BEYOND THE “GRAND JIHAD” INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW McCARTHY….RUTH KING
Interview with Andrew McCarthy – Beyond the ‘Grand Jihad’Ruth King
Notwithstanding this history, when Raila Odinga decided to run for president in 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama – who did very little in America during his brief stint in the senate – spent six days in Kenya campaigning for and with Odinga. During their barnstorming, Obama lambasted the incumbent, pro-American government as corrupt and in need of … wait for it … Change.
We at Family Security Matters are delighted and proud to have some of our questions answered by Andrew McCarthy, author of the best-selling THE GRAND JIHAD: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America (Encounter Books May 2010)
RK: Since the publication of your book, the Ground Zero Mosque seems inevitable. Can you comment?
McCarthy: I don’t think the mosque is inevitable, but it is the eleventh hour. We were told that the KSM trial in lower Manhattan was inevitable, too, but people got motivated, got active, and stopped it. The thing to bear in mind is that they hurl this “Islamophobia” business all the time when they haven’t got a good case on the facts. It’s just ad hominem character assassination — a debating tactic, not an argument.
As my friend Roger Kimball says, a phobia is an irrational fear, and the Ground Zero site is testament to the fact that there’s nothing irrational about fearing the very real consequences of Islam. Wherever it takes hold, Islamist supremacism becomes a fact of life, and an increasingly more menacing one over time.
One thing we must fight back on is the absurd notion that rejecting an Islamic center cum mosque on that particular site makes us intolerant. We permit thousands of mosques in our country and hundreds just in the New York area. Contrast that with Mecca and Medina, where – forget about churches or synagogues – non-Muslims are not permitted to enter. And that’s not some purported al-Qaeda “perversion” of Islam; that’s mainstream Islam. The Saudis are upholding intolerant Koranic scripture.
I suggest we tell the agitators behind this Ground Zero mosque project to get back to us when Muslims permit a $100 million synagogue next to the Kaaba.
RK: Can something still be done about Saudi funding of mosques and cultural centers, and universities and the media? There was even an effort to cede control of our New York City Ports to Dubai.
McCarthy: We were a lot better off when we were primarily a political society, not a legal one. If more attention were given to the Saudi funding of Islamist ideology – not just terrorism, which the Saudis (very unconvincingly) claim to oppose, but the promotion of Salafist, sharia Islam, which they undeniably propagate – Americans would have a much different view of the Saudis and it would be seen as shameful to take their money. Salafism is the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood, which is lavishly funded by the Saudis, makes no secret of conducting a civilizational jihad aimed at nothing less than destroying Western civilization by sabotage.
Those are their words, not my characterization of what they’re up to.
If the American people appreciated that, there would be political and financial costs for people and institutions that accepted their money. That would be a lot more effective than trying to create legal theories to block them.
RK: We are at war on two fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq. How do you evaluate progress given the almost daily bombings and the growth of Taliban influence?
McCarthy: We don’t have a strategy for winning the war. The war is not taking place in two fronts. The war is regional, and in many ways global. We have chosen to make a stand in two places – neither of which is the center of the problem – and the stand we are making is a wayward effort to create modern Islamic democracies.
The result is untold billions down a sinkhole: Muslims deem the effort to plant Western ideas and institutions in Islamic countries to be an act of war – even if we think we’re doing humanitarian work – and none of it makes us any safer from terrorists. Naturally, if you tell your enemies you’re not really interested in fighting them and you indicate to them that you’re leaving soon, as Pres. Obama has done, they are going to sense weakness and step up the pace of attacks. They want to make it look like they chased the superpower out of the country, and that’s exactly how we’re teeing it up for them.
RK: Speaking of these wars you wrote a good deal about the Pentagon and the firing of Steve Coughlin. Do you think our “rules of engagement” in the combat zones limit our success in the war on terror?
McCarthy: The rules of engagement are absurd and imperiling for our forces because the mission is democracy-promotion, not the defeat of our enemies.
Even if you thought we should be using the military to promote democracy in Muslim countries – and I don’t – this is like starting the Marshall Plan in 1943. We didn’t rebuild Japan and Western Europe until we had convincingly defeated our enemies wherever they were, forced them to surrender, and eliminated their capacity to project power against us.
