What Is This 'Jihad' of Which You Speak? It's 'Elementary,' My Dear Glazov

FrontPage's Jamie Glazov ask Andrew McCarthy, author of The Grand Jihad, to explain what "jihad" means to Muslims (not to idiot American apologists who hold sway with Obama):

FP: You mention “violent jihad.” What do you think of the fact that John Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism advisor, just explained to us that jihad is an “internal struggle” and a noble calling?

McCarthy: Ah, yes, the internal struggle to “purify oneself or one’s community.” It is remarkable that we’ve been under jihadist siege for 17 years – and you could say it’s a lot longer than that, but I’ll count from the WTC bombing – and we still hear this blather.

At the highest levels of government, we don’t want to come to grips with what jihad is. It is a very simple concept. In Islam, jihad is always and everywhere the divinely ordained mission to establish, spread or defend sharia, the Muslim political and legal system. Sharia is deemed to be the necessary precondition to Islamicizing societies – the central, supremacist imperative of Islam being to place all the world under the dominion of Allah and His law. Thus jihad can be, and often is, violent. But it can also be nonviolent, though not in the syrupy way Brennan and other apologists suggest. To hear them tell it, jihad is totally benign – the internal struggle to brush after every meal, or to rid one’s neighborhood of drug-dealing, etc. That’s not it at all. When Islam speaks of jihad as the command to “purify oneself or one’s community,” it does so in a very narrow sense. The idea is not to become a better person but a better Muslim – i.e., to be more faithful to sharia. And to “purify one’s community” does not mean to make it a better place in some objective sense; it means to rid one’s community of non-Muslim influences.

If we understand the elemental fact that jihad is, in fact, a bedrock tenet of Islam and that it is entirely about establishing sharia, then we are on road, finally, to understanding the civilizational threat we face.

It ain't rocket science--or even a deep sea oil gusher--Barack.