An American Lion

Well, I don't know what to make of this:

FP [front page]: How is Sharia a threat to us and our way of life?

[Amdrew C.] McCarthy: Sharia, in many salient particulars, is antithetical to Western culture and American constitutional republicanism. Sharia rejects our foundational premise that people have a right to make law for themselves, irrespective of any religious code (and sharia is not just a religious code but a full-scale socio-economic and political system that has spiritual elements). Sharia rejects freedom of conscience (apostasy from Islam is a capital offense). It denies equal protection before the law to women and non-Muslims. It denies private property (it claims to protect private property but it really doesn’t – all property is deemed to belong to Allah and its human “owner” is regarded merely as a custodian who is obliged to use it for the good of the umma). It abhors capitalism. It endorses violence as a means to settle political disputes. In short, it cannot tolerate individual liberty, which is the building block of our society.

FP: Sounds like something the Left would embrace. That’s why you argue that Islamists work together with the Left to sabotage America, right?

McCarthy: Correct, that is a huge part of it.

I should be clear about what I mean by “the Left.” I would have thought this obvious – a subtitle is always something of an overgeneralization – but I am not talking about all liberals or all progressive people any more than I am talking about all Muslims. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims who do not subscribe to Islamist ideology (the problem, of course, is that there are hundreds of millions who do, and they appear to have the better case in terms of fidelity to Islamic doctrine). And not all of what might generally be called “the Left” is part of what I am homing in on: the hard Left – in America, the Obama Left or the Alinskyite Left – pushing to change our society radically. I think they are a minority, but they are a dynamic, effective minority – just as Islamist ideology (which I suspect is not a minority if you take the tactic of terrorism off the table) is the dynamic and assertive movement among the world’s Muslims.

Nor am I saying, as someone asked in one of my first interviews, that Barack Obama wants to impose sharia. This is an alliance, not a merger. Islamists and Leftists have significant points of departure – mostly on civil rights. If it were just the two of them, they would fight to the death. Indeed, that historically is what has happened: the two sides join in marriages of convenience that always end badly once they have achieved the goal that pushed them together in the first place. After taking help from the communists to topple the Shah, Khomeini repressed them. After Nasser’s socialists aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood to overrun the British-backed Egyptian monarchy (an entente in which Nasser personally solicited a skeptical Sayyid Qutb), Nasser declined to install sharia, the Brotherhood tried to kill him, and Nasser responded by brutally suppressing the Brotherhood – such that Qutb was ultimately executed and the Brotherhood was driven into the arms of the Saudis (the unintended deadly consequence we are still living with today).

I’ve been surprised, Jamie, that when I’m asked about this aspect of the book, people imply that I am concocting a theory. I would have thought that not only the historical instances of Islamist/Leftist collaboration but the innumerable examples all around us (e.g., the radical Center for Constitutional Rights jumping in to become al Qaeda’s lawyer after 9/11; the collaboration between the ACLU and CAIR against the post-9/11 national-security measures; the Muslim Public Affairs Council taking a lead role in the push for Obamacare; the Muslim Brotherhood’s very easily accessible economic and social program – you can glean it from their website, Ikhwan.net – which is plainly socialist; etc.) would have made the fact of the alliance undeniable. Yet I am constantly asked, “Doesn’t the Left have as much or more to lose than anyone if Islamists come to power?” Sure, as I’ve said, they’d have a lot to lose if there were a situation where all that was left were themselves and the Islamists. But we’re not in that situation. We are in the situation where, historically, they are most apt to confederate: namely, where they have a common obstacle that makes their differences seem less important. To me, the interesting question is why the two sides collaborate, not whether they collaborate. There’s no question that they’re collaborating.

You mean to say that our own President is selling us down the river and is forging an alliance with the enemy?

Then why is he killing so many of them? It would seem to me that if all of this were true, the President would have already pulled American troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

And the Muslim Public Affairs Council gave us Obamacare? I thought the radical Democrat Congress was to blame for that.

Anyway, I can't help but point out the overall "half-assedness" of an Islamic plot to take over the world. These movements are mostly the imagination of someone sitting in a boiling hot room, pounding away at a broken keyboard. If a billion people of the Muslim faith want to try to take over the world, have at it. There may be sympathies for this kind of thinking, but the same number of people believe in UFOs, ghosts, and the infallibility of the Pope. Nobody thinks about jihad when the World Cup is on.