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 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 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.