In the popular wisdom of the Middle East "The enemy of my enemy is my friend!" This was the principle on which was forged our alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II, in a common determination to defeat and destroy Hitler's Third Reich. With abundant documentation an impressive new book suggests that a similar collaboration is taking place today behind the scenes, with fanatical Muslims and the hard-core radical American Left bonding in their hatred of the United States and in their zeal to replace our republic's present form with something else. And while fanatical Muslims and the extreme American Left are by no means agreed as to what that "something else" ought to be, even as the U. S.A. and the U. S. S. R. had very different blueprints for the kind of world they hoped would emerge after the war, the immediate challenge of how to bring down a powerful enemy in command of formidable resources can readily trump all disputations about the shape of things in more distant days to come.

The book to which I refer is called The Grand Jihad.- How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. Its author is Andrew C. McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor whose skillful conduct of the goveniment's case consigned permanently to "the stammer" the infamous "Blind Sheikh" who organized the first attack on the World Trade Center, the truck bomb attack in 1993.

Mr. McCarthy's prose flows easily, and he knows how to build a case. Faced with pastoral preoccupations, I'm just a quarter of the way through the book's four hundred pages (including sixty pages of end-note documentation). But I've already read enough to conclude that I would very much prefer not to be the defendant in any trial in which Mr. McCarthy would be leading the prosecution, though no doubt someone will come forward at some point to rebut the claims advanced in The Grand Jihad.Whether with or without success remains to be seen.

On this Fourth of July weekend, as we give thanks to God for the precious blessings of liberty, blessings secured through the blood, sweat and tears of earlier generations, let us recommit ourselves prayerfully to do all that we can to safeguard our freedom against those who would subvert it.

Clothed in the mantle of a Paul Revere, Andrew McCarthy has sounded an alarm about what he perceives to be a major threat to our republic. Would it be prudent to dismiss his concern out of hand?

In the National Review for June 21st David Pryce-Jones offered his evaluation of The Grand Jihad. May I share it with you here.
 
The Grand Jihad. How Islam and the Left Sabotage America
    By Andrew McCarthy

The very notion of a Muslim America might seem preposterous, downright laughable, but there are people and forces identifiably working towards that end. "Islamism" is the term that describes the growing global movement of Muslims for whom the supremacy of their faith justifies every kind of deception and violence. Islamism as we experience it today began in Egypt between the world wars, with the movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood. Over the years, the Brothers have been phenomenally successful, establishing themselves in one form or another in at least 60 countries. In 1991 the Brotherhood's top leader in America wrote a memorandum for the Brothers to make them understand their present purposes-and, in so doing, provided the title of this book. They were engaged, he explained, on "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 believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."  Had he known that the FBI would obtain this document, he might have been more guarded. Yet today's foremost spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, boasts in much the same manner. "We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not through the sword but through Dawa [the Arabic for proselytizing, or outreach.].

People in public positions--George W. Bush, for instance, Tony Blair, and pretty well all other European politicians-like to maintain that Islam is a religion of peace, and consequently it has become politically correct, indeed mandatory to say that Islamism is a deformity, nothing whatever to do with the faith. Andrew C. McCarthy has the independence of mind to suggest that the doctrines of the faith and the savagery of Muslims are directly related or, as McCarthy defines it, they form a "nexus." Plentiful incitements to violence and war against non-Muslims are to be found in the Koran to substantiate the point.

Islamism means jihad, and jihad means the imposition of sharia, or Islamic law as laid down in a doctrinal and theological form that cannot be challenged, and that means a Muslim society and Muslim supremacy for ever and ever, amen. Sharia, as McCarthy puts it, "establishes a state of religion, rejects the freedom of citizens to govern themselves irrespective of a religious code, proscribes freedom of conscience, nullifies economic freedom, destroys the principle of equality under the law, subjugates non-Muslims in the humiliation of dhimmitude [officially recognized subordinate status], and calls for the execution of homosexuals and apostates"-all of which is "antithetical to bedrock American principles."

McCarthy has a serious case to make, even if the material has its sensational side. He was plunged into a study of Islamism as the federal prosecutor in the case of the Blind Sheikh responsible for the 1993 terror attack on the World Trade Center. That outrage was widely dismissed as an aberration, an isolated phenomenon, the act of a few deranged criminals. That was both ignorant and condescending. 9/11 and subsequent attacks provide the contrary evidence of a SUSTAINED international campaign planned and waged by purposeful and capable men. It is their belief that Muslims everywhere are suffering from injustices inflicted upon them through no fault of their own. Bad Muslims and wicked non-Muslims are held responsible for everything that has gone wrong in the Islamic world, and good Muslims are obligated to resort to jihad to put this right, sacrificing their lives if they have to.

