Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 52

Re: Bachmann Smart, Media Dumb

I second Stanley's analysis. I also saw Michele in person for the first time at David Horowitz's retreat, and I was amazed at her combination of command and charisma. She spoke at great length about a wide variety of topics and took questions from the very engaged audience -- without notes, with clarity and depth, and with a nice mix of humor and charm. She's got a good lawyer's mind for getting from A to B to C without losing the big picture, and she has the rare ability to grasp wonky details without sounding like a wonk.

We ended up having a long chat afterwards. She wanted to talk about Gitmo, enemy combatants, and the relative merits of military commissions versus civilian trials. I was really impressed. This was not her area of the law (she was a tax lawyer in real life), but she clearly got it: Her questions were pointed, I got the sense that she really wanted to know why civilian trials were problematic (i.e., she wasn't looking for a couple of soundbites that she could slide into the next speech), and she was a quick study -- there was no need to revisit at the end of the conversation some esoteric point we'd covered at the beginning of the conversation.

Obviously, I was impressed. We ended up collaborating on an op-ed -- which ran here on NRO and in the New York Post -- on why, if the Obama administration did not reverse its decision to give KSM and the 9/11 jihadists a civilian trial, Congress should step in and force the president's hand. Michele was a dynamo on this issue, and her forcefulness had a lot to do with the public and congressional pressure that ultimately induced the administration to back down.

It would be a huge mistake to underestimate her. I think she's going to make a lot of her critics look awfully dumb by the time this is over. The Dems moved heaven and earth to try to unseat her in the last two elections because they know she's a force to be reckoned with. Oh ... and did I mention that she beat them handily? 

Mainstreaming of the Muslim Brotherhood Reaches New Low

On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times opinion pages featured a face-off on the prospect of a declaration of Palestinian statehood between our friend John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and Mousa Abu Marzook, a founder of Hamas. Their competing op-eds here.

This was akin to giving equal time to the director of the FBI and the head of Cosa Nostra. Marzook is the most important Muslim Brotherhood operative ever stationed in the U.S. I discuss him in some detail in The Grand Jihad. During his 14 years here, which ended when he was deported in 1994, he actually ran Hamas (the terrorist organization that is the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian branch) from his home in Virginia. This was in the early 90s, during the Intifada. He also had a hand in the establishment of many of the Islamist organizations with which we are familiar today. The Islamist infrastructure he helped build here was the foundation of the Justice Department's successful terrorism financing prosecution against the Holy Land Foundation for funneling millions of dollars to Palestinian terrorists.

And -- I know you won't believe this, but I'll mention it anyway -- none of this information is given to readers of the LA Times. It is as if having Marzook on their editorial pages is no different from having your average Middle East studies professor from any American university. Sadly, that's probably true.

Every Time I Think Obama Must Be Finished Giving Mark Steyn New Material ...

Behold: By executive order, President Obama has established the "White House Rural Council" to -- according to The One's website -- "make sure we're working across government to strengthen rural communities and promote economic growth." (Thanks to Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin's site.)

Not Entitled

There he goes again.

Peter Wehner, that is. He is trawling again for right-wing “extremists” (I am now a recidivist offender) from his perch at Compassionate Conservative Headquarters, where GOP solipsists are determined not to be outbid by the Left when it comes to using your money to advertise their virtue -- which is how you end up burdening an already tapped-out Medicare program with a prescription-drug entitlement that is underfunded by more than $5 trillion. From CCHQ, we learn that, when you really think about it, George W. Bush was way more conservative than that Reagan guy. In fact, when you really, really think about it, President Reagan was actually a non-ideological pragmatist who sagely came to terms with the New Deal and the Great Society -- and those who say otherwise are Birchers, or birthers, or some other benighted genus of the species Right-Wing Nut Job that we’d just as soon keep down in the basement, at least until we need them on Election Day.

