See No Jihad

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IMHO, Andrew McCarthy is one of the go-to columnists on matters jihad. Back in January, when McCarthy wrote his short piece for the Conservatives Against Trump issue of National Review online, I shook my head in disappointment. Here’s a short quote:

A president may not have to be good with names to oppose [the jihad agenda] effectively, but he has to grasp the animating ideology, the power relations, and the goals of the players — and how weakening one by strengthening another can degrade rather than promote our security.

Donald Trump does not have a clue about any of this,  careening wildly from vows to stay out of the fray (leaving it in Vladimir Putin’s nefarious hands) to promises that the earth will be indiscriminately scorched. The threat against us has metastasized in our eighth year under a president who quite consciously appeases the enemy. But the remedy is not a president oblivious of the enemy.

I wonder if Mr. McCarthy has reconsidered his opinion. I’d like to think that back in January, he was towing the NR anti-Trump line half-heartedly, but maybe he still thinks Trump has no clue. 

However, in view of McCarthy’s analysis today of the jihad attacks in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota, it would be difficult to square his Never Trump position with the presidential race. Today, Trump is the candidate speaking in plain English about the threat of jihad to Americans and about screening those who would enter the United States from overseas. Here’s McCarthy on the latest spate of jihad attacks on US soil:

In the all too familiar pattern, things are going boom, Americans are under attack, and the American political class is already busy playing the “See No Jihad” minuet.

In a rational world, where our highest imperative would be to understand the threat that confronts us rather than to find the least offensive way of describing it, it would be patently, undeniably obvious that we are targets of international terrorism fueled by Islamic supremacist ideology. Nevertheless, the political class can only bring itself to say this kicking and screaming, and only if there is no other plausible alternative — which basically means a terrorist caught in the act while wearing an ISIS T-shirt.

. . .

Here is reality: The enemy that unifies the terrorist siege against the U.S., Israel, and the West is Islamic supremacist ideology, which aims to bring the world under sharia dominion. This ideology is far more important than ISIS and al-Qaeda because it is what created ISIS and al-Qaeda. It was the catalyst before those jihadist organizations existed, and it will be around when they are gone — for as long as we fail to take it on without apology and discredit it in the light of day.

The attacks spurred by this ideology, like those carried out this weekend, are international terrorist attacks, regardless of whether the operatives who execute them are affiliated with or inspired by a designated international terrorist organization. There are no “homegrown” attacks because the ideology is alien. There are no “lone wolves” because the wolves are part of a huge pack — a fundamentalist Islamic anti-Western movement that has millions of adherents, some percentage of which will always be willing to take up arms and kill for the cause.

Pro-American Muslims need us to help them discredit the fundamentalists. We cannot do this without openly acknowledging — as, for example, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has courageously done — that the roots of jihadist aggression are Muslim scriptures. This must not be obscured by political correctness. The scriptures in question must be acknowledged and reinterpreted in a manner that confines them to their historic context and nullifies a literal interpretation of them in modern life.

If we don’t confront the animating ideology and its stealth supporters with every bit as much energy as our police pursue the murderous jihadists, we lose. Winning begins with cashiering political correctness, with speaking openly about, and understanding, what we are up against.

Read the rest here. (And Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is meeting with both presidential candidates during his visit to New York and the United Nations this week.)

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