Andrew McCarthy Talks About Islamists and Political Correctness

Most people know Andrew McCarthy as a prolific commentator, National Review columnist, author, and all around expert on the subject of the world-wide terrorist threat, I mean, the world-wide threat of man-made disasters.  Mr. McCarthy became a terrorism expert when he was an Assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York.  It was McCarthy who led the prosecution against Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and others for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. After 9/11 the supervised the Justice Department's Command Post near Ground Zero in New York City.

McCarthy is not a big fan of how the Obama administration has been handling the terrorist threat, especially his decision to release Gitmo Prisoners and to prosecute lawyers who advised the CIA about enhanced interrogation techniques.

Last year when he was invited by Eric Holder to attend President's Task Force on Detention Policy, McCarthy not only declined, but he diplomatically told the Attorney General where to shove his invitation.

….it is quite clear—most recently, from your provocative remarks on Wednesday in Germany—that the Obama administration has already settled on a policy of releasing trained jihadists (including releasing some of them into the United States).  Whatever the good intentions of the organizers, the meeting will obviously be used by the administration to claim that its policy was arrived at in consultation with current and former government officials experienced in terrorism cases and national security issues.  I deeply disagree with this policy, which I believe is a violation of federal law and a betrayal of the president's first obligation to protect the American people.  Under the circumstances, I think the better course is to register my dissent, rather than be used as a prop.

…. I am, in addition, powerless to stop the President, as he takes these reckless steps, from touting his Detention Policy Task Force as a demonstration of his national security seriousness.  But I can decline to participate in the charade. 

 

McCarthy has a new book out called, "The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America," and as part of his promo tour sat down with John Hawkins of Right Wing News. And you can see that he has not softened in his directness nor in his intelligence.

Here are a couple of highlights from the interview.

On the refusal to acknowledge our enemies:

I think that we're in a posture now where we've become so frightened to acknowledge what the threat to us is. Part of that is ideological and part of it is tactical. I think the Left doesn't want to say Islamic doctrine and terror committed by Muslims is a broader threat to our society because if it's not the ideology that's causing it, it has to be being caused by something else...which always turns out to be some policy or another that the Left despises.

 
On How Political Correctness:

But aside from the people who take that approach for tactical reasons, I think a lot of people in good faith believe that if we simply acknowledge what our eyes shouldn't allow us to deny, namely that there is a Nexus between Islamic doctrine and the terror committed by Muslims, we would therefore be at war with 1.4 billion people in the Muslim world. I just think that is such an absurd over reaction. There are millions of people in the Muslim world that don't want to live in Sharia societies and who actually embrace all that is available in the West-- and not for the reasons the Islamists embrace those freedoms, which is to use them tactically in order to undermine our society. Those Muslims really do want to evolve their faith and live in a culture such as the one we have, not destroy it. So certainly we wouldn't be in any sense at war or even in disagreement with those Muslims.

But I think with respect to the Islamists, who I argue in the book, number in the tens of millions of people as well, you could be in disagreement with people, even profound disagreement with people, without having to be in a shooting war with them -- which is the impression you get from the people who make this argument that we would be in that kind of a hostile posture.

Obviously with respect to terrorist organizations and people who are trying to project force and conduct mass murder attacks against the United States, there's no other way of approaching with those people. You have to either kill them or capture them and that's just the way it is

We Need to Stop Apologizing For Protecting Ourselves:

Andrew McCarthy: I think the first thing we have to do is stop loathing ourselves and stop apologizing for who we are. I think in conjunction with political correctness a lot of what's seeped into our culture is this sense that we're the problem in the world because that's the theme that's been pushed by the Left. It certainly is the theme that's pushed by the Islamists and I think because we, in this particular stage of our history, we've never felt a great need to have to defend ourselves. I sometimes worry that we've forgotten how to do it. But, I do think that it's something that we absolutely have to do. If we want to defend our way of life, we have to open our eyes to the fact that there is a threat to it and where that threat is coming from.

 

There is much more to this interview. Click here to read the rest