WarSclerotic

Andrew McCarthy: Obama Administration ‘Becoming Sharia-Adherent’ in Scrubbing ‘Islam’ and ‘ISIS’ from Orlando Jihadi’s 911 Call, Breitbart, John Hayward, June 20, 2016

I think the Republican Congress has been derelict in that duty – but at the same time, I think it’s self-perpetuating in a way because I guess their ostensible reason for being derelict in their duty is that the President is popular. But perhaps the President is popular because they’re derelict in their duty.”

What they’re trying to do is purge any alternative explanation. So the administration has the position that “violent extremism,” which is what they call it, is disconnected from any credible interpretation of Islam – that Islam is singularly a “religion of peace,” and there is to be no other interpretation of it. And, therefore, anything that shows the direct nexus between Islamic doctrine and jihadist terror is to be suppressed.

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Former prosecutor and National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy appeared on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss his latest column, “Obama: Anti-Anti-Terrorist” with SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon.

When Bannon welcomed McCarthy by noting that “you basically imply there are Islamic supremacists inside the national security apparatus of the United States government,” McCarthy replied, “I hope I did more than imply it.”

McCarthy said:

I stated it outright, and think that’s pretty clear, just from some reporting that’s recently come out about Laila Alawa, a 25-year-old Syrian immigrant who’s somehow on the Homeland Security advisory council, that gives the President advice on counter-terrorism policy – a woman who said that basically 9/11 was a good thing and changed the world for good, which is just about as stunning as anything I’ve ever seen from someone who has a quasi-official government position.

“I think it should be underscored that she’s hardly singular,” McCarthy continued. “The President has been turning for advice – policy advice that has been implemented from the beginning of his administration – to leaders of Islamist organizations that are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

McCarthy said his book The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America chronicles how the Muslim Brotherhood has “very explicitly stated – and this has been proved in federal court, this is not just Andy’s speculation here – that their mission in the United States, and basically the West, but particularly the United States, is the elimination and destruction of Western civilization from within by sabotage.”

McCarthy said there was little congressional oversight of the Obama administration’s alternately clumsy and outrageous handling of the Islamist threat because “people in Congress, particularly Republicans in Congress, believe that the country has changed.”

He argued:

We always like to assume, on our side, that it’s a center-right country. In fact, it’s hard to square that with the fact that there are public opinion polls that tell us with all the abusive things that have happened, all the lawlessness that has happened – and it’s not really disputable, or credibly contestable, that there’s been lawlessness – nevertheless, President Obama has an approval rating of something in the area of 52 or 53 percent.”

He said that “political cases against abuse of power don’t just spontaneously appear,” so it is “incumbent on the people in Congress to make those cases because unlike the rest of us who don’t have political authority, it’s a responsibility of the legislative branch to rein in executive abuse.”

If Congress won’t exercise that authority, McCarthy charged, they’re “as derelict as the Executive Branch officials who are causing the lawlessness, and who are conducting themselves in a rogue way.”

“When I was a prosecutor, can you imagine how successful would I have been in prosecuting a case if I just sat at the government’s table and did nothing, while the defense lawyer did all the work?” he asked. “It’s one thing to say crimes have been committed. It’s another thing to say you have the duty to get up and prove it to the jury.”

He suggested:

I think the Republican Congress has been derelict in that duty – but at the same time, I think it’s self-perpetuating in a way because I guess their ostensible reason for being derelict in their duty is that the President is popular. But perhaps the President is popular because they’re derelict in their duty.”

McCarthy said the announcement by Attorney General Loretta Lynch that references to Islam and ISIS will be scrubbed from transcripts of jihadi Omar Mateen’s call to 911 during the Orlando attack was clear evidence that “the government is becoming sharia-adherent, and the Left is using the same tactic with respect to law enforcement against radical Islamic extremism that it uses in the area of what they call ‘climate change.’”

“That is, they have an official version of events, which may be part of a counter-universe, but it’s their story and they’re sticking to it,” he elaborated, adding:

What they’re trying to do is purge any alternative explanation. So the administration has the position that “violent extremism,” which is what they call it, is disconnected from any credible interpretation of Islam – that Islam is singularly a “religion of peace,” and there is to be no other interpretation of it. And, therefore, anything that shows the direct nexus between Islamic doctrine and jihadist terror is to be suppressed.

McCarthy noted the absurdity of the situation by looking back to his time as a prosecutor in the 1990s, when he proved “exactly that connection” in court: “that is, that there are these commands to violence in the Koran, they’re mediated by these influential jihadist sharia jurists, and then acts of terrorism get carried out.”

“For doing that, the Justice Department gave me the highest award that the Justice Department gives out,” he recalled, adding:

Now, what I proved in court is deemed to be something that’s so improper that it can’t go in the Justice Department’s official account of what happened, in what was obviously a jihadist attack. So we’ve gone from rewarding people who demonstrate what the truth is to suppressing the truth and making the people who would expose it persona non grata.