The Grand Jihad

How Islam and the Left Sabotage America

Andrew C McCarthy

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781594035807
• eBook ISBN:
  9781594035814
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Ideologies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The real threat to the United States is not terrorism. The real threat is the sophisticated forces of Islamism, which have collaborated with the American Left not only to undermine U.S. national security, but to shred the fabric of American constitutional democracy—freedom and individual liberty. In The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, bestselling author Andrew C. McCarthy provides a harrowing account of how the global Islamist movement’s jihad involves far more than terrorist attacks, and how it has found the ideal partner in President Barack Obama, whose Islamist sympathies run deep.

McCarthy is the former federal prosecutor who convicted the notorious “Blind Sheikh” and other jihadists for waging a terrorist war that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In his national bestseller, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter 2008), he explored government’s conscious avoidance of the terrorist threat, which made the nation vulnerable to mass-murder attacks. In The Grand Jihad, he exposes a more insidious peril: government’s active concealment of the Islamist ideology that unabashedly vows to “conquer America.” With the help of witting and unwitting accomplices in and out of government, Islamism doesn’t merely fuel terrorism but spawns America-hating Islamic enclaves in our midst and gradually foists Islam’s repressive law, sharia, on American life. The revolutionary doctrine has made common cause with an ascendant Left that also seeks radical transformation of our constitutional order. The prognosis for liberty could not be more dire.

Fight those who believe not
In Allah nor the Last Day,
Nor hold that forbidden
Which hath been forbidden
By Allah and His Messenger,
Nor acknowledge the Religion
Of Truth, from among
The People of the Book,
Until they pay the Jizya^a
With willing submission,
And feel themselves subdued.

—The Koran, Sura 9:29 (The “Verse of the Sword”)

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chapter one

WITH WILLING SUBMISSION

And so he bowed.

Barack Hussein Obama swept into the royal reception hall. With the election won and power assumed, it was suddenly all right to hype “Hussein” again, and the new president had adjusted accordingly. All successful politicians are manipulators of language, of course, but even masters of the game had to marvel at Obama’s prowess. This wasn’t just the routine squaring of “equal protection” with “affirmative action” or transforming “abortion” into “choice.” This guy had actually managed to morph his own name from calling card to epithet and back in nothing flat, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which, for him, it was. No wonder that even here, in Buckingham Palace, he was the center of rapt attention, as he had been for each of the seventy-two days since his inauguration. In fact, it had been this way ever since his improbable run caught fire two years before. Suddenly, his purposeful strut came to a halt. Then it happened, for all to see.

The 44th President of the United States of America bowed deeply, reverentially, before King Abdullah bin Abdul Azziz, Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques, the absolute monarch of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The prostration was all the more shocking beneath these vaulted ceilings. The leaders of the world’s richest nations—mostly Western democracies along with Abdullah’s police state—were in London for the G-20 Summit. They were hobnobbing cordially but, unlike America’s president, with their amour-propre very much intact along the gilded walls, bedecked by portraits of Britain’s heroes.

What could Obama have been thinking instead? That there was an American presidency owed to sheer defiance of this majestic setting. That there was a United States owed to America’s exceptionalism—the historically unique determination, forged in the blood of patriots, to refuse submission to a tyrannical power. This history is the steel in America’s backbone. It is why United States presidents look foreign royalty straight in the eye, with a dignity befitting leadership of the world’s most powerful, most munificent, most freedom-loving nation. They don’t bow.

Obama had seemed to grasp that . . . at least when it came to the United Kingdom, that bastion of Western imperialism so reviled by his Kenyan Marxist forebears. At their first encounter the day before, the president had appropriately greeted Queen Elizabeth II with a steady handshake, while his wife pressed self-regard to the point of impropriety, presuming a huggy familiarity with the sovereign. Michelle’s faux pas, endured with characteristic grace by the queen, might have faded unnoticed if not for Obama’s other flashes of indifference—no, of hostility—to the sensibilities of America’s staunchest ally. For this president, it was plainly not a priority to reaffirm the special Anglo-American relationship, long the linchpin of global security. That was the old order under Western leadership, the order this herald of “change” had come to dismantle.

