Andrew McCarthy: Our Government and the Muslim Brotherhood — My Speech in Washington

By Andrew C. McCarthy

….When we talk about the influence of Islamists, we are referring to Muslims who are beholden to Islamic supremacism. Islamic supremacism is an ideology, not a religion. It is a totalitarian social system that would govern every aspect of life down to the granular level — economic, financial, social, political, military, familial, dietary, issues of crime-and-punishment, even matters of hygiene.

That is the sharia system. As interpreted by many of Islam’s most influential thinkers — including organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and academics like the faculty of ancient al-Azhar University in Cairo — classical sharia rejects basic principles of American constitutional democracy.

In fact, it rejects first and foremost our foundational premise that people are free to determine their own destiny and their own laws — regardless of what sharia holds. Classical sharia rejects freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, economic liberty, equality between men and women, equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, and Western notions of personal liberty and privacy.

It is the goal of all Islamists to impose sharia. That is why there is no such thing as a “moderate Islamist.” If you want to replace the American Constitution with sharia, and Western civilization with the Islam of the Middle East, you are not a moderate — however grateful we may be that you’re not looking to blow up a bridge in order to impose your desires.

Whether they are violent or non-violent, whether they work incrementally toward their goal or work at warp speed, the mission of Islamists is always and everywhere to impose sharia. In Islamist ideology, the implementation of the sharia system is the necessary precondition for turning non-Islamic societies into Islamic societies. And that is what Islamists believe they are under a divine injunction to do.

When I talk about Islamists and Islamist influences, that is what I mean.

It is essential to understand that Islamic supremacism is not a fringe ideology. And with due respect to the trendy, bipartisan diagnosis of it that has become so popular here in Washington, Islamic supremacism — and the extreme forms of behavior it inspires — are not a psychiatric problem.

We like to portray the lethal threat against us as “violent extremism.” But “violent extremism” does not combust spontaneously. It is caused by Islamic supremacist ideology. Violent extremism, as well as non-violentextremism, are effects — they are not causes. They are not irrational and wanton, there is a logic to them … I should say, an ideologic.

This ideology is based on a classical interpretation of Islam that has a rich history. We sound really ignorant to the people we’re trying to persuade when we pretend that this is not the case.

Islamic supremacism has been developed over the centuries by many of Islam’s most respected thinkers — thinkers who are better understood as “jurists” than “clerics.” Their specialty is sharia, which is a societal system, not a mere set of religious principles.

Islamic supremacism is the dynamic ideology of the Middle East at this moment in history. There have been times when it has been dormant, and when its worst tendencies have been cabined or suppressed by force, by law, or by cultural pressures. But at this historic moment, it is once again in its ascendancy.

That is a big problem for us. Islamic supremacists mean us grave harm. We are understandably preoccupied with the fact that violent jihadists are taking aim at our lives. But we should not let the immediacy and horror of that threat obscure the fact that the Islamist movement is taking aim at our way of life.

The movement’s intellectual leader is the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is not a “largely secular” umbrella organization. It is not “moderate.” It is the vanguard of a ground-up, revolutionary, ideological mass movement. It is sophisticated, patient, and determined. It has spent almost 90 years building its reserves and biding its time.

Increasingly over the last half-century, its efforts have been opulently underwritten by oil wealth, especially from Saudi Arabia. The Saudis follow a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, called Wahhabism. That is a close cousin of the Brotherhood’s interpretation, which is called Salafism. For our purposes, the two streams merge into the supremacist ideology that threatens us today.

The threat is very real, very aggressive, and much broader than terrorism. That is because the underlying threat is not terrorism but the rationale for terrorism: which is the gradual imposition of classical sharia — by both violence and non-violence…

 

….On a just-completed trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured the ruling military junta to hand over power to the newly elected parliament, which is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and to the newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, who is a top Brotherhood official. Secretary Clinton later met with Morsi, who has also been extended the honor of an invitation to visit the White House in September.

All this, despite the Muslim Brotherhood’s extensive record of hostility toward the United States, and despite the fact that Morsi, in his first public statement after being elected president, announced that one of his top priorities is to pressure the United States for the release of the Blind Sheikh.

One last thing. Government agencies are responsible to police themselves — to ensure that improper influences and conflicts of interest do not skew policy away from the public interest. Inspectors general are one way the agencies do that internally. And it is entirely appropriate for Congress to ask that inspectors general perform this role in a manner that informs Congress without unduly interfering in the agency’s performance of its mission.

Congress has an obligation to ask questions and conduct oversight over executive agencies. After all, the people’s representatives have created these agencies. It is Congress that funds these agencies with taxpayer dollars. What we are paying for dramatically affects our security, so Congress must examine the policies and the expenditures to protect the public interest.

Under the circumstances, there would be something terribly wrong if members of Congress were not asking questions about Islamist influence on our government. And there is something terribly wrong in the fact that these five members of the House are the only ones who have had the courage to step up to the plate.

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