#ad#Pete is exercised this time over my column from last weekend. In it, I argued that Medicare is a scam that ought to be ended, not preserved. Naturally, Pete doesn’t quarrel with my fact-based demonstration that, from the very start, Medicare was fraudulent: an unaffordable, unsustainable pyramid scheme whose proponents sought not medical insurance for the elderly but fully socialized health care managed by government bureaucrats. My sin, instead, is engage in what Wehner takes to be a tactically disastrous dissent from Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to preserve Medicare through admirably ambitious changes in its structure. If “widely embraced,” my position would, Pete decrees, “reduce conservatism to a fringe movement.” Better, evidently, to proceed straightaway to national bankruptcy.

It is hard to decide where to begin with this critique. It gets wrong both the great and the small things, while misrepresenting the gravamen of my argument and misunderstanding my role as a commentator. To take the last part first: I am not a tactician. My role is not to devise a winning electoral strategy for Republicans, one that enables them to appear unthreatening to moderates while steering the ship ever so gently in the right direction -- you know, maybe “bend the cost curve” so our great grandchildren can start living within their meager means a few decades after we’ve gone to our repose having spent all their money.

The commentator’s role, at least as I see it, is to try to figure out the correct answer to the big vexing problems of the day. Insofar as it is possible, this ought to be done irrespective of the politics. With its hold on the media and academe, the Left is disproportionately influential in shaping our politics; thus, if you allow your deliberations to be cabined by politics -- that box we’re all supposed to be thinking outside of, until we actually do so -- you’ll never get to the right answer. If two plus two is four, it may be fine for Pete to say, “Let’s go with six, because moderate voters really want it to be six,  and the Left, after all, says it is ten, so six is reasonable.” From my perspective, it is preferable to go with four and then try to convince people that it is four, even if that means Pete will say I’m a Cro-Magnon. To make policy based on any assumption other than four will lead us to ten and to ruin.

It is not lost on me that politics is the art of the possible or that governance necessarily entails compromise. If I were a member of Congress or one of those “political strategists” you can’t swing a dead cat in a cable news green room without hitting, I would support the Ryan plan. It has serious flaws -- I bet that, precisely because he is among the few adults in the room, even Ryan thinks so. But it is a big step in the right direction. As Pete says, and I concur, it is “substantively impressive.”

The problem with tacticians is that they conflate art with destiny, seeing the “possible” as the endgame, not a way station to something better. Wehner thus fails to grasp the import of one of his Reagan stories, in which the Gipper, having been chastised by his hard-charging young Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman for being insufficiently radical, grouses about self-destructive “true-believers on the Republican right.” Reagan’s point was not that the right wing ought to get with it, accept the entitlement mentality, and enact some boondoggle such as Bush’s prescription-drug plan. It was that they needed to “take half a loaf” if half a loaf was all you could get, and -- here’s the critical part -- “come back for more.”

Pace Pete, I don’t think it helps to tell Ryan how wonderful he is. We want him to succeed, and that means getting him to address the flaw that will prevent his coming back for more -- that will, in fact, doom whatever temporary reforms he succeeds in enacting. For all the good that he does, Ryan is trapped in the politics box, and Republicans are paralyzed by Democratic demagoguery, because they have accepted the premise that Medicare is a sacrosanct entitlement. It is shortsighted to reinforce the paralysis by telling the pols they need to heed the demagoguery.

#page#My modest goal in writing the column was to begin defanging the demagogues by deconstructing the revered core of their otherwise untenable defense of Medicare -- namely, that it is a sacred inter-generational trust fund, opposition to which is emblematic of hostility to the elderly. This was easy to do, and not because I am either a rocket scientist or, as Pete portrays me, self-indulgently posing as a “brave dissident” from the orthodoxy he represents. It was easy to do because Medicare is going to end whether or not we call for its demise. You can’t have an inter-generational trust fund that isn’t a trust fund and has no possibility of paying what it owes.

