"You can't take the Islam out of Islamic terrorism"

The fearless and insightful Andrew McCarthy tells the truth, truths we have been repeating here for years, on the bully pulpit of the Rush Limbaugh Show. Don't miss Andy's imporhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.photo.gif
Add Imagetant new book about the Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman case and the jihad threat in general (along with our supine and fantasy-based response to it): Willful Blindness. "Rush Interviews Andrew McCarthy," from Rush's site (thanks to Doc Washburn):

RUSH: It's great to have you here. Now, let's get started with this, because there's a lot to discuss with you. There are three themes in Andy's book, folks. The first theme is that a foreign threat to national security is fundamentally a political issue of self-defense that would involve military. It's not a legal issue involving lawyers and criminal law. The second theme is that we have been at war with these people -- declared by them -- since the late eighties, early nineties, and it wasn't taken seriously until 9/11. The third one is what's fascinating to me. I can't wait 'til we get to that portion. It's "You Can't Take the Islam Out of Islamic terrorism." Andy tried the blind sheik, and I'll let him tell you the story when we get there about preparing to cross-examine the blind sheik. He expected to find that this guy was just a fringe nut, making things up -- and nothing he said was made up about Islam. So let's start where you think we need to start for people to understand the threat that we still face, and maybe you want to do that by starting at the beginning and how you became aware of it.

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RUSH: And that, of course, helped you prepare your case. 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.

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RUSH: And we resume our conversation with Andrew McCarthy; author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. If you just missed it, we just finished a discussion of Andy being the lead prosecutor on the conviction of the Blind Sheik -- 1993 World Trade Center -- and I want to repeat this point because I think it's crucial. In preparing for the prosecution and possible witness testimony on the stand of the Blind Sheik -- who ended up not taking the stand -- you had to prepare for it, and you assumed him to be a fruitcake. Nobody, nobody's religion could actually have things in scripture that he was citing, and you found out everything he said was there. It opened your eyes, and I think this is the kind of thing... We're in the middle of a presidential campaign, and you've talked about the notion here that they declared war on us, you cite 1993. We didn't take it seriously until 2001. Do you think we still take it seriously?

MCCARTHY: We're taking it less seriously. I think there was a time right after 9/11, probably I put it at about 18 months -- probably into the Iraq operation, so longer than that -- that I think we really were taking it seriously. We certainly changed our enforcement methods. The Justice Department still had a role, but it was much more subordinate. The military was out front, which it needed to be in that phase, but there was a realization that it needed to be a wholesale government approach. But when I read things like what we've heard in the last few days about how we're getting guidance inside the government about purging our lexicon and saying things like jihadism and mujahideen and the like and --

RUSH: Wait. Wait, wait, wait! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Who's getting what? Guidance? Who in the government is sending this out to who?

MCCARTHY: Well, the reporting that's come out since -- I guess it was about April 24th -- is that the internal syncing at least in parts of the administration -- and this is something the State Department's pushed for a long time -- is that we make a mistake call jihadism, jihadism; because there are all kinds of jihad, not just forceable jihad. This is how the thinking goes. And, by the way, while there may be all kinds of jihad, jihad is a military concept. That's how it grew up. That's the reason there is a Muslim world in the first place. But secondly the idea is that when you call them jihadists, you are somehow emboldening them as if what they were relying on is how we regard them rather than how they see themselves. And that you also --

RUSH: So what are we supposed to call 'em?

MCCARTHY: Well, I'm down to thinking -- as I wrote in a piece in National Review a couple years ago, I think maybe -- we should just call it "Mabel" or something. Because it seems like everything that you say that touches on this... We're so intimidated by the idea that there's a religious label on this and everybody is so afraid of their shadow to talk about it, that whenever you say what is obvious -- which is that you can't take the "Islam" out of Islamic terror and that the main cause of this is not democracy or lack of democracy; or, you know, ancient hatreds or the economy, poverty, or whatever our excuse is this week. This is driven by doctrine. You know, we have poor people all over the world. They're not all committing terrorism.

RUSH: Are the leaders of this movement people of wealth? We know Bin Laden's a man of great wealth; his family was. I don't know about Zawahiri, but he was a doctor in Egypt. What about Rahman? Are the leaders of this movement who are getting hold of these young kids at very impressionable ages and turning them into little hate missiles, are they wealthy people? I mean, so many people in this country believe that it is our usurpation and actual stealing of the world's resources leading these poor people, these nomads with nothing, and they just hate us for that reason?

MCCARTHY: You know, that's a great point. The ideology that we're talking about here is 14 centuries old. It existed and thrived before there was a United States. It has commanded the allegiance of the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the educated and uneducated -- to some extent, Sunnis and Shi'ites, princes and paupers. You know, you can't pigeonhole one rationale for why it exists other than the obvious one, which is that it's a matter of doctrine and the people who believe it believe it's a divine injunction and that mankind doesn't have a right to make laws which run afoul of what they believe is the law that was handed down by Allah directly to Mohammed 14 centuries ago.

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MCCARTHY: You know, Rush, that's exactly right. It actually brings me to another memory of the dynamic between the Blind Sheik and the community, which was an eye-opener and a frightening one to me. We had very long defense case in the case. It actually went on for about two months; and during the course of it, any number of moderate people came in -- and they really were authentic moderate people. There's no way on God's green earth they ever would have crossed into terrorism activity. But every now and then when they were on the stand, a question of theology would come up, of doctrine. You know, "What does jihad mean? What does this concept mean?" and at least three different times, they answered, "I wouldn't be competent to say. You'd have to ask someone like him about that."

RUSH: Meaning Rahman.

MCCARTHY: This was the homicidal maniac sitting in the corner of my courtroom. What it flagged for me was even though these people were very moderate and peaceful people -- you'd never see them be terrorists -- they were willing in a matter of importance in their own doctrine to rely on his viewpoint of it. The second thing is, the world is exactly as you've described it, and every place is not America. When you go overseas -- and particularly when you go to parts of the Muslim world where there's rampant illiteracy and where they think that learning the Koran is really the kit and caboodle of what you need in the way of education -- these fiery clerics, whatever we may think of them, are powerfully influential in those parts of the world; and it's not an accident that when you have the cartoons -- the Dutch cartoons come out or you have this woman in the Sudan who, you know, named the teddy bear Mohammed -- it's not a big surprise that you get riot on demand. When these guys say, "Islam has been insulted," when they say, "Islam is under siege," a lot of people snap to. They're very influential. It's frightening, and I think that we underestimate at our peril how much influence they have....