Tag Archives: Andrew McCarthy

The War on Terror is Over: Now What?

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images (67)by Clare M. Lopez:

“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us.” — President Barack Obama , National Defense University, 23 May 23, 2013

Just a few days before the Memorial Day holiday weekend in May 2013, the President of the United States declared unilateral surrender in what used to be called the Global War on Terror [GWOT] – that is, the war to defend the U.S. and the free world against the forces of Islamic jihad and Islamic Shariah Law. No, he did not actually wave a white flag from the podium, but he may as well have done: in calling for an end to the “Authorization to Use Military Force” (AUMF); declaring al-Qa’eda “on the road to defeat” (again—or maybe it is ‘still’), and expressing reservations about “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing,” Barack Obama made it clear that he hasn’t the stomach for this fight. It is not that the war is actually over, of course, but rather that, as Andrew McCarthy put it, “he wants it to be over.”

In an odd sort of way, though, Obama’s abandonment of the field of battle to the enemy clears away a good deal of the “clutter” that has attended the so-called GWOT over the last dozen years since the 9/11 attacks. Obama even used language that may help the average American and those observers who see things rather differently from him to begin formulating a new, coherent, and comprehensive kind of national security strategy geared actually to defeating an Islamic supremacist adversary.

The president rightly noted that “[w]e need all elements of national power to win a battle of wills, a battle of ideas.” He even went so far as to reference Islamic “extremists,” and acknowledged that there remains a “pull towards extremism.” Of course, after once again accurately mentioning that a “common ideology” fuels the terrorism we face, he shied quickly away from explaining just what that “common ideology” might be and instead launched into a shopping list of surrender terms that he is betting will somehow sap the fighting spirit of Islamic jihad, perhaps, one assumes, by the sheer force of their reasonableness. Among these are the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan and fewer boots on the ground everywhere (they are claimed to be “self-defeating“); suspension of the “Authorization to Use of Military Force;” partnerships with jihadist state powers, such as Pakistan; addressing “underlying grievances,” such as poverty and sectarian hatred (no details on how to get Sunnis and Shi’as to start liking each other, though); more foreign aid (perhaps to some of the oil rich jihad nurseries such as Qatar or Saudi Arabia?); greater respect for state sovereignty (Libya, Syria and Israel presumably excepted); and, of course, closing Guantanamo Bay [GITMO]. The one that’s sure to grab jihadi attention immediately, though, is the president’s determination to “be humbler.” Unfortunately for the president’s strategy, the ideology of this particularly savage enemy tends to treat “humility” as groveling — and as an invitation to double down on aggression.

Read more at Gatestone Institute

France’s Growing Islamist Problem

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franceBy Ryan Mauro:

The reaction to a recent Muslim robbery of a priest in France is a sad indication of where the country is headed. A Catholic official pointed out, “If it had been an imam or rabbi, he [the Interior Minister] would already been on the spot.” This is no surprise, as Socialist President Hollande’s pandering to the Muslim population played a large role in his election.

The incident began when four Muslims surrounded the priest and told him to hand over his cell phone. One thief knocked him unconscious. The attack may have been motivated by criminality and not jihad, but the two are part of a common trend.

There are over 750 government-designated “Sensitive Urban Zones” in France, referred to as “No-Go Zones” by Dr. Daniel Pipes. About 5 million Muslims live in these areas of France where law enforcement doesn’t exercise decisive control. When the authorities do have to step in, a violent backlash quickly arises. There are many videos of Muslim worshippers holding illegal prayers in the streets when their mosques overflow without any response from police.

On New Year’s, about 1,200 cars were set on fire and police clashed with residents in the Muslim-majority districts of Strasbourg and Mulhouse. In August, a two-day rampage was sparked when a Muslim was arrested for driving without a license around the time of a funeral. Massive riots have broken out in these no-go zones because of the hostility to reasonable law enforcement. Over half of the French prison population is Muslim, where many are radicalized.

A lack of integration is the most common factor in Islamic terrorists. These unassimilated areas are not just breeding grounds for criminals, but for extremism as well—particularly when foreign Islamist governments and organizations get involved.

The Saudi Arabia-based Muslim World League, described by Andrew McCarthy as “the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology,” is helping finance the construction of 200 new mosques. The French Council of the Muslim Faith wants to eventually doublethe 2,500 mosques in the country.

Qatar, the supposed U.S. “ally” that subsidizes the Muslim Brotherhood, is also active in France’s Muslim community. It is financing mosques and the Union of Islamic Organizations in France, the Muslim Brotherhood’s main branch there. It demands the government to pass a law against “Islamophobia.” The Qatari government is also investing $65 million in the suburbs where over 1 million Muslim immigrants live.

This isn’t purely an act of humanitarianism or a business investment. The Qatari constitution is based on Sharia Law. The Christians in Qatar, almost 6% of the population, are allowed to practice their faith but cannot proselytize  to Muslims. Hypocritically, Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani publicly pledged in December 2011 to “spare no effort” to proselytize the Islamic teachings of Muhammad al-Wahhab, the founder of what is often called “Wahhabism.”