RK: Any comments on the slate of nominees for the judiciary? Can all or any of these nominations or judgeships be abrogated by a change in administration or will we be locked in to those appointed by the current administration?
McCarthy: Judicial slots are lifetime appointments and, as a practical matter, judges can only be removed for personal corruption. For now, Pres. Obama has an open field: the Democrats have the numbers in the senate for him to push through any nominee he wants. He has a lot of open slots to fill thanks to Republican “moderates” in the senate who worked out the infamous “Gang of 14” deal that effectively allowed Democrats to block Pres. Bush’s nominees back when the Republicans had the numbers in the senate.
I don’t think we should focus on removing judges – that’s a fool’s errand. We should focus on removing the jurisdiction of judges to decide categories of cases. The Left will scream, but they’re in no position to complain.
For all their blather about “the rule of law” during the Bush years, notice that in their massive take-over of healthcare, Democrats tucked in provisions intended to block the courts from reviewing executive-branch dictates about available treatments, costs, etc. They are for the “rule of law†only when it can be spun as an impediment for their opponents. And given that the courts now intrude into areas that used to be the prerogative of the political process, I’d like to see a system in which Supreme Court decisions could be overruled by super majorities in Congress. The courts were designed to decide cases between litigants, not to rule us.
RK: In your NRO interview you lamented the lack of interest in Obama and Kenya. We’re very interested. Could you elaborate?
McCarthy: Obama’s father was a Kenyan Muslim and a communist. He was a member of the Luo tribe, whose leader, Jaramongi Oginga Odinga, was a raging communist who bitterly opposed the pro-Western, pro-American Kenyatta government. Obama’s father wrote a paper – which the press in this country refused to report about during the 2008 election – that was called “Problems Facing Our Socialism.†The paper was a communist (or “scientific socialismâ€) critique of Kenyatta’s economic policies, placing Obama Sr. firmly in the Odinga camp. In many ways, Pres. Obama seems ambivalent about the father he hardly knew, but he has effusively praised Obama Sr.’s academic accomplishments in economics and what he euphemistically calls the “promise†his father had to fulfill to Africa. That “promise†was Marxism – that was Obama Sr.’s ideology.
Odinga’s son, Raila Odinga, is a committed communist – so much so that he named one of his sons after Fidel Castro. (One of his daughters is named after Winnie Mandela, who of course urged “necklacing†and other brutality and was convicted of kidnapping and accessory to murder.) Odinga was also complicit in a plot to overthrow Daniel arap Moi, Kenyatta’s pro-American successor, in a violent coup in 1982 – for which he spent eight years in prison. In the insidious world of African politics, this did not disqualify him for future advancement. Odinga became energy minister in 2001, which enabled him to strike very lucrative personal arrangements with Colonel Gaddafi in Libya and with Sheikh Abdukeder al-Bakari of the Al Bakari oil dynasty in Saudi Arabia. By the way, al-Bakari’s name appears on the “golden chain†list of wealthy donors to Osama bin Laden during the Afghan mujahideen’s jihad against the Soviets. (The list was seized from an al Qaeda safehouse during a 2002 raid in Sarajevo.)
Notwithstanding this history, when Raila Odinga decided to run for president in 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama – who did very little in America during his brief stint in the senate – spent six days in Kenya campaigning for and with Odinga. During their barnstorming, Obama lambasted the incumbent, pro-American government as corrupt and in need of … wait for it … Change.It later emerged that Odinga had made a deal with Kenya’s Islamist faction (a turbulent minority) to impose sharia law and Islamic courts if he won the election. He lost the election and (surprise!) the Islamists revolted.
This plunged Kenya into chaos, with thousands displaced and many killed. Odinga capitalized on the violence, and on his close relationship with Obama, to extort the Kenyan government into creating a powerful position for him: prime minister, an office no one had held in Kenya since Kenyatta occupied it in the brief transitional phase before he became president of the new republic.
I believe this is a remarkable and frightening story. But it has gotten virtually no American media coverage.
RK: How would you deal with the issue of immigration, specifically from those nations that harbor and enable and fund jihad: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia?