#ad#Medicare is already broke. It is unsustainable not just in the future but right now. No less a mainstream-media pillar than USA Today concedes that Medicare added a staggering $1.8 trillion in unfunded liabilities last year alone -- a little-discussed debt mountain that actually outstrips by $300 billion the annual deficit that has animated Ryan, provoked a debt-ceiling controversy, and outraged three-quarters of Americans. Moreover, as the newspaper elaborates, to portray Medicare’s future unfunded liabilities as “only” $24.8 trillion requires a suspension of disbelief, taking at face value such Obamacare bookkeeping pretenses as the 30 percent reduction of physicians’ payments -- “savings” that aren’t going to be realized. As the Heritage Foundation’s Bob Moffitt recounts, the Medicare actuary, using more realistic projections, puts the accrued shortfall at $34.8 trillion -- which is two-and-a-half times the annual GDP of the United States and works out to about $300,000 owed by every household in the country. (And that’s before we even think about Social Security.)

Medicare is already over. It could not conceivably hope to operate in the future as Medicare. No serious commentator on the right, even one of those mainstream enough for Pete’s tastes, argues for keeping Medicare. We are down to the charade of ending Medicare “as we know it,” and quibbling over what that should look like. No matter what happens, it will never be Medicare again. It is frivolous to portray me as an extremist for contending that we should end, rather than preserve, something that will undeniably end precisely because it cannot be preserved. Two and two is four.

The real question is not whether to keep Medicare but what it will be replaced by. On this point, Pete thinks his grating holier-than-thou mode is served by rehearsing the 1980 debate in which, countering President Carter’s Medicare demagoguery, candidate Reagan famously replied, “There you go again.” It’s ironic, because Pete is doing to me what Carter was doing to Reagan.

What I argued for was ending Medicare itself: the mendacious, unworkable, inter-generational heist that masquerades as a health-insurance program. I did not argue for abandoning the elderly who are truly needy. More than once, I argued that we could construct a welfare program to help those Americans -- a detail Pete conveniently omits in his haste to paint me as a fringe character. What I said we should repeal is Medicare, the political program -- not decency.

At issue is not the belief that a good society makes provisions for those who cannot provide for themselves. It is the government-ordained corporatization of a commodity best left to individual choice in a fair market -- a market government safeguards without orchestrating its movements. At issue is the perverse transfer of wealth from working families (including unborn generations of working families) to seniors who, by and large, are in better financial condition to make their own private insurance arrangements. Also at issue is the fraudulently induced transfer of taxpayer dollars to both wasteful government spending and medical insiders who win space at the trough not because they provide the best care but because they retain the best lobbyists and contribute to the right politicians.

Pete is so enchanted by his well-intentioned vision of Medicare that he cannot address the reality of Medicare. The Left has spent decades equating the word “Medicare” with the concept of compassion for the aged, and thus opposition to Medicare with hostility to the elderly. On Pete, that stratagem has worked like a charm. Thus his bizarre resort to Edmund Burke, of all people, for the proposition that a one-way ticket to inevitable national insolvency is so “woven into the fabric of the American sensibility and American society” that to argue for Medicare’s dissolution is a betrayal of “an important conservative disposition.”

In this, Pete adopts the theory Sam Tanenhaus espoused in The Death of Conservatism (a theory ably refuted by Jim Piereson in the September 2009 edition of The New Criterion). For Tanenhaus, fidelity to the Burkean reverence for order and stability requires conservatives to accept progressive “reforms,” regardless of how wrongheaded they may be, once they become part of the status quo. To do otherwise is to engage in radical revanchism, a very unconservative temperament.

#page#One is tempted to dismiss Pete as a most eccentric Burkean. After all, he remains staunchly pro-life, even though Roe v. Wade has been woven into the American fabric almost as long as Medicare. He is an enthusiastic supporter of the Bush freedom agenda, which elevates liberty over order and stability. The idea that our betters have the inside track on virtue, and will let us know which battles are worth fighting and which call for Burkean restraint, is closer to the disposition of the modern Left than to anything that might deserve to be called conservatism. But I prefer to think Pete has simply missed the Burkean points relevant to a discussion of Medicare. It is not the destructive political program that has been woven into our fabric, but the notion that a decent society, even one that cherishes individual liberty, is not indifferent to those who cannot fend for themselves.