Read more at Front Page

Jihad experts decry White House terror training guidelines

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See no jihad, hear no jihad, speak no jihad

See no jihad, hear no jihad, speak no jihad

By Neil Munro:

Experts on Islam and terrorism are decrying the Department of Homeland Security’s recently revealed anti-terrorism training guidelines, which pressure cops to ignore Islamic beliefs when investigating terror crimes.

The Boston bombings demonstrated the impact of such training, Andrew McCarthy, a former New York prosecutor, told The Daily Caller.

“The Boston Marathon was bombed by a jihadist who had been investigated by the FBI … [and was confirmed in 2011 to be] an Islamist, which would have been hard not to do since he does not appear to have made any secret of it,” said McCarthy, who persuaded a New York jury in 1995 to convict “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman for his use of Islamic teaching to spur jihad attacks, including the 1993 attack against the Twin Towers.

But before the bombing, “the FBI closed its file [on Tamerlan Tsarnaev] because it found this did not constitute ‘derogatory information,’” McCarthy said.

McCarthy and other security experts, and even members of the American Islamic community, indicate that a culture of excessive concern for the sensibilities of Muslims supremacists is preventing law enforcement agencies from pursuing jihadists.

The 2011 guidelines unveiled Thursday by The Daily Caller are part of this pattern of deferring to Islamist chauvinism. (Related: Homeland Security guidelines advise deference to pro-Shariah Muslim supremacists)

Under the federal guidelines, “agents are admonished to discount the possibility that an Islamist’s constitutionally protected abhorrence of the United States might possibly lead to violence,” McCarthy told TheDC.

Even if FBI officials had learned about Tsarnaev’s 2012 trip to a part of southern Russia that is embroiled in a jihadi war, they would not have restarted their 2011 investigation, a government official told the Washington Post in April.

“The FBI investigation into the individual in question had been closed six months prior to his departure from the United States and more than a year before his return. …Since there was no derogatory information, there was no reason to suggest that additional action was warranted,” the official said in April.

On his six-month trip, starting in January 2012, Tsarnaev visited several militant Islamic leaders and mosques in Dagestan, where jihadis are fighting the Russian government, according to several U.S. and Russian media sources.

“The fiasco regarding Boston is a prime example” of how bad training degrades security, said Robert Spencer, an authority on Islamic doctrine who is heavily criticized by Islamic groups in the United States. He noted that even though FBI agents had interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the FBI was unable to identify Tsarnaev in crowd photographs taken before and after the bomb strike.

After the attack, FBI officials also did not ask the main mosque in Boston for help in identifying the suspects, said Nichole Mossalam, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Society of Boston.

“We were the ones who reached out to them … on Friday” once the picture were released, Mossalam told TheDC.

Under the federal guideline, the FBI officials had “no reason to go to the mosque since the [Tsarnaev] brothers don’t show any outward signs in the [street] photos of being Muslims,” said McCarthy.

Because of the guidelines, it would be “a ‘profiling’ scandal to show the pictures at the mosque just because it was a bombing with … no other evidence of connection to Muslims,” he said.

The guidelines, titled “Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Training Do’s and Don’ts,” don’t merely promote respect for free expression but actively promote extremist views by telling officials to sideline experts who “venture too deep into the weeds of [Islamic] religious doctrines and history. … [T]hese topics are not necessary in order to understand the [Muslim] community.”

The DHS also actively discourages engagement with moderate Muslims. “Don’t use trainers … who are self-professed ‘Muslim reformers’ … [or who] equate radical thought [or] religious expressions … with criminal activity,” say the training guidelines.

The guidelines also advise cops, “Don’t use a trainer or training that has received repeated external negative feedback … don’t use training that treats the American Muslim community as a problem rather than as a partner … don’t use training that relies on fear [for example, by citing convictions that show] mainstream Muslim organizations have terrorist ties.”

The training guidelines go so far as to urge federal officials to rely on a political report by the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), a Los Angeles, California-based Islamic advocacy group with extensive ties to jihadists and Islamist groups, including the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood.

Read more at The Daily Caller

 

Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX-01) read and commented on an article from The Daily Caller on the House floor. The article notes, “The Department of Homeland Security…has shown a keen interest in monitoring and warning about outspoken conservatives, takes a very different approach in monitoring political Islamists, according to a 2011 memo on protecting the free speech rights of pro-Shariah Muslim supremacists.”

 

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Allen West on How to Successfully Prosecute the Boston Marathon Bomber

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1366650904223.cachedFormer federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy talks to Col. Allen B. West about the challenges prosecutors will face in prosecuting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Is federal court the right forum in which to prosecute the Boston Marathon bomber? Is a military commission a more appropriate forum? Find out.

