Andy McCarthy is no conspiracy theorist, but that doesn’t keep him from recognizing and warning us about the common goals of the Islamists and the hard left, both of whom pose a serious, active threat to America’s freedom.

In his book “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America,” McCarthy, the prosecutor of the Blind Sheik and a tough-minded realist, exposes the connection between the two groups and the danger they represent to most everything we hold sacred.

This is not another book on the dangers of Islamic terrorism, but a wake-up call to Americans who might be missing the overarching goal behind that “tactic,” a goal shared by the hard left in this country: the destruction of “the freedom culture” on which America was built.

Among McCarthy’s major concerns is that America, indeed the entire West, is largely blind to the goal of Islamists, the destruction of America’s founding institutions to make way for an Islamic-controlled nation under Shariah law.

Moreover, Islamists are not some fringe group of Muslims who have hijacked the religion. They are “very mainstream,” and their theocratic goals are clearly based on Islamic scripture. At least sometimes, they’ve been very open about their goals, such as when the Muslim Brotherhood revealed in a 1991 internal memorandum that “their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

McCarthy expressly refuses, however, to condemn all of Islam and maintains we must encourage and laud moderate Muslims who reject terrorism and the notion that the entire world should be forcibly subjected to Shariah.

But unlike certain apologists, McCarthy believes we ought to hold those moderates to a reasonable standard of accountability, demanding from them not just empty platitudes about their love for America but also their outspoken rejection of ideas frequently attributed to Muslim theology, including an Islam-based theocracy, discrimination against non-Muslims and women, and denials of freedom of conscience.

On the other hand, McCarthy disputes that the only way to avoid a war with the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims is to candy-coat the undeniable realities. Hundreds of millions of Muslims, says McCarthy, don’t buy into Islamism, and we won’t win them over by denying the truth about the non-moderates among them and about the nexus between Islamic doctrine and the Islamist threat.

But that’s precisely what America’s hard left, led by President Obama, would have us do. Having the shared goal (with Islamists) of undermining and ultimately destroying America’s freedom culture, they deny that there is a broader Islamist threat, that obvious acts of terrorism (Fort Hood, the Christmas bomber, etc.) are Islam-inspired, and even that we are in a war with Islamists. The hard left’s view that America and its allegedly imperialist policies, rather than “the fascistic, supremacist ideology” of the Islamists, are “the trigger of jihadist terror’s rampage … suits the Islamists just fine.”

But just as McCarthy refuses to condemn the entirety of Islam, he refuses to indict, wholesale, the left wing because there are many liberals, in his view, who are merely wrongheaded and naive about Islam and who do have benign, albeit unwittingly destructive, intentions toward the United States and its sacred institutions.

However, we must not focus on the benign ones, who pose no threat. The hard left truly is in power, and it poses a systemic threat. If you take nothing else away from this book, McCarthy wants to make sure you understand that Obama shares the Islamists’ goal of fundamentally transforming our society, even if they don’t agree on what to replace it with.

The irony of the violence and chaos spawned by terrorism is that they actually create a diversion of sorts and a protective cover for other Islamists who seek the destruction of America’s freedom culture. As long as other Islamic groups in America are not overtly supporting terrorism, we tend to give them a pass. In the meantime, they are working toward a softer, more “domesticated” – but no less ominous – dismantling of America’s institutions by infiltrating all aspects of our culture and, like their nihilistic counterparts on the Saul Alinsky-inspired hard left, attempting to overthrow us from within.

For those who would nevertheless accuse McCarthy of hyperventilation, I commend to you his chilling description of then-Sen. Obama’s six-day trip to Kenya, during which he rallied support for Raila Odinga, the “anti-Western, radical Leftist presidential candidate” who sought to impose Shariah in Kenya. If that doesn’t connect the dots for you and convince you, at the very least, of the reasonableness of McCarthy’s arguments, you may well need a reality check. “The Grand Jihad” is a must-read.

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