In her review of Andy McCarthy's excellent and essential book, The Grand Jihad, Pamela Geller graciously hat-tips my earlier contribution to the study of the Islamic supremacist effort in the U.S., Stealth Jihad: "The Grand Jihad is Worth Reading," by Pamela Geller in Human Events, July 5:
I anxiously looked forward to the release of Andrew McCarthy's new book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, for several reasons. It was long overdue that a respected thinker, a senior fellow at National Review Institute and former prosecutor of the most heinous Muslim terrorists would address what Robert Spencer so brilliantly warned us of in his seminal work, Stealth Jihad.Spencer is considered one of the world's leading scholars on Islam and his take on the topic is from Islamic text. Andrew McCarthy, one the other hand, came to the subject matter from a court room.
McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, got the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman locked up for his role masterminding the first World Trade Center jihad attack in 1993. And so respected was McCarthy by that killer, he referred to him as "Sheikh Andy."
So when a man of McCarthy's stature warns of the "grand jihad" or as Spencer coined it "the stealth jihad," you can be sure the nation is in trouble. [...]
The Grand Jihad covers a lot of the same ground that was covered by Islamic scholar Robert Spencer in his 2008 book Stealth Jihad. Spencer deserves props for being the first to examine in detail the Muslim Brotherhood's strategic goals in the United States, and the many ways their stealth jihad is advancing here. Spencer's book reveals the Brotherhood's activities in depth, as well as the international war on free speech that is being pursued by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).
McCarthy deserves kudos for confirming Spencer's research, and furthering and updating it with vital information about the complicity of the Obama Administration in these efforts. Too few people know what the Muslim Brotherhood is doing in the United States, and fewer still realize just how thoroughly anti-American Obama really is and how that shows through in his policies. That makes The Grand Jihad one of the most important books of the year.
During our interview, McCarthy asked me: "You remember the CIA photographs they were going to release, the prisoner abuse photos? People rose up, they got angry about it. There was a lot of political backlash. And what happened? He reversed himself. So it's not hopeless...It's our courthouse, it's our government and they get to serve it for a while, and I think that we should speak to them and let them know what we want."
We don't want the grand jihad advancing in America. We don't want any more U.S. Presidents bowing to Islamic kings. Get Spencer's Stealth Jihad and McCarthy's Grand Jihad, and educate yourself--before it's too late.
See an excellent interview with McCarthy here:
http://www.booktv.org/Watch/11589/The+Grand+Jihad+How+Islam+and+the+Left+Sabotage+America.aspx
For a less uncritical examination of McCarthy's analytical approach to the problem of Islam, see my essay:
Andy McCarthy: Hard Glazovian.
Here's a man who pulls no punches when he confronts a Muslim calling into his radio show:
NEIL BOORTZ LEVELS HIS ANGER OUT ON THIS MUSLIM CALLER---I'M KIND OF THINKING BOORTZ HAS HAD ENOUGH OF THEIR CRAP.---YOU BE THE JUDGE??
Hesperado - I read the piece on Glazovianism. It had this:
"Here, as elsewhere, Glazov commits the elementary and simplistic error of assuming that if a sociopolitically diseased population has internal victims, those internal victims must not be part of the dysfunctional nourishment of the disease."
which reminded me of a conclusion I have reached about Muslims, but I have never expressed it because it sounds like a low-brow cheap shot, but here it is:
Muslims are like a rabid dog. Not in the sense that they are necessarily crazed and foaming at the mouth, but in the more subtle sense that they are at the same time the **victims AND propagators** of a dangerous, even deadly condition. Islam as rabies helps understand the dichotomy that civilized people fell towards Muslims - as decent human beings we don't want to fear and react against them, but on the other hand we suppress those responses very much at our own peril.
In the end, Old Yeller had to be shot, mainly because there is no cure for rabies and his status as threat trumped his status as victim. His death was a given at that point, the only question remaining was - would he be put to death or would the rabis be allowed to run its course and kill him, all the while leaving others exposed to the risk of being bitten?
Is there a cure for Islam? The fact that 1 Muslim in 1000 can break away from Islam, and family, and country, and tradition is hardly a ringing endorsement for the theory that Islam can be cured, but hope springs eternal I guess.