In his first days in office, the new president expelled from the White House a bronze bust of Winston Churchill, lent to the United States by the former Prime Minister Tony Blair in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Stunned British diplomats implored the new administration to keep this symbol of trans-Atlantic solidarity—as British soldiers continued fighting side-by-side with their American allies in the war on terror. Curtly, Obama staffers told them there was no room in the White House’s 55,000 square feet for it.

Shortly afterwards, Obama hosted Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Washington with a jarring lack of ceremony. Brown, like Obama, is a committed man of the Left, and one whose Labour government then teetered on the brink. No matter: no state dinner, no customary joint press conference, and no show of support. The president, moreover, was downright bizarre in the exchange of gifts between heads of state. He bestowed on the prime minister a set of American movie DVDs that were not formatted to play on British machines. And what would a new president—veteran of less than four years in the Senate (most of which were spent campaigning for higher office)—give Elizabeth II, queen for over a half-century of the United Kingdom and what are now fifteen sovereign states? Why, an iPod loaded with recordings of some of Obama’s favorite speeches . . . by Obama, of course.

It was different—very different—with Abdullah.

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As the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and a cluster of diplomats looked on, agog, Obama prostrated himself waist-deep before the grinning, eighty-four-year-old Saudi despot with an ostentation that rendered even more laughable than usual the evasions of Robert Gibbs, the White House press-secretary, who dutifully accused the videotape of lying.

Didn’t the “post-racial” new president know that Saudia Arabia was still officially in the slave trade when Obama had been born in 1961 (and that the practice has been unofficially indulged ever since)? Through a series of post-World War I routs, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, then the family dynast, cobbled the “Kingdom” together from former British protectorates and the last vestiges of what had been Ottoman domination of the Arabian Peninsula. Still ruled today by the House of Saud, it is one of the world’s most repressive, discriminatory, anti-Semitic regimes. It is, furthermore, a regime that, since the 1960s, has spent tens of billions of dollars on a sedulous campaign to undermine American constitutional democracy.

The place is a money-machine rather than a forgotten desert wasteland due to the discovery of vast oil reserves, finally developed in the 1950s by the U.S. and the U.K.—the Saudis having been too backwards to do the job themselves, then too narrow-minded to build a diverse, productive economy once they’d appropriated the American and British handiwork. Oil is America’s economic lifeblood, and as the United States shifted over the decades from net producer to net importer, American presidents had taken to blandishing Saudi royals with red-carpet attentions. That’s distasteful, but it neither explains nor is on a par with Obama’s subservient display: The new president’s supplication occurred with oil prices in free-fall during a global recession.

So, of all the planet’s potentates, why would an American president demean his station in homage to this one? Because Saudi Arabia is the cradle of Islam. More specifically, it is the bottomless purse and symbolic crown of a movement which aims at nothing less than supplanting Western political, economic, and cultural values. The subversion of those values is Obama’s fondest wish: the work of his presidency, the Hope behind the Change. The president was bowing to a shared dream.

Supremacism and Dhimmitude

The cities of Mecca and Medina are Abdullah’s trust. They are Islam’s most sacred sites, the “Two Holy Mosques”: respectively, the birthplace of Mohammed in 571 A.D. and the sanctuary where converts to the prophet’s new religion—Allah’s deen—fled under siege nearly fifty years later, hardening both their resolve and their scriptures in preparation for an eventual violent return and conquest. Mecca is the locus of the Kaaba, toward which all Muslims, wherever on earth they may be, turn to recite their daily prayers. It is the place to which all able-bodied Muslims are required, at least once in their lives, to make the Hajj pilgrimage—as millions do each year.

Non-Muslim tourists, however, are barred from both cities. Only believers are deemed worthy of entering. To most people, that might seem downright immoderate. It might even make the most engagement-obsessed president rethink that whole bowing business. After all, imagine the howls from our elite “Religion of Peace” cheering section if Muslims were banned from, say, Rome or Washington.