Obama and the Jihad

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images (34)Front Page:

Editor’s note: Below is the video of the panel discussion “Obama and the Jihad,” featured at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2013 West Coast Retreat. The event was held February 22nd-24th at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California. A transcript of the discussion follows. Speakers: Andrew McCarthy, Robert Spencer and John Solomon

Jamie Glazov: We have a heroic truth-teller by the name of Michele Bachmann.  And one of the names that she was concerned about was Mohamed Elibiary.  An Egyptian magazine, by the way, just recently boasted that the Muslim Brotherhood is penetrating Washington.  And one of the names they mentioned was Mohamed Elibiary.

Just want to tell a very quick story about this individual, and for us to let it swirl around in our head that this is a person that today’s in the Homeland — he’s on the Advisory Council in Homeland Security.  Mohamed Elibiary in 2004 gave a speech at an evening dedicated to the Ayatollah Khomeini.  It was a tribute to the grand Islamic visionary.  This is in 2004.  This is a mass murderer — the killing fields, Ayatollah Khomeini.  Imagine one of us gives a speech at a conference praising Adolf Hitler or Stalin.

And Robert Spencer, our distinguished guest with us this evening, approached Mohamed Elibiary, if I am correct — right, Robert?

Robert Spencer: Yes.

Jamie Glazov: And he asked him — what were you doing there?  And he said — oh, I was there, but I didn’t really know what it was about.  But, you know, I was there anyway.  And we are not investigating this.

Imagine that you end up at a conference praising Adolf Hitler, and you don’t know why you’re there.  And then you’re there anyway, and your reaction is — oh, they’re praising Adolf Hitler here tonight.  Well, I’m here anyway, might as well go ahead and make the speech.  Because he did go ahead and make the speech.

This is one of the individuals in our government today.  And what I’m thinking about is — do we have a right to ask some questions?  Should there be an investigation?

Ladies and gentlemen, the future must not belong to the slanderers of the Prophet of Islam.  In Islam, “slander” is also known and interpreted to be not even slander; it could be just saying something uncomfortable.  It could be saying something that Muslims just don’t want to hear.  And my response to that is — no, Mr. President, the future must belong to the truth-tellers.

And we have three of them with us this afternoon.

Andy McCarthy: For all the awful things there are to say about the Obama Administration — and there certainly isn’t time in a panel, in a weekend, in a lifetime, to catalogue all of those — a lot of what we’re seeing today is simply Obama exploiting an atmosphere that has been created over a course of more than 20 years.

I said 20 years — Jamie mentioned the Blind Sheikh prosecution — Tuesday will be the 20th anniversary, if you can call it that, of the World Trade Center bombing.  And I thought that was pretty significant, because we just got through the testimony at the confirmation hearing of John Brennan.  And Michele catalogued a lot of Brennan’s dubious background last night.  But I think the most interesting thing I’ve come across about Brennan is his speech about jihad just a couple of years ago, and explaining his interpretation of the concept of jihad.

And the interesting thing about that is that here we are 20 years after the Trade Center bombing, 20 years of jihad in America, and we actually don’t even know what jihad is yet, even at an official level.  And I think the interesting thing — if you go back to that trial and flash forward to today, a couple of interesting things stand out.  One is the Blind Sheikh wanted his defense at the trial to be that we couldn’t hold him liable for green-lighting acts of terrorism, for issuing fatwas — or the Islamic edict, juristic edict, approving a course of conduct — any course of conduct, but in this instance, terrorist attacks.

Because in his view, he was simply performing under Sharia the customary traditional role of a jurist of his academic accomplishment, which meant that the members of the flock or the faithful would come to him, propose one course of conduct or another — you know, can I marry this person, can I blow up this building and, you know –

(Laughter)

– everything in between.  And it was the Sharia jurist’s job to say, you know, yes, that’s permissible or no, it’s not permissible.

So back in those days, we had a great — I thought, the greatest trial judge in the United States at the time, later the Attorney General of the United States, Michael Mukasey, who, after hearing arguments about it, would not allow that defense to be presented to the jury, on the common-sense principle that we are in the United States, and we follow American law in the United States.  And it didn’t matter what Sharia said, or really — not just to single out Sharia — what any other religious code would say in terms of where religious law would collide with the civil law.  Because there’s a lot of Supreme Court law that says that, you know, basically if you allow chaos like that, you have every person being a law unto himself.  And that’s not an acceptable way to have a civil society.  So that defense got bounced out pretty easily.

The reason I think that’s interesting is — flash forward almost 20 years, in my own home state of New Jersey. And we had a woman, a Muslim woman, who was married to a Muslim man who she was trying to divorce, who was serially raping and beating her.  And she went into New Jersey state court to try to get a protective order.  And the court refused to give her the protective order under circumstances where there was no doubt that the attacks and the sexual abuse was actually going on.  But the court reasoned that he was simply following his religious principles, under which his own understanding of them was that she had no right to say no.

