Our friend, Andy McCarthy – a former Assistant United States Attorney from the Southern District of New York, and the prosecutor who brought jihadists to justice for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing – has written an outstanding book titledThe Grand Jihad – How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Buy it. Read it. Give it to friends. Give it to dad for Father’s Day. Read it again.

The book should serve as a wake up call to each and every one of us that the threat of Islam goes much deeper and much wider than the all-too-real threat of terrorism alone. Rather, Andy notes:

…It’s fair to say we are confronted by a horrifyingly large pool of potential terrorists. But the terrorist threat pales beside a lurking reality: the massive fundamentalist pool is churning out legions of activists who wish to end our way of life and who believe that there are plenty of avenues besides mass-murder for pursuing that goal.

Andy spells out in breathtaking detail the extent to which this is true and how the liberal left in America – led by President Obama – is complicit in allowing it to happen. From a disastrous foreign policy to the left’s consistent promotion of radical groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), as well as blind acceptance of Muslims deemed “moderate” for not actually blowing people up, Andy calls it as he sees it. His insight into the threat Islam poses to America is strikingly, but importantly, blunt – and it leaves Andy and his well written book in a class by themselves while most of the world cowers to political correctness.

With respect to the “moderate” Muslim, Andy points out:

In common parlance, someone is a “radical” Muslim only if he is a practitioner of jihadist terrorism, as if it were perfectly normal to want exactly the sharia state the terrorist wants as long as one refrains from terrorist methods in seeking it. The U.S. government, as well as our states and municipalities, clings to this connotation. At all levels – administrations of both political parties, intelligence agencies, law-enforcement, members of Congress, the federal bench, state and local authorities – officials would rather stick pins in the their eyes than grapple with the incontrovertible nexus between Islamic doctrine and the savagery committed by Muslims throughout the world for decades. We are led to believe that the only real “radicals” are the terrorists. Any other Muslim, no matter how supportive of terrorist goals, is deemed a “moderate” so long as he doesn’t seem, right this minute, to be plotting the next Armageddon.

Having begun a tour talking about the book, Andy often discusses the lunacy of the planned placement of a Mosque near Ground Zero. But, more than a “hot” political question, it is an indication of the purpose and intent of the Jihadist.

Andy expresses the idea that “[a]s Islamists see it, modern Muslims in America are surrounded by their enemies, vastly outnumbered, and incapable of mounting a realistic armored attack,” and relatedly, that “a full frontal assault on the American system would simply be crushed, but that the missionary work – jihad by sabotage – gradually eat away from within, abrading both the system and the will to preserve it.” But this is not the western notion of missionary work, he goes on:

Dawa is the missionary work by which Islam is spread. But don’t be fooled by the term “missionary.” Dawa no more resembles the Western connotation of “missionary work” than Islam resembles the Western notion of religion. Just as Islam aspires to domination rather than a place at our ecumenical table, dawa is not mere proselytism but… the key to “victory.”

We all should note that there are, of course, millions of exceptional human beings who are Muslim. Andy makes clear that his book is not an indictment of Muslims – but it is a must-read look at the force behind Islam, and the extent to which we in the west, Christian, Jew or otherwise, simply do not appreciate the threat Islam poses to America and our way of life.

Go get the book.