Americans, however, are not supposed to see it that way. Sure, your religion may be mocked with abandon—the Christmas crèche cast as a threat to the Constitution, the Jewish state equated with racism. Not Islam, though. This is their faith, Americans are told, and we’re simply expected to accept its, er, eccentricities. And by the way, it is the Islamic faith we are talking about here, not some purported perversion of it. The supremacist edict that bans non-Muslims from Islam’s core territories was not, after all, al Qaeda’s idea. It comes, undeniably, from Islam itself: “The pagans are unclean,” instructs the Koran’s Sura 9:28, “so let them not . . . approach the Sacred Mosque.” Our “moderate” friends, the Saudis, enforce this injunction without a hint of apology, in the same way they insist that a just resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian dispute must include a purging of Israeli settlements from enlarged Palestinian territories while the heretofore Jewish state is coerced into granting a suicidal “right of return” to millions of Palestinians—the “one-state solution” to be implemented, without firing a shot, by democratic means.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Islam’s most influential Shiite cleric, makes even more explicit the dehumanizing leitmotif of Muslim scripture. Relying on centuries of Shia scholarship, he teaches that non-Muslims should not be touched, much less associated with. They are considered in the same category as “urine, feces, semen, dead bodies, blood, dogs, pigs, alcoholic liquors, and ‘the sweat of an animal who persistently eats filth.’”¹ You don’t like that? You’ll love this: The United States government deems Sistani to be our key “moderate” ally in the new Iraq.

In the Sunni tradition, more preponderant by far than Shiism among the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims, the Saudi monarchy is Islam’s physical, financial, and moral guardian. Islam is the irreducible core of what King Abdullah represents to the world. The House of Saud was built on a mid-eighteenth-century alliance between its patriarch, Muhammad ibn Saud, and the Muslim scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of Wahhabism. This creed hearkens back to the practices of Islam’s founding generations. To this day, Wahhabism remains Saudi Arabia’s official religion, and the Kingdom claims the Koran as its only constitution. ² Thus, the tenets of Islam are strictly enforced.

In cracking the whip, the regime gets enthusiastic support from the Mutaween, the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. It is an Islamic police force, several thousand strong, that monitors the various niceties of sharia, Islam’s divinely ordained law—including dress codes, prayer observance, and restrictions on women’s travel and even driving. Interestingly, the basis for the driving prohibition is a fatwa—or Islamic religious edict—issued by the late Abd al-Aziz bin Abdullah bin Baz, who was appointed Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia by Abdullah’s predecessor, King Fahd. Bin Baz is best known to Saudis for his 1966 fatwa declaring the world flat.³ The rest of his oeuvre—in particular, numerous pronouncements against Christians, Jews, and “infidel” Westerners—is too Islamically mundane to be very memorable, though these edicts are still regarded as authoritative in the Kingdom.⁴

Atop the Mutaween priority list is keeping the sexes segregated—on pain of six months’ imprisonment and 200 lashes with a rattan cane, as a nineteen-year-old woman learned in 2007 when she was sentenced after being gang-raped by seven Saudi men. But the Kingdom is clearly evolving: In 2009, a seventy-five-year-old woman who allowed the bread delivery man to enter her home got only forty lashes to go along with four months in the slammer.⁵

George W. Bush, Obama’s predecessor, had nauseated Americans in 2005 by holding hands with Abdullah (then the Crown Prince) on a stroll through the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. But Bush’s adoption of this Arabic custom was merely a demonstration of friendship—a gesture of the sort not atypical of Bush’s cloying “compassionate conservatism,” however ill-suited it may have seemed to the “cowboy” president of popular caricature. In real-world terms, it was a nod to the de facto chairman of an international oil cartel by a chief executive then getting domestic political heat for spiking gas prices. But a chummy nod or holding hands is not a bow. Obama moved matters to a new low.

The target audience for his submissiveness was the world’s Muslims. Ironically, from their perspective, and even from the perspective of Abdullah himself, a bow would ordinarily be thought unseemly. In many interpretations of Islam, including Wahhabism, overt subservience is the equivalent of worship. Muslims reserve worship for Allah and no other. In fact, many of al Qaeda’s most devoted terrorists, including Mohammed Daoud al-‘Owhali, who killed over 200 people when he bombed the U.S. embassy in Nairobi in 1998, decline to swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden, the organization’s emir. Like subservient bowing, they see pledges of fealty (or making bayat) to another human being as a violation of Islamic tenets.

There is, however, a telling exception. The Koran endorses the prostration of an infidel before his Muslim better—or, writ large, the subordination of the West before the might of Islam. Such a gesture amounts to a “willing submission” as Sura 9:29, the “verse of the sword,” puts it. It signifies that dhimmis, non-Muslim subjects, have not only surrendered but “feel themselves subdued.”