So think about that.  We go from 20 years ago — where a Sharia defense basically gets laughed out of court on a very straightforward, confident idea of American law that we follow our own law in the United States, we don’t — Sharia’s not the law of the land — to a situation we have now where — not just in New Jersey; that case happened to be reversed on appeal — but in almost every state in the Union, we’ve had Sharia principles creeping into our law.

And the reason I think we’ve had them creeping into our law is what a lot of our distinguished speakers have discussed throughout the course of the day, and that is cultural confidence.  We really lack it.  And we’ve lacked it for 20 years.  And the result of that is that the people who are now in charge of our government really have precedents that you could drive a truck through.  And that’s pretty much what they’re doing.

I mean, what we’ve done for 20 years is basically suppress any discussion of our enemies’ ideology.  I mean, I’ve said probably every bad thing that you can say about the idea of using the civilian courts as your main counterterrorism weapon, the idea of bringing our enemy combatants into court and awarding them all of the Bill of Rights protections.

Let me tell you the one really good thing about using civilian courts.  And it’s one that I don’t think has been replicated by any other part of our government.  And that is that juries won’t convict people unless you give them a rational explanation not only of what was done but why it was done.

So even though 20 years ago we were saying the same things that we’re saying today — you know, religion of peace, Islam has nothing to do with terrorism — back then, it wasn’t violent extremism, but the basic message of the government was we didn’t really have a national security problem so much as we had 20 knuckleheads in Jersey City who weren’t representative of Islam as a whole.  And if we could just reign them in, all would be well.  And they said that in the White House, they said it in the White House Pressroom, they said it on the steps of the courthouse, Janet Reno said it, everybody in the government said it.

The only place it didn’t get said was inside our courtroom.  Inside the courtroom — because we had to prove to the jury not only what was done in the way of terrorist attacks but why it was done — we were actually able to prove why the terrorist acts were committed.  And what we were able to show was that there was an unavoidable, undeniable nexus between Islamic doctrine — and I’m not going to try to parse at this point, you know, Islamism or Islamist, or — we’ve had that discussion again and again.

What I’m talking about is what’s undeniably in Islamic doctrine — the nexus between Islamic doctrine and terrorism committed by Muslims, and the mediating agent from one to the other, where people like the Blind Sheikh — who we wanted to paint as wanton killers but who, in fact, were authoritative figures in their own communities.

Go to Front Page for the rest of the transcript

Twenty Years after the WTC Bombing

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20121001_WTC_attack_1993By Andrew C. McCarthy, February 26, 2013:

Today is the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing. It also marks three weeks since the attempted murder of Lars Hedegaard, the intrepid Danish champion of free speech. These events are not unrelated.

Back in 1993, there was a tireless effort to limn the WTC bombers as wanton killers. They were, we were to understand, bereft of any coherent belief system, unrepresentative of any mainstream construction of Islam. In reality, though, they were devout Muslim operatives who belonged to a jihadist cell formed in the New York area by Omar Abdel Rahman – whose notoriety as the shadowy “Blind Sheikh” obscured the basis of his profound influence over Islamists across the globe.

Sheikh Abdel Rahman is an internationally renowned Islamic jurist, having earned a doctorate in the jurisprudence of sharia – Islam’s societal framework and legal code - from Egypt’s al-Azhar University, the center of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. Blind from early youth and plagued by several other maladies, Abdel Rahman was physically incapable of building a bomb, hijacking a jetliner, carrying out an assassination – in short, of performing any blood-soaked activity that would be useful to a terrorist organization . . . other than leading it.

It was nothing other than Abdel Rahman’s indisputable mastery of Islamic doctrine, and hence his capacity to give present-day vitality to a seventh-century summons to holy war, that vaulted him to the forefront of the jihad.

The World Trade Center bombing was Islamic supremacism’s declaration of war on the United States. It was a blunt statement by the savage shock troops of a worldwide movement that America – “the head of the snake,” as the Blind Sheikh called us – could be struck at home, right in the beating heart of economic liberty.

Despite serial atrocities, thousands of deaths, and a decade of war, we are today more willfully blind to the reason we were attacked than we were back in 1993 – back when our ignorance might have been excused by our homeland’s seeming invulnerability to the scourge of jihadist terror. Regardless of our reluctance to see it, mainstream Islam – the dynamic Islam of the Middle East, unadulterated by incentives to moderate, at least for a time, while settling in non-Muslim lands – is aggressively hegemonic. As proclaimed by another iconic supremacist, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated.”

And to dominate for a very specific reason. Supremacists are not the irrational savages we have been so desperate for two decades to portray them as. Whether the jihad terrorizes by explosives, suffocates by the systematic subjugation of women and persecution of religious minorities in Islamic countries, or infiltrates by stealthily using liberty to undermine liberty in the West, the mission is always coherent and always the same: the imposition of sharia.