#ad#Burke, I’d wager, would have construed Medicare as a perversion of that notion. Unlike Medicare, Burke’s concept of society included a genuine sacred inter-generational trust, an inheritance that enriched a people, bonding them through the ages. Medicare, by contrast, is gluttony run amok, the impoverishment of future generations by our insatiable contemporaries.

Furthermore, as I demonstrated in the column, Medicare was never intended by its proponents to be health insurance for the elderly. It was a stepping stone to -- oh, let’s let Ronald Reagan explain:

The legislative chips are down. In the next few months Americans will decide whether or not this nation wants socialized medicine#...#first for its older citizens, soon for all its citizens. The pivotal point in the campaign is a bill currently before Congress. The [bill]#...#is a proposal to finance medical care for all persons on Social Security over 65, regardless of financial need, through the Social Security tax mechanism. Proponents admit the bill is a “foot in the door” for socialized medicine. Its eventual effect: across-the-board government medicine for everyone.

Reagan’s diagnosis of the Medicare activists’ ulterior motives was given under the auspices of a 1961 campaign that succeeded in turning back the tide, at least for four years. History has proved him a prophet. It would not have surprised Burke, who, in the course of arguing that “the power of bad men is no indifferent thing,” counseled that we should never “separate#...#the merits of any political question from the men who are concerned in it,” since “designing men never separate their plans from their interests.” Burke warned that if, instead of fighting such men, “you assist them in their schemes, you will find the pretended good in the end thrown aside and perverted.” You will have helped them accomplish not the good you intended but their unsavory objective.

The left-wing social engineering to which the Ryan plan surrenders is not compassion for the elderly. It is the entitlement construct. The foundation of Medicare, and of the Second Bill of Rights that was the goal of New Deal socialism, is that citizens, as a matter of right, have a claim on the property of other citizens, which government is obliged to enforce by confiscation. Once you cede that premise, the game is lost, no matter how many fleeting victories you manage to win along the way.

A welfare program to help the truly needy is something a decent society can and should support in accordance with its means, but it is not a right. The federal government need not micromanage such a welfare program; it would best be left to the ingenuity of the states, private insurers, charities, and families. A well-conceived welfare program would encourage personal responsibility rather than dependency -- you want people moving out of it rather than being recruited into it. A federal entitlement is something that is owed regardless of the country’s financial condition. The central government must enforce it by coercing participation. And, because enough is never enough for those who see themselves as entitled to take, government officials are incentivized to ply beneficiaries with more and more goodies, further punishing thrift and personal responsibility.

I admire Paul Ryan’s determination to put America’s fiscal house in order. I am, however, convinced that he cannot succeed if he accepts the premises that make Medicare a monstrosity: that it should continue as a universal entitlement overseen by the federal government. Correcting that error doesn’t just mean ending Medicare, which is going to happen anyway, it means replacing the destructive assumptions of the Second Bill of Rights with the American spirit of the original Bill of Rights -- replacing faith in government with faith in the abiding decency of the most charitable people on earth. If the political climate makes it too risky for elected officials to take that position, it’s up to the commentariat to change the climate. Otherwise, the demagogues win.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Re: Boundless Arrogance

Ramesh, who could forget Justice O'Connor's star turn on the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group -- or, as our pal Matt Franck described it, the discovery at long last of her life's calling: "government by blue-ribbon commission"!

War Powers Debate

I've enjoyed Rich's column and Jeffrey Anderson's responsive essay this morning on the War Powers Act (WPA) and the fact that President Obama has effectively killed it with his Libya war. But I continue to think, as argued in this column, that the WPA is a sideshow. Focusing too much attention on it -- other than for the purpose of yet again demonstrating the gulf between Obama campaign rhetoric and Obama governance -- is counterproductive. The issues are whether what we are doing in Libya is constitutionally legitimate and whether it serves the national interests, not whether Obama is in compliance with 60-day time limits, etc. 

