors.


In addition the author makes an interesting point about leftists and the demise of the Soviet Union. You would think they would be depressed by the death of the most important socialist state, but that is not the case. The disappearance of the Soviet Union has freed them from having to defend a terrible regime. Now their utopian vision no longer has to argue on behalf of a real socialist state, so leftists can indulge their unrealistic agendas without restraint.

These leftists connect with revolutionary movements like Islam because they share a religious fervor. They both wish to establish the new by sweeping away the old. McCarthy points out that Bolsheviks tolerated Islamist elements years ago even before Stalin, Iranian Communists backed Khomeini against the Shah, and the Muslim brotherhood aligned with Nasser against the Egyptian monarchy. Leftists in this country have made common cause with Islam. Both see America as the problem. McCarthy views Barack Obama as a leftist who was influenced by Islam in his formative years.

What is the global Islamist project? Simple -- supplant American constitutional democracy with sharia law.

What about the idea that most Muslims do not support terrorism? Actually, Muslim approval of terrorism increases dramatically when Muslims perceive a place as Islamic territory or associate a target with a Western government seen as occupying or interloping in Islamic territory. In addition, if we look at Muslim attitudes about the imposition of sharia (the regulation of all life's aspects by Islamic law), Muslim support goes out of sight.

McCarthy says we are deluding ourselves. We believe other people are just like us, that we can change them if we just say or do the right thing. We believe they will be influenced by our arguments. He says our security task becomes figuring out not how to coexist with the Islamic world but how to have as little to do with it as possible until such time, if ever, it undertakes radical change.

The author defines his terms carefully. "Islamist" is the best way to describe the belief system we are up against -- it holds that Islam is the complete, obligatory guide to human existence, governing all matters political, social, cultural, and religious, from cradle to grave. It refers not just to terrorists but to the hundreds of millions of believers who share the terrorist goal of installing sharia societies though they do not actively encourage brutality.

More to come from this book. Please take a look at it when you can. It's been endorsed by Hugh Hewitt, William Bennett, Mark Levin, and others.