Video: Law & Jihad with Andrew McCarthy

September 2008

Some quotes from a YouTube interview with Andrew McCarthy, author of Willful Blindness...

PR: President Bush on September 17th in 2001 said "Islam is peace".

AM: Sorry. Wrong. Nope, he's wrong...

PR (20:30): So is it true to say that even as you were successfully prosecuting Sheik Rahman in 1995 you were thinking to yourself "this is not the way to go about dealing with such people"?

AM: I wish I was prescient enough ... to say I realised that in 1993 at the beginning of the process, but by the end of the process, when you see the way it works every day, when you realise that this is really more of a war than a crime, and you realise that by complying with our due process rules that we are basically edifying the enemy about our intelligence, about our methods and sources of collecting intelligence while they are trying to kill us. I don't think that you could get a front row seat like I had for two years and not at the end of it come out of it and say "this is nuts"...

PR (22:20): I see your point and I see it vividly: criminal prosecution will not work on terrorists.

McCarthy's experience in terrorism prosecution...

RUSH: ... What was your role in the trial against the Blind Sheik?

MCCARTHY: Well, I was the lead prosecutor, and that informant turned out to be the main witness in the case, and he was my witness, so I spent, you know, quite a bit of time studying what he had done and also, you know, having to do the other odds and ends that you do when you do a case like this, one of which was to try to get prepared in the event the Blind Sheik decided to testify, which, you know, ultimately he didn't do but that didn't mean we didn't have to prepare for it. And that was an eye-opener. In fact, the whole experience in watching the dynamic of him and other people in the Muslim community throughout the trial was a real eye-opener for me. I wanted to believe in 1993 the stuff that we were putting out, you know, that he basically perverted who was otherwise a peaceful doctrine. But what I found was going through all of his thousands of pages of transcripts and statements, was that when he cited scripture to justify acts of terrorism, to the extent he was quoting scripture or referring to it, he did it accurately, which shouldn't be a surprise.

RUSH: So you went in thinking this guy might be a fringe little kooky and perverting Islam, and you were stunned to find out that everything he said or proclaimed had a root basis?

MCCARTHY: That's correct. There's no other way of putting it. And it shouldn't have been a surprise. I mean, he was a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence, graduated from Al-Azhar University in Egypt. Why in the world I would have thought that I or the Justice Department would know more about Islam than he would is beyond me now that I look back on it, but back then I was pretty confident that we must have been right when we said that he was basically perverting the doctrine.

And finally McCarthy, a terrorism prosecutor, actually admits that immigration has a role to play...

... Immigrants presumably come to a new place because it is attractive to them as is, not because they seek to reform it. More desirable would be real gate-keeping immigration policies that admitted only those of a mind to assimilate to the home culture, not the other way around. If that means people who would otherwise emigrate end up remaining in their home countries, is that such a bad thing?

And this thinking logically ends with (cue Lawrence Auster)...

McCarthy is making two distinct and correct assertions: that Islam is indeed the problem; and that Islam is not just a reaction against American freedom (as the president imagines) but is a coherent belief system with a billion followers, most of whom are passionately devoted to it...

I would suggest that McCarthy is touching on a contradiction in his own thought process that will eventually move him toward the logic I have been enunciating for the last few years:

1. Islam is the problem.
2. However, we do not have the ability to destroy Islam.
3. Nor do we have the ability to democratize Islam.
4. Nor do we have the ability to assimilate Islam.
5. Therefore, the only solution is to separate ourselves from Islam.

Because ...

If advocacy of and/or belief in sharia are grounds for barring an individual from the United States, then, given the fact that all Muslims are commanded by their religion to live under sharia and to expand sharia to non-Muslim lands when possible, and given that there is no way we can determine which Muslims will actually advocate sharia once they are here, or, for that matter, whether their children will advocate sharia once they are grown, isn't it the case that by the logic of this law all Muslims should be kept from immigrating into the United States?