Andy McCarthy, on how political correctness has taken over both major parties, to the detriment of our security.

The Obama administration and the Republican establishment would have us live a lie — a lie that endangers our liberties and our security. The lie is this: There is a difference between mainstream Islamic ideology and what they call “violent extremism.”

The vogue term “violent extremism” is chosen very deliberately. To be sure, we’ve always bent over backwards to be politically correct. Until Obama came to power, we used to use terms like “violent jihadism” or “Islamic extremism” in order to make sure everyone knew that we were not condemning all of Islam, that we were distinguishing Muslim terrorists from other Muslims. (In a more sensible time, we did not say “German Nazis” — we said “Germans” or “Nazis” and put the burden on non-Nazi Germans, rather than on ourselves, to separate themselves from the aggressors.) But now, the Obama administration and the Republican establishment prefer to say “violent extremism” because this term has no hint of Islam.

According to the Obama Left and the Republican establishment (personified today by the likes of Sen. John McCain and many, but by no means all, former high-ranking officials from the Bush 43 administration), the only Muslims we need to be concerned about are terrorists, and there is nothing relevant in the fact that they happen to be Muslims. “Violent extremists” are not motivated by a coherent ideology, much less by scriptures from “one of the world’s great religions.” Instead, they are seized by a psychological disorder that inexplicably makes them prone to mass-murder attacks.

The fall-out from this line of thinking is that we must conclude mainstream Islam, everywhere on earth including the Middle East, has nothing to do with violence, and therefore, it is “moderate,” and even “admirable.” Sure, it may be advocating the adoption of something called “sharia,” but we needn’t worry about that. After all, we have Western scholars of Islamic studies (mostly working in university departments created by lavish donations from Saudi royals) who will tell you that sharia is amorphous and evolving — such that nobody really knows exactly what it is, anyway. Consequently, nothing to see here, move along. You are to accept as an article of faith that there is no reason to believe people steeped in mainstream Islam will resist real democracy or that they will remain hostile to the United States. And, yeah, sure they are opposed to Israel, but that is just a “political dispute” about “territory”; it has nothing to do with ideology or mainstream Islam per se.

This reminds me of Jonah’s thesis in his new book of how full of it leftists are when they claim to have no ideology. No, they’re just “pragmatists,” who just want to do “what works.” If we continue to deny that sharia is the goal of our enemies, then we will not fight it, and we will lose. We have to recognize that the “Arab spring” is giving way to a new form of Nazism in the Middle East, except one of Arab supremacy rather than Aryan, but just as totalitarian.

…for the sake of Islam. No duty greater than Jihad.

I wish I didn’t find this credible:

Kahlili says Iranian terrorist cells inside the U.S. have weapons, explosives, money and safe houses; they use contacts with Mexican and Latin American drug cartels to smuggle explosives and weapons into the U.S.

“They have very detailed information about sensitive sites such as bridges, railroads, airports, military bases, power plants, nuclear sites, water plants, railway stations,” he says.

If the U.S. or Israel attacked Iran, he says, sleeper cells inside the U.S. would launch suicide bombings and sabotage. Iran would attack Israel, and U.S. bases in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, he warns.

Kahlili says Iran has intelligence agents inside American universities, Islamic cultural centers and charitable institutions, posing as academics, policy experts and officers of nonprofits. They try to influence policymakers to encourage negotiations in order to give Iran time to develop nuclear weapons.

Kahlili says the Iranian leadership is motivated by Mahdism, the messianic belief that the 12th imam of Shiism, the Mahdi, will one day reappear to establish universal Islam. The trigger is the destruction of Israel.

Sanctions against Iran won’t work, Kahlili argues. “It’s not about the economy. It’s about ideology,” he says.

Of Obama’s many foreign-policy disasters, history may view his indifference to the Green Revolution, or indeed to the very notion of Iranian regime change, as his biggest.

And by the Obama administration, too. What a shock.

We need to neutralize Iran:

It is unseemly and stupid for Washington to remonstrate with the Russians for playing the spoiler in Syria, for example by providing the Assad regime with attack helicopters. The way to deal with this dog is to beat up the dog’s owner, namely Tehran. Washington’s pathetic display of solicitude towards a terrorist regime that uses negotiations to buy time for nuclear weapons development aggravates every other problem in the region, Syria above all.

Yup.