McCarthy: As I suggest in The Grand Jihad, I would end programs like the State Department’s diversity visa initiative (which encourages immigration from countries like Somalia whose citizens would not otherwise be trying to come here). I would try to fix the tracking of legal immigrants to make sure they do only what they represented they were coming here to do and that they leave as scheduled. I would also push to reverse the loopy interpretation of federal law that confers citizenship on anyone physically born in the U.S., regardless of their parents’ immigration status (the “anchor baby†phenomenon) and drastically reduce chain migration.
On criminal enforcement, I would target the businesses that hire illegal aliens and I’d deport aliens who are detained or arrested for violating our state and federal laws – i.e., you target your sparse enforcement resources on the magnet that draws illegal immigrants to our country and on the real criminals. I’d also cut off welfare benefits for illegal aliens – our states are out of money, and we can’t even afford the benefits now being paid to citizens and legal immigrants. If you do these things, you’re not harassing the illegals who are not real criminals, but you are encouraging them to leave on their own because the things they come here for – legitimate jobs and public services – will increasingly not be available to them (i.e., those are reserved for people who come here legally and play by the rules).
Finally, I would push for severe restrictions on immigration from sharia countries – especially countries such as Saudi Arabia that propagate sharia.
We could then use the potential of greater access to our country, our markets, and the security we are in a position to provide to push for the real advance of freedom: religious liberty, freedom of conscience, equal rights for women and non-Muslims, the repeal of sharia Islam’s grotesque hudud penalties, the end of religious persecution, the end of persecution of homosexuals, and so on. That’s the kind of democracy promotion I’d be doing – you don’t need the military for it and it doesn’t cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
RK: What about other nations such as Malaysia that practice discrimination on the basis of Sharia law and are still called “moderate”? All ethnic Malays are given identity cards, declaring them to be Muslims, and no living ethnic Malay has ever been granted permission to leave Islam and their policy “ketuan melayu” severely oppresses ethnic Chinese and Indian citizens. Can’t we change the bar for the word “moderate”?
McCarthy: As I argue in The Grand Jihad, you are not a moderate if you want to supplant American law and individual liberty with a totalitarian system of any kind, be it sharia or any other such system. The fact that you are not looking to blow up bridges to get your way makes you a non-terrorist, and I suppose we should all be grateful for that. But you are not a moderate, and we should not let you get away with pretending you are. Nor are countries that enforce sharia law moderate countries. There is nothing moderate about sharia.
RK. Do you think the capture of the Times Square Bomber and the two home grown terrorists from Bergen County represent some improvement in homeland security and thwarting jihadists in America since your book was published?
McCarthy: No. Good police work goes on all the time. Ray Kelly is a superb police commissioner, and I have great respect and affection for the line agents on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, so it doesn’t surprise me to see them quickly solve cases like Times Square and so on.
The problem is our before-the-fact intelligence. That Times Square wasn’t bombed, or that the underwear bomber, Abdulmutallab, did not kill many people on Christmas Day, is a result of dumb luck. The terrorists were thwarted not by effective government action but by their own incompetence and the alertness of ordinary Americans on the scene. Luck is not a national security strategy. We need to open our eyes to the fact that these attacks, and the broader threat to our society, are driven by an ideology that is very mainstream among the world’s Muslims. When you look at what happened in Fort Hood – where twice as many people were killed as were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, yet the government shrunk from even calling it a terrorist attack, let alone a jihadist attack – you come to the grim conclusion that our government is not ready to open its eyes. And you can’t stop what you won’t allow yourself to see.
RK: Congratulations. Your book is a major success. Any thoughts on a sequel, or a guide for the coming elections?
McCarthy: Thank you so much, and thank you for the opportunity to discuss these important issues. I didn’t expect to write another book so soon after Willful Blindness, so I’m not going to look that far down the road beyond The Grand Jihad. I’m just very glad to be back writing columns at NRO and NR without trying to write a book at the same time. There are only so many hours in a day, and President Obama gives us no shortage of things to write about!
RK: Many thanks for your efforts. I’ve written before that your book is the best book on the subject and that assessment stands.
Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, author ofWillful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and The Grand Jihad. He blogs at National Review Online’s The Corner .
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Ruth S. King is a freelance writer who writes a monthly column in OUTPOST, the publication of Americans for a Safe Israel.
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