The Messenger

Long before humbling himself to Abdullah, Barack Obama had signaled his intention to steer the United States toward submission and appeasement. This was back in October 2007, the heady days before the Democrats’ nomination battle intensified and invocations of Obama’s middle name by political adversaries ignited fusillades of media indignation. The candidate grew downright whimsical when he told PBS,

Well, I think if you’ve got a guy named Barack Hussein
Obama, that’s a pretty good contrast to George W. Bush....
If you believe that we’ve got to heal America and we’ve got to
repair our standing in the world, then I think my supporters
believe that I am the messenger who can deliver that message.⁶

Such beliefs were indeed shared by Obama’s acolytes, to whose ears the incantation “Barack Hussein Obama” was music. This progressive vanguard ached for the antidote to “Bushitler” and his “war on Islam”—a.k.a. the “war on terror” or what, in Obama parlance, is now called the “overseas contingency operation.” For these suddenly ascendant leftists, the United States is the permanent culprit in tensions between America and Islam. The United States, in fact, is the permanent culprit, period. The left has thus made common cause with Islam—or, at the very least, with Islamism, Islam’s large fascistic subset that is driven by the religion’s dehumanizing supremacism. Contrary to popular belief, this supremacist ideology, because it is rooted in doctrine, is entirely mainstream in the Muslim world. Leftists see America—not the fascistic, supremacist ideology but America—as the trigger of jihadist terror’s rampage. And in grand enemy-of-my-enemy tradition, that arrangement suits the Islamists just fine.

Obama cements the arrangement. He was elected president because he knew how to speak to these forces annealed in resentment. He could give voice to the words and the symbols that ring their chimes while seemingly standing above, rather than among, them. This was more than a first-term senator of sparse record and thinner accomplishment. This was Obama the Saul Alinsky-schooled “community organizer,” a master of the art of harnessing grievance, of appropriating popular language and values in the service of radical ends.

“I am the messenger who can deliver that message,” the candidate had told PBS. Would anyone seriously believe that Obama, a deft communicator and no stranger to celestial imagery, was not intentionally evoking images of Islam’s Prophet in remarks fashioned for Islamic consumption? For Muslims, after all, Mohammed is the “excellent model of conduct” who ceaselessly announced himself as “the messenger”—the last in a line of “messengers,” including Moses and Jesus, sent by Allah to call mankind to the one true faith.⁷ For argument’s sake, though, let’s pretend this thought never crossed Obama’s mind. There can still be no denying that the candidate was seeking to highlight the incandescent power of his middle name, “Hussein.” It is, after all, a name straight out of Islam’s glorious lore. Hussein, Mohammed’s grandson, was a central figure in the triumphant campaigns of Islam’s original “rightly-guided” caliphs. His is among the most common names in the Muslim world.

As Obama deployed it, Hussein was not merely a name. It was a cipher. The sleepy A...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• chapter one - WITH WILLING SUBMISSION
• chapter two - ISLAMISM
• chapter three - JIHAD IS OUR WAY
• chapter four - ELIMINATING AND DESTROYING THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION FROM WITHIN
• chapter five - WE WILL CONQUER AMERICA THROUGH DAWA
• chapter six - FAUSTIAN BARGAIN
• chapter seven - E PLURIBUS UMMA
• chapter eight - THE AMERICAN DOESN’T KNOW ANYTHING
• chapter nine - NOT SUCH STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
• chapter ten - ISLAM AND THE REVOLUTIONARY LEFT
• chapter eleven - THE TIES THAT BIND
• chapter twelve - MUSLIM WORLD TRAVELER
• chapter thirteen - ISLAM, THE LEFT, AND APOCALYPSE IN KENYA
• chapter fourteen - SOCIAL JUSTICE, OBAMA STYLE
• chapter fifteen - THE “MOUNTAIN” GOES TO MOHAMMED
• chapter sixteen - RIGGING THE NUMBERS
• chapter seventeen - STARS OF STATE AND SCREEN
• chapter eighteen - FLYING IMAMS
• chapter nineteen - NO STRONGER RETROGRADE FORCE EXISTS IN THE WORLD
• chapter twenty - ON LANGUAGE
• chapter twenty-one - THE ENCLAVE OF MINNESOTA
• chapter twenty-two - BACK IN THE FOLD
• chapter twenty-three - ISOLATED EXTREMISTS
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• INDEX
• Copyright Page