SFR Special Edition with Andrew McCarthy

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FG: Welcome back, it is the high point of my week and I hope of yours as well. It is our weekly visit with Andy McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor who has gone on to great public service in his post government life as a pundit, as a commentator, as a star of stage and screen I think it’s fair to say. Also, a best selling author of numerous books including Willfull Blindess, The Grand Jihad, and Faithless Execution. Andy, a Happy New Year to you although I don’t think there’s much reason to believe it will be – it’s the better for at least to be able to visit with you each week. Thanks so much for you time and good to have you.

AM: Always a pleasure Frank, thanks for having me.

FG: You have been all over for quite a while now, but quite particularly in recent days, on what I consider to be one of the most serious developments in this larger war for the free world and that is inroads that are being made, seemingly inexorably in restricting what we do here which is practice freedom of expression. Talk a little bit about your weekend column in which you interviewed a man whose come into considerable public prominence but also some safety issues as a result of his willingness to do just that.

AM: Well over the weekend Frank I wrote a profile of a Bosch Fawstin who is a really brilliant cartoonist who we’ve known a little bit over the years but I guess best come to public prominence in recent time by winning the Draw Muhammad contest in Garland, Texas at which two ISIS jihadists tried to storm the contest and attempted to murder the contestants. They were actually killed in a firefight with police but obviously called alot of attention to the contest and why they were having it and in my conversation with Bosch, he explains that he thinks the best way to fight an enemy ideology is to expose it to the Western principle of free speech, expression, examination and the like and I agree with him about that.

FG: Andy, you mention he’s a brilliant cartoonist and I think his background is also interesting. He is himself a former Muslim. When you talked with him about this, what has he shared with you about this particular ideology that we’ve come to call Shariah?

AM: Well you know I think Frank the way Bosch – I wouldn’t want to put words in his mouth – but I think the way that he looks at it its that there really is one Islam and that he sounds a lot like Erdogan the Turkish president. Islam is Islam and there is no moderate Islam, the doctrine is what the doctrine is. I don’t totally agree with him about that because I think there’s a cultural aspect and a practiced aspect in religion and in some places, it’s simply a fact. You know, Islam is practiced more moderately than in others but I think there’s a lot to be said for his point of view that there’s really one consistent Islamic doctrine and moderation is not so much a factor of cultural impingements – it’s really a factor of how deeply devout a Muslim becomes and I think to his mind, the more seriously you take the doctrine, the more acts you are or at least supportive of if not downright committed to violent jihadism.

FG: This leaves us with the question – what on Earth is the Obama Administration doing? And by that, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, seemingly embracing and advancing one of the most worrying aspects of that Shariah doctrine, namely its blasphemy restrictions. Talk if you would about what you’ve written on Resolution 1618 and this now further question of whether Twitter is getting into the act of suppressing freedom of speech along those lines as well?

AM: One of the big agenda items of the Islamic supremacists that I think we have to be clear what we mean by that, not just violent jihadisits and those who directly, knowingly support them, we’re also talking about big grassroots localists, and internationalist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, which has tentacles throughout the west and operates all over the world and also the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which is the fifty-seven government block of mainly Muslim majority countries. It’s really the biggest voting block in the UN and deems itself, if I can borrow a term from our friend Steve Coughlin, the articulation of the proto caliphate as opposed to the declared caliphate of ISIS. But not too different in the sense is that they both want is to install shariah and along those lines their biggest agenda item in the last decade has been imposing on the west and on everyone in fact, Islam’s blasphemy restriction, which in shariah are very very restrictive. Under Islam and shariah, any critical examination of Islam would be forbidden and what the United States in the Obama years has been doing instead of fighting this idea and defending our first amendment which the President is sworn to do under the Constitution, they’ve instead colluded with these Islamic supremacists in as you point out in Resolution 1618, which actually would impose Islam’s shariah restrictions on everyone under the guise of prohibiting speech that could cause hostility to Islam.

FG: Now Andy, you’re a serious student of these matters. You’re a practitioner at least in the past as well as an observer of what’s being done at the moment. Stitch together if you would Hilary Clinton’s famous declaration in July of 2011 about shaming and peer pressure to be used to affect this kind of shariah blasphemy conformity on the one hand and the recent comments before a Muslim Brotherhood audience, of the Attorney General of the US Loretta Lynch.

AM: I think that Mrs. Clinton understands even as she was working to hoist this unconstitutional Resolution 1618 on the United States and on all of UN member states, even she understands that it can’t withstand the first amendment – which is clearly a violation of our core protecting of political speech. So she basically said even understanding the legal restriction and the possibility that you couldn’t pass a law to ban speech critical of Islam, that they could rely on old fashion peer pressure and shaming in order to signal to people that they didn’t have a right or the power to engage in that. I think that should have been the most frightening thing for most Americans because I think shame does play an important part in our cultural development but it quites another thing when you’re talking about the government using extra legal means or even illegal means, outside the law, in order to extort people in behaving in a certain way and not expressing themselves in a certain way and I think one of the ways that they have suggested that they would enforce this outside the law is to use the processes of government which in themselves, can be a penalty in order to threaten people with prosecution if they engage in behavior or speech that the government is uncomfortable with and I think that is what Loretta Lynch was getting at with her remarks that they would use investigation powers that the government has and put people in fear of being prosecuted in order to sort of brush them back from engaging in rhetoric that would be deemed by Muslims to be insulting but that to you and I, might find as just a critical discussion of Islam and I think this comes full circle to the other thing that you want to talk about, which is what we’re seeing in Twitter. With respect to twitter, I think this is another variation of what Mrs. Clinton was talking about, the use of peer pressure and shaming. So what the government does is it uses its allies in the private sector, that is what a progressive government like the one we have now does, and lets them do the heavy lifting that the government can’t do. So for example, twitter is not bound by the first amendment, because the first amendment is a restriction on government, it’s not a restriction on what private parties can do. Twitter can keep whatever communications its wants to keep off of its network, but because twitter is such a wide network, and so widely used by millions of people, if as its trying to do now, it imposes restrictions as they say that allow twitter to purge anything they call ‘sensitive topics’, like speech that could provoke hostility to a religious group, and what they are doing is basically setting our framework and our expectations about what kind of speech is acceptable and not acceptable. To my mind, their doing the governments extortion at work and the government doesn’t have its fingerprints on it.