The rationale of jihadist terror is to diminish our resolve to resist the gradual erosion of freedom and the relentless demands of Islamists – especially, Islamists of the Brotherhood variety. After the Blind Sheikhs and the bin Ladens have softened up the target, it is the Brothers who beguile us. Impeccably well-mannered and wearing neatly tailored suits, they flack for Hamas and maintain, straight-faced, that free speech is not so much a right to condemn their totalitarian ideology as a responsibility to suppress examination of it.

In that ideology, the implementation of classical sharia is the necessary precondition for Islamizing a society. Sharia is the architecture for a global caliphate. This is why Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood chieftain, promised that when elected he would birth a new constitution enshrining “the sharia, then the sharia, and finally the sharia” – a promise on which he has followed through. This is the utopia of all Islamists, be they terrorists, or faux moderates who proclaim their willingness to pursue totalitarian ends by “peaceful political” means, or the Muslim masses who celebrate 9/11 and vote Brotherhood parties into power.

We did not want to acknowledge the sharia logic of the terrorists 20 years ago. We were told then that Islam had nothing to do with attacks on the West incited by Muslim jurists citing Muslim scripture.

There is no selling that fairy tale today, not after thousands of Americans have lost their lives. So the lie has become more aggressive, like Islam itself. While poseurs such as John Brennan – President Obama’s counterterrorism czar and nominee for CIA director - distort the meaning of jihad, Islamists and their fellow travelers seek not merely to suppress by intimidation but to criminalize by law the objective examination of Islamic supremacism.
Read more: Family Security Matters 

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor  Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and blogs at National Review Online’s The Corner. 

 

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Muslim Brotherhood “Machinations”, Or Vox Populi?

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Egyptian Liberals (like their Egyptian-American expatriate colleague Mona Eltahawy) championing free speech

Egyptian Liberals (like their Egyptian-American expatriate colleague Mona Eltahawy) championing free speech

by Andrew Bostom

Vote Compass is an interactive electoral literacy application, originally founded by Clifton van der Linden, at the University of Toronto, and subsequently applied internationally by political scientists, including within Egypt.

Dutch Political Scientist André Krouwel, working with an academic team of Egyptian political scientists at Vote Compass Egypt, was interviewed for a story published today (12/8/12) in the Vancouver Sun (hat tip Diana West) about data on Egyptian attitudes toward the draft constitution. Despite Egypt’s ongoing political crisis, including violent clashes, precipitated by President Morsi’s assertion of executive powers to break the 6-month deadlock which had stalled Egypt’s constitutional draft and referendum process, Krouwel (ostensibly speaking for his Vote Compass Egypt team) acknowledges,

About 70 per cent of the population will vote in favor of the constitution

This overwhelming support for the draft constitution was registered despite the fact that as my colleague Andrew McCarthy re-affirms today (12/8/12), the charter effectively, “denies freedom of conscience,” and “denies freedom of expression.”

Dating back to within a few days of their publication in April, 2007, I have repeatedly highlighted data from Egypt indicating that 74% of Egyptians favored “strict” application of the Sharia in general. As recently as December 2010, Pew polling data revealed that 84% of Egyptian Muslims rejected freedom of conscience in the most ugly terms claiming apostates should be killed (i.e., that percentage would likely be well over 90% if less draconian punishments, such as imprisonment and beating till recantation were queried), 82% favor stoning adulterers to death, and 77% approved of mutilating punishments for theft. Moreover, just last week when 7 expatriate Copts and Terry Jones were condemned to death for “blasphemy” not a single high profile Egyptian  “liberal” or “non-Islamist,” or “authentic moderate reformer”—whatever moniker one wishes to use for such individuals—has forcefully and unequivocally condemned this heinous verdict in the Egyptian public square.

None of this bedrock, totalitarian, liberty-crushing mass Islamic mindset can be blamed on the behind the scenes “machinations of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)”; it is merely a reflection of Islamic beliefs and  mores the MB openly shares with the mass of Egyptians, and has shared since the undercurrent of public longings in the 1920s first lead to the MB’s flowering.

Islamologist James Heyworth-Dunne’s observations, published shortly after his death in 1949, made clear that “…should the ikhwan [Brotherhood] acquire power,” it would impose the orthodox Islamic, Sharia-based restrictions advocated by founder Hasan al-Banna (i.e., such as the compulsory veiling of women; closing “un-Islamic” newspapers and periodicals, and making impossible the purchase of English and French novels; closing bars, restaurants, and cabarets, while forbidding the sale or consumption of alcohol and scourging anyone found consuming alcoholic beverages).  However, Heyworth-Dunne added that these restrictions merely represented a “…return to their Islamic customs which, in fact prevailed only 25 years ago.”Thus Heyworth-Dunne (writing prior to1950) confirms that before 1925 (or earlier, i.e., “25 years ago”)—antedating by at least three years the advent of the MB—their “version” of Sharia and its mores represented in fact a recent, previously longstanding status quo

History and hard data—including the Vote Compass Egypt data just shared by Krouwel revealing 70% support for the increasingly Sharia-compliant Egyptian draft constitution, tell us why the “Egyptian liberals” are so afraid of a constitutional referendum despite their claims it is “unpopular”.