Prof. Anderson correctly outlines some of the WPA's policy flaws, particularly the fact that it actually encourages presidents to take unilateral military action -- which Anderson describes as "grant[ing] the president too much authority, not too little." What makes the WPA constitutionally problematic, though, is mostly its legislative veto provision, which purports to enable Congress to direct the president to withdraw forces by a joint resolution. (See this 2004 CRS analysis, here.) Joint resolutions are not binding law because, under the Constitution, law can only be enacted if the president signs a bill passed by both houses of Congress, or if Congress overrides a presidential veto of that bill by the required super-majority. (As Rich points out, the veto-override is how the WPA was enacted in the first place.) Putting aside the knottier question whether Congress has the authority to order a president to withdraw forces (i.e., could Congress constitutionally direct a president to withdraw forces by overriding the presidential veto of a bill directing him to do so?), Congress certainly cannot direct a president to do anything by a mere resolution.

Nevertheless, the fact that the WPA is a nullity (and now a dead letter thanks to Obama's conduct) does not help us resolve the underlying issue: Does the Constitution empower a president to initiate a war under circumstances where the United States has not been threatened, much less attacked, and there are no vital U.S. interests at stake?

Rich seems contend that it does, and asserts that "The president's inherent powers as commander in chief do not depend on affirmative acts of Congress." The quoted proposition is surely true, but it begs the question of what the president's inherent powers are -- i.e., what is his Article II authority, including the powers of commander in chief? The issue is not whether the president needs to be in compliance with the WPA; it is whether the Constitution empowers him to dispatch forces whenever he pleases. And there is clearly a difference between raw power and constitutional authority. That is, as commander in chief, the president clearly has the power to invade anyplace he chooses -- including, say, Canada, or the state of New Jersey. But he obviously doesn't have the authority to do that.

Prof. Anderson's position is not easily nailed down, either. He seems to argue, mostly in reliance on Justice Story's Commentaries on the Constitution, that the president may not conduct war unless Congress authorizes it. Yet, although President Reagan's attack on Libya would violate this principle, Anderson grants Reagan an exception on the curious ground "that it was a one-time strike that required the element of surprise and was not a precursor to a larger war." It can never be known with certainty that a seemingly limited strike will not snowball into a larger conflict (see, e.g., Sarajevo 1914). Moreover, just as Rich observes that the WPA does not make exceptions for "piddling" wars, so does the Constitution not limit Congress's war powers to the declaration of only big wars. That aside, though, we can safely assume that if Prof. Anderson believes Reagan's Libya attack was legitimate, he would endorse the generally accepted view that presidents have inherent authority, absent any approval by Congress, to respond to attacks or threatened attacks against the United States, even though the Constitution does not say so (at least by anything other than inference from the powers granted by Article II). 

The bottom line, I'd submit (and I've argued before), is this: It is a fool's errand to analyze this question in legal terms rather than political ones. The matter of where the Congress's war power ends and the president's begins is not justiciable. Moreover, it cannot be marked with legal certainty -- "The great ordinances of the Constitution do not establish and divide fields of black and white," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in Springer v. Philippine Islands (1928).

The political branches have overlapping authorities, requiring them to work together to get important things done and to check each other to stop abusive things from being done. That is the genius of the system. When the system is working properly, the president must get Congress's approval to initiate an unprovoked war. As a practical matter, however, the president cannot be stopped from doing this absent a strong, accountable Congress that is willing to flex its constitutional muscles -- any more than, say, the Supreme Court can be stopped from some of its excesses absent a willingness by the political branches to take decisive, constitutional counter-measures. We're a body politic, not a body legal.

More on Ending Medicare

To those who've been asking, I am aware that Peter Wehner has responded at Contentions to my column last weekend on Medicare. I will have more to say about Pete's post, probably in my weekend column because I don't think I can get to it before then. But I do want to clarify one matter.

Pete opens by observing that I criticized his EPPC colleague James C. Capretta. That is true, but it is not exactly accurate. I am a major Jim Capretta fan, and I have learned a great deal from him about the politics and economics of health care. Jim wrote a lengthy cover essay essay for the May 2 issue of the mag, entitled "Paul Ryan's Medicare Fix." It is fabulous, and I agree with about 95 percent of it. I took issue with a single point, albeit an important one, namely, Jim's endorsement of Congressman Ryan's position that government should play what Jim calls "an important oversight role" in a reformed health-care system in which Medicare is preserved.

