Willfull Blindness on Terror

Andrew McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor, columnist and terrorism expert, was a guest on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney this week.

McCarthy testified at a Senate hearing on terror led by Senator Ted Cruz this week and the title of the hearing was “Willful Blindness” which is also the title of McCarthy’s first book.

Gaffney asked McCarthy to describe the scene at the hearing:

“For more perspective, I tried to lay out the importance of ideology to the threat and the – how insane it is, both factually and legally to hold that because ideology has Constitutional protection, in the sense that you can’t be indicted for having beliefs, it’s just ridiculous to say that it can’t trigger investigations, it has to. I think Zuhdi (Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser) brought out the importance of Islamic reform and the idea that we ought to be empowering pro-American, pro-liberty, pro-Western Muslims instead of taking our cues from what really ought to be labeled a terrorist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood… We ought to pause over intelligence whenever we talk about it in connection with this war because unlike the traditional war where you have national armed forces facing off against each other… in a terrorism conflict where you’re dealing with an enemy that strikes in stealth and hides among civilian populations the better to mass murder them, intelligence takes on a dimension of importance that I think even transcends it’s importance in a traditional national conflict.”

McCarthy said other people who testified at the hearing focused on the cultural aspect of Sharia which he described as “almost more insidious” than violent acts of Jihad.

Gaffney then asked McCarthy to describe the witnesses who were invited by the Democrats. McCarthy described a woman who was an activist for Muslim advocacy, a representative from the far left Southern Poverty Law Center and a former FBI agent who’s part of another far left political group.

These three folks were there to try to make the argument one of cultural relativism in which Muslims shouldn’t be singled out because all groups are capable of extremism.

This is the strategy Obama and the Democratic Party have been using in the face of terrorism for years now and it Fails because it is more concerned with fairness and people’s feelings than with reality.

McCarthy summed up the left’s position very well:

“There just seems to be, again, what I regard to be a hard headedly conscious avoidance of the fact that there is a particular ideology that is rooted in scripture that results in both incitement by very authoritative Sharia supremacist jurist figures like the guy I prosecuted years ago, the blind Sheik, and that this toxic combination results in terrorist attacks and is representative of a broader attack on Western Civilization. There are people who simply don’t want to come to grips with that.”