The Grand Jihad is Worth Reading

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.

Andrew McCarthy knows what it meant when Barack Obama bowed to the Saudi king: “The President’s bow to the Saudi king should have surprised no one. It was a submission to their mutual aspiration: a symbolic moment in the transformation from the America that was, to the America of Barack Obama’s fancy, a vision that would mark a giant leap forward for the global Islamist project.”

When I interviewed him in November 2009 about the Obama Administration’s plans to move the 9/11 terror trials to New York City, McCarthy explained what is also the main point of his book: “Jihad is anything that advances their cause, which is to establish sharia as a first step towards Islamicizing this society. So anything that they can advance the cause with is properly categorized as jihad.”

Anything they can advance the cause with—not just terror attacks. The Grand Jihad is about all the many ways that the Muslim Brotherhood is working to “establish sharia as a first step towards Islamicizing this society,” with willing help from President Obama and others among the America-hating left.

The book’s title comes from a Muslim Brotherhood document that came to light during the Holy Land Foundation jihad charity trial in 2007, that said that the Brothers in the U.S. “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion [meaning Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.”

In The Grand Jihad, McCarthy shows all the ways the Brotherhood is working to make Islam victorious in the U.S. He explains how the Brotherhood works through its supposedly “moderate” front organizations like the Muslim American Society and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which tries to intimidate Americans (as in the “Flying Imams” case) into being afraid to oppose jihad activity or even report suspicious behavior by Muslims.

McCarthy also shows how they’ve infiltrated at the highest levels, placing Muslim Brotherhood operatives in government agencies where they hinder anti-terror efforts, as when Islamic law expert Steve Coughlin was fired from his job in the Pentagon at the instigation of Hesham Islam, a Brotherhood-linked operative who was an assistant to Bush’s Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England. McCarthy explains how they are now also running candidates for office, like Esam Omeish of Virginia, positioning them as “moderate” when they’re anything but.

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.

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