Now that the “Egyptian liberals” have organized into a front they should be able to defeat the proposed constitution, and force a new draft process. But the “liberals’” response seems to be violent anarchy instead—which of course likely serves the MB because the MB bureaucrats may have softened, but their ardent followers of all stripes surely haven’t become less adept at violence.

The sheer, delusive hypocrisy of the “Egyptian liberals” is epitomized by Kamel Daoud, spokesman for Hizb-el Dostour, (the Constitutional Party), led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed El-Baradei. Crowing that the opposition was “winning a new round every day,” and “I think more and more people understand why we are against what is happening,”  he nonetheless re-stated his movement’s bottom line rejection of a simple democratic referendum that would validate his contentions:

We continue to insist that there should not be a vote on the constitution.

Andrew McCarthy’s Guide for the Perplexed

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by Roger Kimball for PJMedia:

Do you wonder what the hell happened in Libya?  Right after our ambassador and three other Americans were murdered by that “spontaneous” uprising in Benghazi by people who just happened to be armed with RPGs, know the layout of our safe house, and who congregated on — let’s see, oh, right, it was on September 11, what do you know! — right after that, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed surprise: after all, hadn’t we helped “liberate” the Libyans from the monster Gaddafi and made way for . . .  for what? Oh, right, for the “Arab Spring”!

I think that the administration’s response to the crisis in Libya might be the coup de grace for Obama’s reelection bid. In my view, Romney would have won anyway. I’ve been saying that for months. The president’s record on the economy is just too catastrophic to win him another term.  And this, remember, is the first time in his life that this president has had to run on his record, on what he has actually accomplished, as distinct from his “charisma.” But what happened in Libya — and, more to the point, how the administration has twisted, turned, equivocated, and lied about what happened and what its initial response to the crisis was — that is likely to put the final nail in the coffin of Obama’s reelection bid. As Mark Steyn pointed out in a devastating column:

In those first moments of the attack, a request for military back-up was made by U.S. staff on the ground but was denied by Washington. It had planes and Special Forces less than 500 miles away in southern Italy – or about the same distance as Washington to Boston. They could have been there in less than two hours. Yet the commander-in-chief declined to give the order. So Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought all night against overwhelming odds, and died on a rooftop in a benighted jihadist hell hole while Obama retired early to rest up before his big Vegas campaign stop.

How do you spin that, Mr. President?

But I digress.  I brought up Libya in the first place because it presents yet another example of what  is one of the biggest foreign policy, nay, existential challenges the West faces: the challenge, that is to say, of Islam.

At the end of his book America Alone, Mark Steyn suggests that, when it comes to its encounter with Islam, the West has three choices: acquiescence, annihilation, or enlightenment. We can acquiesce and become good Muslims or dhimmis; we can engage in armed conflict with a theocratic Islam; or we can work to segregate the secular currents that buoy many Muslims from the ideological imperatives that direct so much of the Muslim population.  The only palatable alternative, it should be clear, is the last.  But in order to pursue it, we have to be clear about what it is we are dealing with.

There is a great deal of nonsense spouted about Islam, from the corridors of Western power just as much as from the opinion columns of the commentariat.  The Bush administration’s insistence, for example, that Islam was fundamentally a religion of peace was misguided  public-relations claptrap. Nor does it help, as Andrew McCarthy forcefully points out in a must-read column today, to suggest that Islam is “not a religion,” as some conservatives have done. The real issue, as Andy notes, “ is ideology, not religion.” He goes on to make a critical point:

The distinction is worth drawing because, for the most part, Islamist terror is not fueled by Muslim zealousness for Islam’s religious tenets — for instance, “the oneness of Allah.” We Westerners recognize such beliefs as belonging to the realm of religion or spirituality. To the contrary, Islamist terror is driven by the supremacism and totalitarianism of Middle Eastern Islam — i.e., by the perception of believers that they are under a divine injunction to impose all of Islam’s tenets.

We in the West are puzzled by Islam because,  having been brought up to believe in religious freedom, we are confronted by this specious syllogism:

  • We believe in religious freedom;
  • Islam is a religion;
  • Ergo, we must respect and protect that which goes under the name of Islam.

This is a version of the fundamental antimony of liberalism, which moves from a belief in tolerance to an acceptance of ideologies (like communism, say) that demand tolerance for the “point of view” that we should be destroyed and replaced by a different way of looking at the world.

Christianity at its core makes room for the secular realm (“render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”) in a way that Islam does not (everyone and everything always and everywhere is subject to the will of Allah).  That difference is critical.  It does not mean that we in the West deny the pertinence of religious and moral tenets for everyday life. As Andy puts it, “the fact that we separate church and state in the West does not mean our moral sense is without influence — indeed, profound influence — over how we conduct secular affairs. But in the West, we reject the notion that any religious belief system’s tenets should control those affairs. In the United States, we reject the establishment of a state religion — such official primacy would suffocate freedom of conscience, a bedrock of liberty.”