A plethora of organizations is at work in the United States implanting Islamism with all the overt and covert means at their disposal. The first step has been to arrange for some sort of social separation from the native non-Muslims, or what McCarthy calls "voluntary apartheid". He duly unpacks the. complicated genealogy of the organizations set up for this purpose: the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the Muslim Students Association, the Islamic Assembly of North America, the North American Islamic Trust, the Muslim American Society, the Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR]- and others besides, all more or less DERIVATIVES OF THE ORIGINAL MODEL of the Muslim Brotherhood. In opposition to American law, bogus charities surreptitiously funnel money to such causes as al-Qaeda and the Palestinian Islamists of Hamus. CAIR is an especially subversive organization, masquerading as a civil-rights lobby but prominently and consistently defending indicted terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. One of its officials called the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania the unfortunate result of "misunderstandings on both sides." Other CAIR figures have been convicted of federal felonies, including terrorism, illegal financial transactions, and recruiting jihadists; and some have been deported for their offenses.

The diversity of these bodies reflects the careerist capabilities of those coming to the top of them, and it is more apparent than real because, in general terms, they are front organizations for Saudi Arabia, whose foreign and domestic policies they exist to promote. According to McCarthy, Saudi Arabia has spent in the United States alone $100 BILLION [of its oil riches] and probably more on its policy of "sabotaging," which includes funding mosques like the Dar at-Hijrah in northern Virginia, where the Islamist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki prepared Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to kill and wound his army colleagues at Fort Hood. (Awlaki fled to Yemen to avoid investigation, but remained in touch by e-mail) The one genuine dispute between these bodies and their representatives concerns the IMPLEMENTATION of terror. Some believe that terror is an INDISPENSABLE weapon that must so undermine the will of Americans that they will collapse, sue for peace, and convert to Islam. The more cold-blooded argue that terror is certainly a VITAL tool in the long term, but 9/11 proves that it risks provoking Americans to defend themselves with superior violence, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and therefore FOR THE TIME BEING its use is PREMATURE.

Granted their view of the irremediable malice of infidels and Westerners especially, Islamists are behaving predictably, you might even say naturally. They want a clash of civilizations, and they shall have it. Much more extraordinary, much more damaging, is the support given BY THE LEFT to Islamism. In McCarthy's judgment, these partners may took improbable but actually they are two of a kind. "The essentials of their vision COALESCE. They are totalitarian, collectivist, and antithetical to ... individual liberty." Elsewhere he rephrases this analysis: "With their collectivist philosophy, transnational outlook, totalitarian demands, and revolutionary designs, Islamists are natural allies of the radical Left. That doesn't mean the alliance is naturally enduring," but only that free-market capitalism and the liberty of the individual are enemies they have in common.

What is apparent here is an intellectual failure current throughout the West. Due to some inferiority complex or other psychological disorders, many Westerners [especially college and university faculty members] have internalized the negative view that Islamists have of them and feet themselves to be guilty as charged, capitalists, exploiters, racists, and what have you. Third World sadism perpetuates First World masochism in a vicious cycle. Ranks of professors and Islamist apologists line up with the likes of Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, John Esposito, and Juan Cole ... [along with other exponents of] "a Leftism of the most insidious kind, secular and uncompromising in its rejection of bourgeois values, but feverishly spiritual in its zeal to tear down the existing order....[including such figures as] Saul Alinsky, the community organizer.-the [poet and] Communist-party member Frank Marshall Davis ... and the race-obsessed and anti-American Jeremiah Wright, in whose Chicago church Barak Obama worshipped for some 20 years....[President Obama's] speech in Cairo in the summer of 2009 was to mark a new beginning in the relationship of the United States to the Muslim world. That speech was co-hosted by Al-Azhar University, at which the Blind Sheikh and Sheikh Qaradawi had studied, and selected members of the Muslim Brotherhood were in the audience. They may have been as surprised as everyone else to hear in that speech that Islam had ALWAYS been a part of America's history.

All around him McCarthy sees evidence of appeasement and surrender in response to the example set at the top....An Orwellian order comes that language has to be controlled, and terms like "jihad" and "Islamofascism "purged. The expression "War on Terror" is now bowdlerized to "Overseas Contingency Operation against Man-Caused Disasters," and officials have to keep a straight face when they utter this complete travesty of reality.   Major Stephen Coughlin, an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, was ousted from the Pentagon-at the behest of someone of Egyptian origins and dubious credentials-for a scholarly brief he had written. The incident when Obama bowed low to the Islamist bigot-in-chief, the king of Saudi Arabia [and Supreme Guardian of the Sacred Sites of Mecca and Medina] seems to McCarthy the perfect symbol of national abasement and a promise of worse to come.

Everyone must hope that Muslims will assimilate wherever they have immigrated, and that the Grand Jihad will fade away as fantasies do. In that event, this polemic will seem a curiosity, a state-of-the-nation pessimism at a time when things were in flux.... But should the opposite occur, and the Grand Jihad make further inroads, then this will prove to have been a furious and prescient warning.

[Emphasis added].