It is not my intention to belabor the arguments I made on this point. I merely want to point out that, in the column, I called Jim Rep. Ryan's "ablest defender," and observed that his essay "expertly" described the fee-for-service structure that is one of Medicare's chief flaws. I think very highly of his work. It's perfectly fair for Pete to emphasize the point on which I disagreed with Jim, but I am not a Capretta critic. I am a Capretta admirer.

The Coordinates of Radicalism

What is it that radicalizes Muslims, including American Muslims? Is it American foreign policy? Israeli “occupation” of the ancient Jewish territories of Judea and Samaria? Cartoons depicting the warrior-prophet as a warrior? Korans torched by obscure Florida pastors? The life of Osama bin Laden, or, perhaps, his death? Any of a thousand claimed slights, real or imagined, that purportedly provoke young Muslims to “conflagrate” -- if we may borrow from the forgiving rationalizations of Faisal Rauf, would-be imam of the would-be Ground Zero mosque?

Here is the unsettling but sedulously avoided truth: What radicalizes Muslims is Islam.

#ad#Political correctness requires that we becloud this simple truth with a few caveats that, in most any other context, would be regarded as distractions by sensible people. So it is necessary to say that there is more than one interpretation of Islam. We must further note that the fact that Islam itself is the radicalizing catalyst does not mean that all, or even most, Muslims will become radicals. But here is another disquieting truth: Even the terms “radicalization” and “radical Islam” get things exactly backwards. The reality is that the radicals in Islam are the reformers -- the Muslims who embrace Western civilization, its veneration of reason in matters of faith, and the pluralistic space it makes for civil society. What we wishfully call “radicalism” is in fact the Islamic mainstream.

These are the principal takeaways from an important study just competed by Israeli academic Mordechai Kedar and David Yerushalmi of the Center for Security Policy in Washington. As detailed in a just-published Middle East Quarterly essay, “Shari’a and Violence in American Mosques” (available here), the authors’ “Mapping Sharia” project surveyed 100 randomly selected mosques across the United States. Onsite, fully 81 percent of the mosques featured Islamic texts that advocate violence. In nearly 85 percent of the mosques, the leadership (usually an imam or prayer leader) favorably recommended this literature for study by congregants. Moreover, 58 percent of the mosques invited guest lecturers known for promoting violent jihad.

Kedar and Yerushalmi sought to study two intimately related sets of correlations. The first focused on sharia, the Islamic system of law that is based primarily on the Koran and the Sunnah (i.e., the words, deeds, and traditions of Mohammed). The authors homed in on observable sharia-compliant behaviors. These are not actions unique to terrorist groups but conduct reflective of the broad consensus of sharia jurisprudence that cuts across the Sunni/Shiite divide -- for example, women wearing the hijab or niqab (respectively, the head covering or full-length covering of the entire female form), the segregation of men from women during communal prayer, and the enforcement by imams of the requirement that male worshippers form up in tight, straight lines during mosque prayer.

#page#The survey probed whether there was a statistically significant correlation between these sharia behaviors and the availability at the mosque of “violence-positive” literature. Significantly, although violence pervades Muslim scripture, the authors did not include scripture (the Koran and the Sunnah) in this violence-positive category. Instead, they confined it to “normative and instructive tracts,” because “a believer is free to understand scripture literally, figuratively, or merely poetically,” unless it has become an Islamic norm or a legal obligation through incorporation in sharia.

#ad#Thus the focus on violent-positive tracts, which are interpretive of scripture. They were ranked in accordance with their promotion of violence as “severe,” “moderate,” or “nonexistent.” The “severe” is easy enough to spot: It includes tracts that affirmatively call for brutality against non-Muslims (and deviant Muslims) by such 20th-century ideologues as Muslim Brotherhood theoretician Sayyid Qutb and his fellow polemicist Abul Awa Mawdudi. Similarly straightforward is literature that does not approve of, much less incite, violence. Most disheartening is the “moderate” category. These are tracts written by widely respected sharia authorities that, though predominantly concerned with “the more mundane aspects of religious worship and ritual,” express “positive attitudes toward violence” -- implicitly endorsing it even if they have not incited it in the manner of Qutb and Mawdudi.