The operation of this fundamental moral economy works in a very different way in Islam. “By contrast,” Andy points out:

The foundation of Middle Eastern Islam is submission to Allah’s law, not individual liberty. This interpretation of Islam thus rejects a division between the secular and the spiritual. Its sharia system contemplates totalitarian control. That makes Islamist ideology (i.e., Islamic supremacism, or what is sometimes more elliptically called “political Islam”) just another totalitarian ideology, albeit one that happens to have a religious veneer.

There are thus two things to bear in mind:

  1. “Islamist ideology  . . . [is] just another totalitarian ideology.”
  2. Islam’s theological tenets “are every bit as deserving of the First Amendment’s guarantees as any other.”

The price of that guarantee, however, is assimilation:

Muslims must accept that, in America and the West, it is not Islam but our traditions — especially the separation of church and state — that set the parameters of religious liberty. This way, Islam, the religion, is protected, but Islamic supremacism, the totalitarian ideology, is not. The latter undeniably draws on Islamic scripture, but it is categorically akin to Communism or National Socialism, not to religious creeds.

It is often said that the first step towards solving a problem is acknowledging that there is a problem and having the courage to call it by its real name.  We Western liberals have a difficult time doing that.  We habitually extend to others the benefit of the doubt, the latitude of tolerance, the dispensation that assumes all are, at bottom, freedom-loving creatures with domestic concerns akin to our own.

This is dangerously naïve and wrongheaded. Exactly how wrongheaded can be summed up in a single word: sharia, i.e., Islamic law.  They — hundreds of millions of Muslims — want it, we do not.  Al-Qaeda wants to impose sharia the world over.  But it is not just al-Qaeda. “Non-violent Islamists also want to impose sharia, “ as Andy notes, “that’s why they’re Islamists.”  Moreover:

These reputedly non-violent Islamists are not a “small minority” — they may be a majority of the world’s Muslims, and they are certainly a majority of the Middle East’s Muslims. They are al-Qaeda’s ideological allies, and, truth be told, they’re not really all that non-violent: They generally disagree with al-Qaeda’s attacks on Muslims and on non-Muslim countries, but they are supportive of violence against what they take to be non-Muslim aggressors in what they consider Islamic territories. Indeed, the sharia to which they adhere requires financial support (zakat) for those fighting in Allah’s cause.

The bottom line? “Sharia is the tie that binds terrorists to all other Islamists.” We in the West will never get a handle on the problem of Islam — the problem that this deeply illiberal ideology poses for our civilization — until  we acknowledge the true dimensions of the problem we’re dealing with. Neville Chamberlain thought that Hitler was a man  he “could do business with.” He was wrong about that, with unfortunate consequences.  Had he straight off acknowledged the true nature of the threat Hitler represented, he might have saved the world, and not least the Germans, a great deal of unpleasantness.

Andrew McCarthy: Rule of Law, Equal Protection Threatened Under Obama DOJ

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AIM:

Andy McCarthy twice addressed the AIM “ObamaNation: A Day of Truth” conference. The author and former federal prosecutor discussed the Obama Justice Department, under the leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder. McCarthy successfully prosecuted the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

“What we’re seeing in this administration,” said McCarthy, “is not only an out-of-whack choice about what their priorities ought to be, but the actual use of political philosophy in deciding who gets prosecuted, and how cases get conducted—and that, for somebody who’s been inside the Justice Department, is an unbelievable thing…If you have a situation where the Justice Department is using politics in the actual enforcement of the law, then you don’t have the rule of law anymore, and you don’t have equal protection under the law anymore.”

In a later talk at the conference, McCarthy discussed his new book, Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, which we will post in the near future. He also gave an interview at the conference, where he said that what’s happening in the Middle East “is not the spontaneous outbreak of democracy,” but rather the ascendancy of Islamic supremacism. McCarthy also observed that the only countries that practice slavery today are Islamic countries.He said that America and Islam are two different civilizations and that while we’re a freedom culture, in Islam “liberty is subordinated to ‘order’…sharia law.”

He added that what the media largely ignore is the fact that there is serious persecution of religious minorities throughout the Middle East. He indicated that of the worst 50 countries that persecute religious minorities today, 36 of them are Muslim countries.

You can watch his interview here:

 

And you can watch his talk on “Eric Holder’s Department of Injustice” here; or you can watch it here along with the transcript.

