Andrew McCarthy: Liberals Have A 'Fantasy Account' Of Reality In Facing Terrorism
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Writer and former US Attorney Andrew McCarthy talked with Chris Stigall and Rich Zeoli on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT about the spread of radical Islam to America following the shooting at a club in Orlando and thinks we are not doing enough to confront the threat.
McCarthy, who writes at National Review, said the Obama Administration and the American left are still not willing to face what is happening.
"They project a really fantasy account of what our reality is. When you do that, it's awfully hard to combat a threat. On the one hand, they won't come to grips with what actually fuels this kind of violence, which is ideological. On the other hand, they are so fantasy fictional about how people become 'radicalized.' To listen to the President tell it, you have these ne'er-do-wells who are sitting in their basements, they watch three videos on television and they're ready to go out and commit mass murder. Everybody with an IQ over 11 know that that just doesn't happen in the real world."
He pointed out how much easier it is today for people to access the message of terror groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda
"The ideology, which I call Sharia supremacism or Islamic supremacism, is much more accessible than it has been ever in history. To be more concrete about that, when I prosecuted the Blind Sheikh over 20 years ago, the way the ideology mainly was propagated was by things like cassettes that were recorded of people like the Blind Sheikh making statements and then they would distribute it at mosques...Now you can get it on the internet and study it and learn it."
McCarthy also reflected back to the prosecution of the Blind Sheikh to compared it to confronting terrorism today, and came away believing that, in many instances, it is not a stretch to see Islamic texts supporting terrorist acts.
"The story the government was telling is the same story it's telling today. We had two dozen or so ne'er-do-wells who were just, basically, knuckleheads unrepresentative of any mainstream current of any belief system, and certainly not representative of true Islam, whatever that is. I thought that if what we're saying as a government was true, that there must be two or three places that I could say to the Blind Sheikh, if he ever took the stand, you say the doctrine says this but the Koran actually says that. We went to school on everything he had written. He was a pretty prolific writer and speaker and it turned out that when he quoted scripture, whether it was from the Koran or the Hadith or other sources of Islamic scripture, he quoted it accurately...The point is, we as a government were saying he was lying about and had perverted Islam. I don't mean to suggest that his way is the only way of interpreting Islam, because it's clearly not. But you couldn't say he was lying about Islam. He was saying, literally, what it said."
