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.