Willful Blindness

Andrew McCarthy made a guest appearance on the Rush Limbaugh program promoting his new book Willful Blindness, A Memoir of the Jihad. So many believe Islam is a religion of peace. In my opinion, it far more resembles a worldwide cult. Those in positions of government are so politically correct and so fear religion that taking an honest approach to dealing with the threat of Islam may have to wait for another attack.

McCarthy discusses his prior ignorance of Islam while fighting certain leaders within the court system. He admits that he thought Islamic terrorists were men who had hi-jacked a peaceful religion. While in court he attempted to prosecute the Blind Sheik. In this portion of the interview with Rush he explained his beginning to understand Islam.

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.

Rush asked McCarthy, “We didn't take it seriously until 2001. Do you think we still take it seriously?”

McCarthy’s response was indeed troubling. Here is the conversation.

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.

I thank God for men, whether they be Christian or not, who understand the role of the State, especially our own form of Government and are willing to defend our way of life. I hope his message is heard clearly by conservative leadership. I hope even more they will lead.