He did it with the Fez on
He will undo it without a Fez
Andrew C. McCarthy is an accomplished former federal prosecutor who convicted the infamous jihadist “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman for his role in orchestrating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and planning other acts of jihad terror. McCarthy recounted this prosecution in Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, which characterized the motivating Islamic ideology, goals, and methods of contemporary purveyors of violent jihad. He juxtaposed their openly declared jihad war campaign to the “conscious avoidance” of this threat by both America’s leadership elite and its masses in a game effort “to expose this suicide ethos as it pertained to maintaining our security against the terrorist threat.”
But the alarming and depressing subject matter of Willful Blindness matter did not drain McCarthy of his own sanity-sparing sense of humor. McCarthy recounts the following anecdote which captures Rahman’s—and his own—demeanor:
…he [Rahman] was genial enough, in his paltry English, to call me “Sheikh Andy, “ with a wry, resigned smirk that always sounded like, “Man, would this ever be a different game on my home court, insha Allah!”
In The Grand Jihad, McCarthy extended these previous observations, and focused upon the more pervasive threat of jihad’s non-violent manifestations, which he described so appositely, as
…the wolf, that comes, if not quite in sheep’s clothing, as nothing more dangerous than a sheepdog-is the more insidious one. …Very simply the purpose of jihad is not violence for its own sake. It is to pave the way for the imposition of sharia, the Muslim legal code and the necessary precondition for erecting an Islamic state and society. That is a peril we don’t want to deal with. Doing so would require confronting the brute fact that such a state would be antithetical to American democracy.
Central to McCarthy’s presentation—and containing key extracts eponymous to the book’s title—was a document whose contents were revealed during the Texas Holy Land Foundation jihad-terrorism funding trial. This internal Muslim Brotherhood statement dated May 22, 1991 was written by an acolyte of the Brotherhood’s major theoretician, lionized Qatari cleric, popular Al-Jazeera television personality, and head of the European Fatwa Council Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America,” the document is indeed self-explanatory.
The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] 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 by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
The Grand Jihad’s masterful, remarkably compendious narrative elucidated how the Muslim Brotherhood program has taken shape, concretely, in America. McCarthy offers this summary assessment:
[T]his grand-jihad-by-sabotage has been underway for nearly a half century. Its bottom-up elements have stressed Islamist domination of Muslim education, community centers, and mosques. That means it is now raising, in our midst, its third generation of operatives and sympathizers.
Based upon steadily burgeoning evidence—much of it masterfully presented by Andrew McCarthy himself, New Gingrich issued (on 7/29/12) a passionate and articulate defense of Michelle Bachman, and the four other intrepid House Representatives—Gohmert Franks, Westmoreland, and Rooney—demanding serious, formal Congressional investigation of the overall extent of Muslim Brotherhood influence operations.
Today, Wednesday, August 8, 2012, from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm Eastern Time, Andrew McCarthy will make a presentation (to be streamed live on C-SPAN 3) at The National Press Club marshalling the data which underpin the call for this Congressional inquiry by those Representatives Gingrich has aptly dubbed “The National Security Five.”
In 1978, Charles Wendell published a magisterial translation of Muslim Brotherhood founder Sheikh Hasan al-Banna’s five pathognomonic treatises, or “tracts” as Wendell translated the Arabic word “risala,” in al-Banna’s case. What Charles Wendell knew and was unafraid to proclaim, is that Sheikh Al-Banna represented a continuum, not just from the so-called “Muslim modernists” al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida, most directly, but from foundational, mainstream Islam itself—the Islam that still appeals most to the Muslim masses wherever they reside, including sadly, here in the US.
For those who may never have (or never will) actually read Al-Banna’s main treatises/tracts, here are Wendell’s critical summary insights:
Hasan al-Banna’s fundamental conviction that Islam does not accept, or even tolerate, a separation of “church” and state, or of either from society, is as thoroughly Islamic as it can be. Any attempt to translate his movement into terms reducible to social, political, or religious factors exclusively simply misses the boat.
The “totality” created by the Prophet Muhammad in the Medinese state, the first Islamic state, was Hasan’s unwavering ideal, and the ideal of all Muslim thinkers before him, including the idle dreamers in the mosque. His ideology then, before it was Egyptian or Arab or whatever, was Islamic to the core. Since it embraced all aspects of human life and thought, it was at least as much religious as anything else. Practically all of his arguments are shored up by frequent quotations from the Qur’an and the Traditions, quite in the style of his medieval forbears. If one considers the public to whom his writings were addressed, it becomes instantly apparent that such arguments must still be the most compelling for the vast bulk of the Muslim populations of today.
[I]t seems beyond dispute that, like Al-Afghani, he envisioned as his final goal a return to the world-state of the Four Orthodox Caliphs [r. 632 to 661 C.E.] and, this once accomplished, an aggressive march forward to conquer the rest of the earth for God and His Sacred Law…This aspect of Al-Banna’s teachings is particularly vividly illustrated in the chapter entitled “On Jihad”
Confirming Wendell’s observation, Sheikh al-Banna wrote the following in his tract “On Jihad”:
You will not come across any ancient or modern regime, whether religious or civil, concerned with the question of jihad and the armed forces and the drafting and mobilization of the entire umma into one phalanx to defend the right with all its strength such as you will find in the Islamic religion and its teachings; or in the verse of the Noble Quran; or in the Traditions of the Almighty Apostle, overflowing with all these lofty ideals and summoning me with the most eloquent clearest exposition, to jihad, to warfare, to the armed forces, and to the reinforcement of the means of defense and offense of every possible kind—on land and on sea, and under all other conditions and circumstances.
Allah ordained jihad for the Muslims…as a means of implementing the Supreme Message [Islam], the burden of which the Muslims bear, the Message guiding mankind to truth and justice
How fitting that “Sheikh” Andrew McCarthy—uniquely knowledgeable and experienced in combating the global jihad—has courageously arisen, yet again, to defend the core values of Western civilization against the heirs of Sheikh al-Banna. Let us pray that his clarion call is heeded.