FG: there is a government that may have its finger prints on this, or at least a royal family, and I’d like you to talk a little bit if you would Andy about a Saudi prince that we’ve covered in the past in our conversations. Does he in fact likely figure in this effort by twitter to enforce, what amount to, sharia blasphemy restrictions?

AM: well we’re speaking now about prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who was a prominent member and very wealthy member of the royal family of Saudi Arabia, the house of Saud, he throws a lot of his fortune around in academic circles and media circles in the United States, and has become a very heavy duty investor in twitter, I think he now has a 5 percent share, which translates to about a billion dollars in twitter stock holding. Can I prove that the prince had anything to do with the recent changes that twitter has done with respect to regulating content over its social network? No I can’t prove it, but I can say that they certainly have a billion dollar investor from the Saudi royal family. The Saudi royal family is one of the most prominent OIC members, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, that’s moving or pushing this sharia blasphemy agenda. And then low and behold, here comes twitter enacting new regulations that look just like Resolution 1618 in the sense that they give twitter the ability to purge any communications over its network that would subject Islam to critical examination. When I was a prosecutor, we really didn’t believe in coincidences too often.

FG: that’s where I wanted to go with this Andy, you are in fact a trained prosecutor and there is an important piece of circumstantial evidence that might be worth factoring into your consideration here. And as you’ll recall, I’m sure, back when there were the first uprisings, as they called them intifadas in some of the French police circles, of the banlieu mid 2000s as I recall. There was reporting as to what was going on and initially the reporting by Fox News, among others, was that there were Muslim riots taking place because that’s who lived in these banlieu as there called, neighborhoods. There was a meeting that Alwaleed bin Talal addressed on Arabs in the media, somewhere in the Middle East shortly there after, and he declared in a public setting to his brothers in the audience that they should do as he did, which is to say buy the western media because when he saw that chyron coming across the bottom of the Fox screens he called up Rupert Murdoch in who’s company, News Corps, he had also heavily invested in at the time, and said “Rupert those are not Muslim riots”, and he gloated to the audience, as you may recall Andy, that shortly there after the chyron changed to “youth riots”. So again, is that a smoking gun on the twitter case, I don’t know, but it certainly demonstrates intent to influence, to manipulate, to use the western media for his purposes which align pretty closely with those of the OIC and the Muslim Brotherhood and the rest. Andy let me switch gears one more time, you have also written recently a very importance piece about a friend, a man admired greatly for his clarity about a lot of these issues, including what he has used his right of freedom of expression to say about the President of the United States and his background and his influences and his policies, namely Dinesh D’Souza. Talk about what befell him; this went beyond peer pressure and shaming to be sure.

AM: I think this is more in the category, what happened to Dinesh, Frank, of what happened to the producer of the anti Muslim video that the administration falsely blamed for causing the Benghazi massacre. What happened in Dinesh’s case is he was a very prominent and influential critic of the president and they ended up prosecuting him using the criminal justice police power of the state to basically go after him for no better reason that the fact the he’s a prominent critic of the president. Now I shouldn’t say when no better reason, Dinesh committed a campaign finance violation. It was trivial one but he hasn’t denied having committed it. The point in this instance is it was such a trivial offense that it was of the sort that Justice Department never prosecutes. They allow it to be settled by a civil fine. And he’s written a very compelling memoir about it, but he ultimately was prosecuted, they tried to get a jail sentence for him, he didn’t get that but he did get time in a halfway house and he writes about his time there and the similarities between the way the criminal types that he has to mingle with for seven or eight months work, and the way the Obama administration handles the levers of power in Washington.

FG: Can I just ask you in the closing minute your quick thoughts on the administration’s efforts to use executive power to control our guns?

AM: yeah you know Frank, as you know I wrote this book “Faithless Execution” that you were kind enough to mention about, I guess it was June of 2014, by the time the book came out I was already a few acts of impeachment or impeachable offenses behind, you know the truth of the matter is that we’re in a constitutional system where the framers were worried about presidential lawlessness and overreach, and gave congress powers to stop them; namely the power of the purse and the impeachment power. If the congress forfeits those powers, all you’re left with is the president’s own personal sense of what he thinks he can get away with. So we now have 12 months of looking at this president who has all the awesome power of the executive branch, who is really a radical left wing ideologue and who’s essentially been told by the republican controlled congress that he’s got a green light to do pretty much whatever he wants to do for the next 12 months. So it’s frightening.

FG: It is scary indeed and it definitely going to give us many occasions to reflect on Dinesh D’Souzas insights about the thugishness of this kind of bully when he is unleashed.