Former federal prosecutor McCarthy’s latest book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, is a grand tour of Islam’s threat to the United States. It takes direct aim at the well-funded, well-coordinated, and seemingly unrelenting efforts to insinuate Islamic law, or Shari’a, into the fabric of American society and to weaken America’s will to resist these attempts.
The author became schooled in radical Islam through on-the-job training. As a federal prosecutor, McCarthy led the team of U.S. lawyers that obtained the conviction of “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman for involvement in multiple terror activities. After spending years in the legal trenches, McCarthy became an accomplished author and regular commentator on Islamism.
The scope of the book is ambitious. McCarthy describes the Islamist threat in the United States with a special focus on the leftist-Islamist alliance. Many readers might be perplexed initially that leftists and Islamic ideologues would sup together, let alone pool their efforts. McCarthy skillfully unravels their twisted partnership; despite the vast divisions in their social and political agendas, Islamists and leftists are united in hate against the world’s capitalist and Christian colossus.
While some commentators on discord between Muslims and the United States place the onus on U.S. policy, McCarthy will have none of it. He dispenses with myths about jihad being a form of spiritual yoga; that Islam is a religion of peace; that those who protest the expansion of Islam in the United States are “Islamophobes"; and that those Muslims who wish Americans harm are confined to an isolated, small nucleus of marginalized hotheads. McCarthy captures full scope of the Islamic threat, which alone makes the book worth the read.
He goes beyond the broad sweep of American Islamism to get down to details. One subchapter, for example, exposes a dangerous and shameful incident in the Department of Defense. U.S. Army Maj. Stephen Coughlin, an expert on the security implications of Shari’a in the United States, was forced out of his job by Hesham Islam, a higher-level advisor in the DOD, with dubious qualifications and suspicious connections. McCarthy deploys his prosecutorial skills to make a case for the major.
McCarthy has much to say on a subject he has mastered. Not all of his arguments are original, but all support his broad and updated account arguing that Americans are engaged in a long struggle with a determined enemy.