The authors found that 51 percent of the mosques featured severely violence-positive literature; an additional 30 percent distributed moderately violent tracts; and 19 percent offered nonviolent materials. What’s more, there was a strong correlation between sharia-compliant behavior and the presence of severely violent (as well as moderately violent) tracts. And while the mosques that were not as sharia-compliant (e.g., mosques that did not segregate the sexes during prayer or enforce straight prayer lines) featured less in the way of violent materials, the percentages of even these mosques that had violence-positive literature on site was disturbingly high. (See Table 2 of the MEQ essay.)

The second, related correlation the study examines is between the presence of violence-positive materials at a given mosque and the recommendation of these materials to worshippers by the mosque’s imam -- a direct promotion of violent jihadism. To cut to the chase, if these materials are on site, the imam is nearly always found endorsing them. The more observably sharia-adherent the imam, the more certain this conclusion. For example, 93 percent of imams who sported the traditional full beard were found to recommend violence-positive literature. Nonetheless, more than three-quarters of imams who did not manifest similar indicia of sharia-compliance were still found to endorse the pro-violence literature if it was on site.

Perhaps the most jarring finding in the study involved mosque attendance. As the authors observe, “mosques that contained written materials in the severe category were the best attended, followed by those with only moderate-rated materials, trailed in turn by those lacking such texts.” We are not talking small divergence here: Severe-material mosques were found to have a mean attendance of 118 worshippers at services, while no-violence mosques had 15. The moderate-violence mosques came in around the middle, at 60.

In this aspect of the study may lie whatever modest silver lining there is. The Kedar-Yerushalmi survey examines what goes on in the mosques. It does not account for what happens outside the mosques or for how many American Muslims actually attend mosques with any regularity. That is to say, the fact that only 19 percent of mosques actually reflect what Islamic apologists portray as a vibrant, predominant brand of “moderate Islam” does not necessarily mean that only one in five American Muslims is a moderate.

Thousands of Muslims pray privately, as Islam permits. They visit mosques rarely, if at all, and when they go it is more for social or cultural purposes than for instruction. If they are Westernized, pro-American Muslims, they may resist the mosques precisely to avoid the influence of rabble-rousing clerics who have been recruited or trained by Saudi-backed Muslim Brotherhood elements. The study does not account for these Muslims. Their number would edge up the percentage of Muslim moderates, perhaps considerably.

But that is not the Islam Muslims are getting in American mosques. In sum, the study shows: The more sharia-compliant the mosque and its imam, the more virulently anti-Western is apt to be the Islam being preached there. Nor can it be ignored that this promotion of a pro-violence and anti-Western Islam in more than 80 percent of American mosques is of a piece with polling conducted of Muslims living in Islamic countries. As Messrs. Kedar and Yerushalmi remind us, a 2007 survey conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org found that substantial majorities in Morocco, Egypt, and Pakistan -- and a majority even in reputedly moderate Indonesia -- favored the implementation of sharia law and the insulation of their countries from Western values.

It is time to stop pretending that there is some other cause for this. Many things can prompt a tinderbox to conflagrate, but it has to be tinder in the first place. Islam is the tinder. We can hope that brave Muslim reformers can build on the small but far from invisible havens where a nonviolent, pluralistic Islam has taken root. But to deny an obvious nexus between the mainstream Islam of the mosques, the violent jihadism of the terrorists, and the stealth jihadism of Islamist organizations is to remain willfully blind.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

I Still Think We'll Have a Full NFL Season

And over in Right Field, I make my case.

American Muslims Celebrate Ayatollah Khomeini

An annual event, and very moderate, I'm sure. Details at Big Peace and the Investigative Project on Terrorism.