The Grand Jihad

An outstanding analysis of the Islamic onslaught on the West.  Andrew McCarthy discusses his newest book The Grand Jihad.
 
"The Brotherhood is the font of modern Islamist ideology, which is deeply rooted in Islamic doctrine and scripture and which is far more mainstream among the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims than we’d like to acknowledge."

"In Islam, “freedom” means perfect submission to Allah and His law (sharia). So an Islamist has no trouble looking you in the eye and saying he is all for freedom. It owes to our own ignorance that we don’t grasp that he really means the antithesis of the concept we think we are hearing."


FROM FRONTPAGEMAG.COM:

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a columnist for National Review. His book Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008), has recently been released in paperback with a new preface. Check out a description  from Encounter Books. His newly released book, which has just become a New York Times bestseller, is The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

The Grand Jihad

FP: Andrew C. McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Tell us about your new book and what inspired you to write it.

McCarthy: Jamie, as always, it’s a pleasure to be here.

My first book, Willful Blindness, which you kindly allude to in introducing me, was really focused on the terrorist aspect of the Islamist threat. Although I did argue that terrorism was the direct result of Islamist ideology, based undeniably on an accurate and mainstream construction of Islamic doctrine, my main purpose was to explain why prosecution in the criminal justice system, standing alone, was an inadequate response to a profound national-security challenge.

The Grand Jihad is an effort to dig deeper into what that national security challenge is, and in particular, to stress that terrorism is only a small subset of it. Islamists consider themselves to be in a “civilizational jihad” — their words, not mine — against the West. They use terrorism to great effect, but the battle proceeds on every conceivable front in our society: the media, the academy, and our politics, law and culture. And their aim is nothing less than the “destruction of the West” — as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual guide (and probably the most influential Sunni cleric in the world), puts it, “to conquer America” and “conquer Europe.”

FP: Why is a book like yours necessary?

McCarthy: The reason a book like this is necessary is that, in the U.S. and the West, we don’t seem to grasp — some of us expressly deny — the dimensions of the threat facing us. When they hear someone like me talking, they tend to dismiss these warnings as some sort of far-fetched theory: “He says they plan to destroy the West — how crazy that is!” So it’s important to be able to point out that I am not theorizing here. I am reporting to you what they are saying about what they are so obviously doing. You can ignore it, at your peril, but to deny it is happening is just preposterous.

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