Let me be clear - I am not advocating that Muslims be killed a la Old Yeller, but simply making the point that they are **at one and the same time** victims and perpetrators of Islam, a very dangerous and threatening condition for sure.
Here is something I read from another site:
"Gulen, a Turkish Muslim "interfaith scholar" (living in the US?) stated that “IN ORDER TO REACH THE IDEAL MUSLIM SOCIETY 'EVERY METHOD AND PATH IS ACCEPTABLE, [INCLUDING] LYING TO PEOPLE.’” This public acknowledgment of taqiyya (employing deception to advance Islam) is highly pertinent to Gulen’s activities here in the United States."
Gulen in a sermon "You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, …
You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions …
Until that time, any step taken would be too early—like breaking an egg without waiting the full forty days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside. The work to be done is [in] confronting the world"
And let me clarify further - MOST Muslims are victims of Islam. Since Islam empowers the most ruthless in a group, the small minority of ruthless savages are in fact not victims of Islam, but leverage Islam to make themselves into the victimizers of all in their reach - Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
http://newstime.co.nz/norway-bans-sharia-courts.html
US state Louisiana and Norway wakes up for the barbarian Sharia Law, while the others still dream ... but every dream has an end!
"Stealth Jihad" by Robert Spencer!
"And let me clarify further - MOST Muslims are victims of Islam. Since Islam empowers the most ruthless in a group, the small minority of ruthless savages are in fact not victims of Islam, but leverage Islam to make themselves into the victimizers of all in their reach - Muslim and non-Muslim alike."
That's a very good and very important clarification.
“First the state of Louisiana banned Sharia Law, and the state of Oklahoma is in the process of banning it as well."
Bravo Louisiana and Oklahoma!
While your analysis in that link, Hesp, of those McCarthy statements seems sound, this from a McCarthy speech (as published in a Summer 2008 supplement in The New Criterion) suggests an understanding a little more nuanced:
“We officially regard the Saudis as ‘key allies’ in the war on terror, acquiesce in their zealous exportation of a triumphalist hate ideology, and reward them with billions in high-tech military hardware. All in all, it is part of a determination (shared by administrations of both parties) to elide the ‘Islamic’ in Islamic terror, portray jihadists as imposters who have perverted the real Islam, and insist that Muslim belligerents are really animated by poverty, ancient grievances, lack of democracy, etc – anything but scriptural commands to quell non-believers.” (pp.25-26)
MBR, I'd say there's no rational way to square McCarthy's comments I analyzed in my essay, with the one you quoted -- for they essentially contradict each other.
I thus stand by my conclusion in my essay:
I thus call McCarthy a "hard Glazovian": He is hard insofar as he recognizes data about Muslims that should lead him to widen his diagnosis of the problem and our prescriptions for managing it. But he remains Glazovian in resisting the rational direction which the data he notices would lead him.
The quote you cited would reflect McCarthy's ability to notice data that others (in the mainstream, for example) refuse to notice and/or appropriately process. His other quotes I analyzed reflect his inability to take the import of that data to its logical conclusion.
In a similar vein, I adverted in my essay to another apparent contradiction in McCarthy's theory about the problem of Islam where he subscribes to the TMOEWAHI -- i.e., the "Tiny Minority of Extremists Who Are Hijacking Islam" paradigm -- while at the same time he maintains (quite rightly) that democratic procedures in any given Muslim society lead to more "radicalism".
This curious inability to iron out the incoherence and contradiction by simply following the data's import I have noticed and analyzed numerous times on my blog with regard to many observers. It's not merely McCarthy or Glazov; there are many others within the ambit of the ragged umbrella of the Anti-Islam Movement who demonstrate this irrational tendency, to one degree or another. I have termed it the "asymptotic" tendency -- moving ever closer to a point, but never quite getting there. I think the problem here is both cultural, and psychological.
Culturally, these "asymptotic" observers of the problem of Islam have not entirely freed themselves of the subtle influence of PC MC.
Psychologically (which is related to the cultural factor), they semi-consciously recoil from the logical conclusion to which the massive and horrible data of Muslims leads -- for it would lead them to embark upon those thought crimes in our time, of "making sweeping generalizations" about Muslims, of "painting them with a broad brush", and worse yet, of getting within 1,000 miles of the ballpark of that most feared of all adjectives when discussing Muslims: all. And so they go through mental gymnastics and hypothetical pretzels trying to figure out various ways to avoid that logical conclusion. Oftentimes these mental gymnastics result in the kind of incoherent contradiction McCarthy seems to hold in his head.
And let me clarify further - MOST Muslims are victims of Islam. Since Islam empowers the most ruthless in a group, the small minority of ruthless savages are in fact not victims of Islam, but leverage Islam to make themselves into the victimizers of all in their reach - Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
This seems simplistic, and tends to fail to explain such evidence of mass fanaticism among Muslims as, to take one example out of thousands we could pluck from a turban, the fact that upwards of 80% of Pakistani Muslims support the death penalty for blasphemy. If all those masses of Muslims who, for example, demonstrated en masse in various cities around the world for the death of Salman Rushdie -- yet have never got around to demonstrating en masse (let alone in small numbers) against the truly horrific atrocities their brethren are perpetrating around the world -- are "victims", the only conceivable framework for understanding such a type of "victim" is the Stockholm Syndrome. But even that framework, I maintain, is like trying to superimpose a square hole onto a pentagon. Such a framework is insufficient to explain the unique phenomenon of Islamic fanaticism, whose dimensions -- sociological, psychological, geographic, and temporal lasting 1400 years and not only still going strong today but getting worse -- defy any other cross-cultural comparison in world history. The framework might explain small-scale situations of individuals caught up in a small cult, or possibly the somewhat larger phenomenon of the Jim Jones mass suicide, but not the massive international proportions of Islamic fanaticism. It thus seems to be yet another attempt to flail around straining for a way to save Muslims from our condemnation, and our vigilant suspicion of the danger they pose to us.
Indeed Hesperado, McCarthy failed to state as do also many of those who possess a most exhaustive knowledge of islam the following stark truth: all muslims are a danger. While the degree to which they participate directly in murdering innocent lives varies, their allegiance to the Koran, what identifies them as muslim, makes them all share a responsibility for the death and destruction which come about the actions of their more active co-coreligionists who follow the the same teachings, the same prophet.. By Western standards of law and justice they all are held collectively responsible for being accessories to the jihadists murders form past to present. One pulls the trigger, the other provides the gun, the other just carries the instructions, they all obey and live for the same cause, islam in this case.
Because of the false and easy association the left and CAIR
ilk make in front of the PC MSM ,perhaps Mccarthy and others tactfully are avoiding the ALL word for it some esaly can be spun in ways which in the end hurt the cause.
Great recommendation Pamela!
Great analysis Hesperado, there is no clearer prism of truth than the one you use
All of which gets back to the rabies thing. I would say that those who are mindlessly albeit very threateningly screaming for death ARE classic victims of a cult, and their brain, judgement, free will, morality, and basic humanity are all under siege as a result. Although these types are not on the very bottom rung of victimhood (that being reserved for women, infidels, sub-Saharan Muslims, and so on) they are nonetheless diminished and have their existences ruined by Islam, even if they are also transmitting that plague (rabies..).
In don't mean to wander off into Psych 101 here, but the fact that they go home and kick and abuse the old lady can be seen as them responding to their victim status by finding someone more lowly than even themselves to abuse and hence to "de-victimize" themselves against.
I don't want to get dragged into semantics, and I am not leading a "sympathy for Muslims" campaign, far from it, I just think it's important to have the most correct understanding possible of the phenomenon.
RABIES....
Islam is not like a rabid dog herd, but a next of cockroaches, which breeds fast while the adult male hunter cockroaches spread the territory. Only it's the holy writings of Islam which transform humans into cockroaches in stages, all the way to the terminal stage of a jihadist. Yes, I know, the little ones are so cute, and not all go terminal.
Why shell out money on retro books about Islam when an entire online course for all 1400 years is at your fingertips free on the Internet with the Historyscoper at http://go.to/islamhistory
Scope Jerusalem's history to see why the Jews not Arabs have all the historical claims to it: http://historyscoper.com/tlwjerusalem.html
Scope Obama's Muslim past free:
http://historyscoper.com/obamascope.html
Keep up on daily news:
http://historyscoper-islamwatch.blogspot.com/
Just using the two text mentioned, and seeing the mestasticization of this cancer, you will be drawn to pursue many other texts. Spencer and McCrthy are very generous in sharing their sources.