Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy on Tuesday credited President Barack Obama with a measure of consistency, telling
Newsmax TV that locking arms with other world leaders in Paris at Sunday's million-strong peace march would have contradicted Obama's own pro-Islamist policies.
McCarthy told "The Steve Malzberg Show" that he did not find the president's absence from Paris strange in the wake of last week's terrorist violence in France, in which Islamist gunmen killed 17 people, among them 12 employees of the satirical, religion-baiting weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
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"And in some way I almost admire the fact that he elected not to go," said McCarthy, author of
"Faithless Execution: Building the Case for Obama's Impeachment".
"Because had he gone there, he would have been demonstrating against the very policies that he has tried for six years to implement — very much including the imposition of Shariah blasphemy standards on the American people, notwithstanding our First Amendment liberties," he said.
McCarthy returned to a
National Review column he wrote: "Who Is to Blame for the Paris Slaughter?" in which he named figures as varied as radical London cleric
Anjem Choudary — an occasional Newsmax guest — and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as contributors to a climate that enabled attacks.
The prosecutor who put away Omar Abdel-Rahman, "The Blind Sheikh," for life in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, McCarthy stressed that unlike Choudary, Clinton wasn't sanctioning terrorism.
But he argued that the Obama administration, with Clinton as its foreign-policy architect, effectively endorsed the feelings of grievance and resentment that Islamists have nurtured to justify violence.
A case in point, he said, was Clinton's past support for a United Nations resolution sponsored by Muslim countries that would have "criminalized" criticism of Islam.
"Hillary Clinton spearheaded the Obama administration's effort to work with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, this 57-Islamic-government entity, mainly a voting bloc at the United Nations that includes Iran, includes Turkey, Saudi Arabia, etc. — a number of countries that not only impose repressive Sharia but have pretty hostile relations with the United States.
"And their main project was to adopt and implement a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution, known as Resolution 1618, the purpose of which is to make illegal speech that casts Islam in an unfavorable light, whether it's true or not," he said.
Clinton "not only propounded and pushed this resolution, acknowledging that the First Amendment was a problem for the United States in this regard, she said we need to go back to some old-fashioned shaming and peer pressure," said McCarthy.
"Which is another way of saying coercion that's outside the law is something that's okay if what we're talking about is repressing speech that's critical of Islam," he said.
"Now I'm not saying that she called for terrorist attacks," said McCarthy. "But when you know the violent propensities of these people and you say that coercion outside the law is okay, what do you expect is going to happen?"
McCarthy said that Western progressives and Islamists have found common cause over the need to curb the more gratuitous insults of the Muslim faith, the kind that Western religions have long endured — but with progressives perhaps mistakenly assuming that "gratuitous" is as far as the prohibition would go.
In fact, "it's not just that kind of insult that they're trying to proscribe," McCarthy said of the Islamists. "Under their interpretation, they would criminalize any critical examination of Islam, even if it's true, and even if Islamic supremacism — which is a mainstream interpretation of Islam — is our major national security threat."
McCarthy said that signing on to a pro-Islam censorship project feeds the sense of Muslim outrage that finds justification for violence.
"It's very similar to what we were dealing with a couple of weeks ago with the murders of the police officers in New York City, where certainly the people who carry out these atrocities are principally responsible," he said. "But I think we're kidding ourselves if we don't think that the climate that's created, that promotes this kind of activity, doesn't bear some responsibility."
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