Review of ‘Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy’ (by Andrew C. McCarthy)

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by RUTH  KING:

Andrew McCarthy’s second book The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the  Left Sabotage America (Encounter Books May 2010) begins with  the words: “And so he bowed” referring to April 2,2009, when only a few months  into his term America’s 44th President’s reverentially bowed to Saudi  King Abdullah, a moment captured in a photograph that is being recirculated as  the Arab/Muslim world has exploded into a violent rampage against the United  States. Was it to protect America’s oil supply? No, as his subsequent obsequious  Cairo speech disclosed, it was abnegation of the leader of the free world to a  tyrant who is the keeper of the holy Muslim city of Mecca, home of Mohammed and  site of pilgrimage and travel for millions of Muslims. Furthermore, The World  Assembly of Moslem Youth (WAMI) is a collaboration between the Saudi government  and the Moslem Brotherhood whose chief aim is to “arm the Muslim youth with  full confidence in the supremacy of the Islamic system over other  systems.”

In the conclusion, McCarthy laments craven American response to a  concatenation of Moslem outrages and adds very presciently: “A half a world  away, King Abdullah smiled. He knew a bow when he heard one.”

The Moslem Brotherhood and assorted tribes, sects and radicals also heard the  bow, while American pundits and commentators, many of whom were alert to the  depredations of Communism, but seemed either blind or indifferent to  totalitarian Islam, were virtually giddy with the Arab Spring.

Andrew McCarthy begins his new book “Spring Fever: The illusion of  Islamic Democracy” with the following words: “Well, that didn’t  take very long.” Effectively, his (Morsi’s)election has converted Egypt from a  military dictatorship to a sharia dictatorship. As this book argues, that is the  end to which “Islamic democracy” leads.

As events now demonstrate, we see exactly where it leads. Using a film that  insults Islam as a pretext, Muslims are rioting throughout the Muslim world-  Egypt, Lebanon. Libya, Tunisia, Pakistan chanting “death to America.” Why the  surprise? An old saw states “if you want to know what a person is thinking,  listen to what he says. As McCarthy demonstrates, Moslems wasted no time in  doing their Spring cleaning by escalating the persecution of Christians, and  averring time and again: “There is no place in the Arab and Muslim world for  liberal and secular democratic values,” and for good measure they  reaffirmed their “struggle against Zionism.”

In a chapter appositely titled “Sharia and  Factophobia” McCarthy observes, the Moslem Brotherhood clearly  dominates the presentation of Islam in America, and in a witty and biting  statement he derides “a government so desperate to “reach out” to Muslims  that it is reliably found canoodling with, and thus increasing the cachet of,  Islamic supremacists whose defining trait is contempt for the West.”

Others are not spared his wit and sarcasm. About inter-faith “dialogue” he  describes how “Christian and Jewish clerics explain how much they admire  Islam, then Muslim clerics reciprocate by explaining how much they admire  Islam.” Touche!

While Obama is seen as more culpable, the author does not spare his  predecessor George Bush, who, after a rousing speech in the aftermath of 9/11  perseverated the myths that Islam is a religion of peace “hijacked’ by a tiny  fringe of fanatics, and that the West would do well to promote the yearning for  freedom and moderation that beats so fiercely in their collective heart.

As McCarthy demonstrates, in a chapter titled “They Just Don’t Like  Us” this attitude ineluctably contributed to the Obama faith that  not only is Islam virtuous, but, more dangerous, that it is America that is to  blame for their hatred. As McCarthy observes: ” Where Bush airbrushed Muslim  supremacists, Obama embraces them. Where Bush retreated from such clarifying  terms as jihad and Islamofascism due to caterwauling from the Brotherhood’s  American grievance chorus, Obama stridently objects to utterances of the word  Islam for any purpose other than hagiography – and enthusiastically contributes  to the slander that anyone who sees things differently is a hate-mongering  “Islamophobe.”

Much of the book demonstrates the global Renaissance of Islam, particularly  in describing Turkey’s descent into Sharia rule and its present role as champion  of Hamas with ties to Al-Qaeda, a collaborative port of embarkation for the  Flotillas of Jihadists that sailed to Israel, and a fount of money and  logistical support for terrorists.

McCarthy concludes this essential volume with the following, written before  the savage riots that assault our sensitivities with daily broadcasts of chaos  and unmitigated hatred for America:

“The Muslim Middle East is aflame, not with democracy but with Islamic  supremacist ideology. When the conflagration will end and exactly what each  theater will look like once it does, we cannot say for sure.We do know only that  classical sharia is being seared into the region’s fabric. Necessarily, that  means it will be more hostile to the West, more anti-American, and more  committed to Israel’s destruction. “

Andrew McCarthy’s books, columns, and blogs have done more than anyone or  anything else to brush away the cobwebs woven by skilled Moslem propagandists  and so called “moderate” agents of disinformation who oil their way around the  corridors of power and obscure America’s vision.

We are in his debt. Read this book and recommend it. And listen to the author  speak about the Arab Spring in his own words:

Published at Family Security Matters

Ruth King is a freelance writer. She has written a book and articles on  gardening, and also writes a monthly column in OUTPOST, the publication of  Americans for a Safe Israel.

The Grand Jihad: