Excerpt:
EDITOR'S NOTE: Kathryn Jean Lopez continues her conversation with Andrew McCarthy on his new book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. Part 1 of the interview can be read here.
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: "So atrocious has been the bloodbath wrought by al-Qaeda, its affiliates, and its imitators that it has enabled more methodical Muslim extremists to operate under the radar." Are there politicians — true leaders — out there who get that?
ANDREW C. McCARTHY: Some do, most don't. In the last three attacks or attempted attacks (Fort Hood, Christmas bomber, and Times Square), absurd efforts were made to pretend that there was no connection to Islam. Fort Hood was especially reprehensible, with Gen. Casey claiming that to lose the military's "diversity" would somehow be even worse than the mass murder, and with the military following up by whitewashing the role of Islamist ideology from its report on the atrocity.
And now, look at the Ground Zero mosque controversy. We have leading politicians rallying to the Islamist cause on the grounds of "tolerance." Yet there are 2,300-plus mosques in the U.S. and scores in the New York metropolitan area alone. No one has tried to stop that, even though we know about three-quarters of the mosques are controlled by anti-American Islamists. (To be clear, I am speaking about who controls the mosques, not who attends them.)