The Grand Jihad Quotes

“In France, officials promoted Islam as a weapon against left-wing radicalism in enclaves teeming with Algerian immigrants. Still in shock over the murders of several members of its team at the Munich Olympiad of 1972—i.e., in the years before the emergence of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Hamas—Israel, too, deluded itself into nurturing a Palestinian religious turn. The government naively imagined this development would be a boon for Israel: a burr in the saddle of the Yasser Arafat, whose Palestine Liberation Organization was robustly backed by the Soviets.
Like Nasser, however, Arafat was a shrewd Leftist who appreciated the necessity of accommodating Islam. Though Arafat was a domineering Marxist, the PLO was, and is, an amalgam of entities that always incorporated Islamist elements as well as socialists, secularists, and Arab nationalists. Transparently, the American Left’s motive for pinning the purely “secular” label on the PLO and, particularly, on Fatah (Arafat’s base within it), is to promote the fiction that Fatah (now the ruling party in the “Palestinian Authority”) is “moderate” and worthy of U.S. support. The idea is to draw a flattering contrast to the incorrigible Islamist terrorists of Hamas. As we’ve seen, though, Fatah is not strictly secular—the claim that it is relies on the savage zealotry of Hamas to overwhelm the facts. Fatah was propelled by jihadist rhetoric and theory, its charter regards the duty to “liberate” Jerusalem as a religious obligation, and it has a decades-long history of rationalizing terror on Islamic scriptural grounds—these are “moderates” who maintain their own terrorist wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
Similarly astute were Pakistan’s Leftists. Zulkifar Ali Bhutto’s legacy, the Pakistan People’s Party, has always couched its secular-socialist ambitions in Islamic rhetoric. With echoes of the Muslim Brotherhood’s slogan, the PPP’s motto remains, “Islam is our faith; democracy is our politics; socialism is our economy; all power to the people.” And for all her pretensions to Western liberalism, Benazir Bhutto, who followed her father’s footsteps to become Prime Minister, was midwife to the Taliban in Afghanistan and stoked jihadist terror in Kashmir—all part of her geopolitical maneuvering against India.
Sadat and both Bhuttos were ultimately killed by Islamists: Sadat slain by the Muslim Brotherhood; Bhutto père executed in the Zia coup d’état, after which Pakistani society underwent a thoroughgoing Islamicization; and daughter Benazir murdered by the Taliban when she reincarnated herself as a crusader for democracy. Fatah, similarly, is holding on for dear life: ousted from the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, it is hunkered down in the West Bank—hoping that the democracy it purports to champion isn’t taken too seriously (notoriously corrupt, Fatah would be likely to lose a true popular election) and praying that Hamas decides jointly annihilating the Zionist entity is a higher priority than crushing an intramural competitor.

There is a moral to these stories. Revolutionaries of Islam and the Left make fast friends when there is a common enemy to besiege. Leftists, however, are essentially nihilists whose hazy vision prioritizes power over what is to be done with power. They are biddable. Islamists, who have very settled convictions about what is to be done with power, are much less so. Even their compromises keep their long-term goals in their sights. Thus do Leftists consistently overrate their ability to control Islamists. Factoring the common denominator, power, out of the equation, something always beats nothing.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America

“To be sure, it helps that Qaradawi describes his doctrine in vaporous prose only an academic or a bureaucrat—or an Alinskyite—could love. Wassatiyya, says he, “lies between spirituality and materialism, between idealism and realism, between rationalism and sentimentalism, between individualism and collectivism, between permanence and evolution.”5 That is, it means everything and nothing, depending on Qaradawi’s—or the State Department’s, or the academy’s—sense of what the circumstances require. No surprise, then, that Qaradawi frequently gives Western audiences what is music to their ears, a concession that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is strictly about land and politics, not religion;6 yet, feeding red meat to his al-Jezeera audience in 2009, he brayed that the Holocaust was “divine punishment” for the Jews and that, “Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers”—believers like himself, who would “shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America

“In common parlance, someone is a “radical” Muslim only if he is a practitioner of jihadist terrorism, as if it were perfectly normal to want exactly the sharia state the terrorist wants as long as one refrains from terrorist methods in seeking it. The U.S. government, as well as our states and municipalities, clings to this connotation. At all levels—administrations of both political parties, intelligence agencies, law-enforcement, members of Congress, the federal bench, state and local authorities—officials would rather stick pins in their eyes than grapple with the incontrovertible nexus between Islamic doctrine and the savagery committed by Muslims throughout the world for decades. We are led to believe that the only real “radicals” are the terrorists. Any other Muslim, no matter how supportive of terrorist goals, is deemed a “moderate” so long as he doesn’t seem, right this minute, to be plotting the next Armageddon.

This is sheer lunacy. Of Islam’s approximately 1.4 billion adherents worldwide, there are, to estimate very modestly, hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the United States, and tens of millions globally, who desire the adoption of policies sensible people would find quite radical. The moderate masquerade enables them to make common cause with the radical Left in one big, “progressive” campaign for “social justice.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America

“Sharia, the Muslim aversion to canines, and the traditional Islamist focus on dominating the education system proved”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America

“family in Minneapolis, blew himself up at a UN checkpoint in 2008, killing twenty-nine people. In September 2009, another Somali immi-grant left his Seattle community to return home and carry out a truck bombing in Mogadishu, killing twenty-one people.18 The case of Ahmed is especially grating. Thanks to the State Department’s refugee resettlement mania, he’d become a naturalized American citizen. So, after his mass-murder attack against U.S.-supported allies in northern Somalia, the FBI, at the expense of the American taxpayer, had his remains (which had become evidence in the Bureau’s terrorism-support investigation) transported back to America so he could be given a”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America

“Ramadan, the faithful are known to block streets, driveways, and fire-hydrants with their parked cars, and trample across neighborhood yards while approaching the mosque on foot. If, as apologists maintain, jihad really is the internal struggle to become a better person, one wonders why manners seem to degrade as Muslim numbers increase. But wait—if jihad is actually about struggling to implement sharia as the necessary precondition to Islamicizing a society, it all makes perfect sense. The overflow parking situation became intolerable in Falls Church, and to ease it somewhat, neighboring churches offered the use of their lots in an overture of Christian charity. Predictably, Abdul-Malik accepted the ecumenical gesture as a concession. “If Islam really catches on in the area,” he smirked to Sperry, “maybe the neighborhood churches will come over lock, stock, and barrel, and we can all share our parking lots.”8 Islamists are happy to expand Islam’s American enclaves one”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America