Who Is the Radical?

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Saturday, December 27, 2025

 

I’m writing this amid the Festival of Lights and few days before our annual observance of the Nativity in the Judeo-Christian West. A confession, though: I am far from brimming with Christmas spirit.

 

It’s impossible to at the moment. Hopefully things will be better when you read this. Just days ago, we witnessed the unspeakable horror at Bondi Beach, where a father-and-son jihadist team murdered Australian Jews who were doing nothing more provocative than being Jews and celebrating the start of Hanukkah.

 

It was bound to happen: The transnational progressives who run the Australian government turned deaf ears to repeated warnings about intensifying Jew hatred — the word “antisemitism” doesn’t do justice to the historical enmity involved. The surge in incidents of intimidation and violence follows surges in Muslim immigration to the country. That’s not just coincidence; sometimes post hoc really is propter hoc.

 

Integrate But Don’t Assimilate

 

The pace of immigration has picked up in the past 15 years: a diaspora driven not only by internecine Islamic bloodletting — particularly in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria — but also by the Muslim Brotherhood’s longstanding “integrate but don’t assimilate” strategy of conquest in the West. That was the subject of my 2010 book The Grand Jihad. The title was not something I came up with; I cribbed it from an internal Brotherhood memorandum:

 

The Ikhwan [i.e., the Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. (Internal quotation in original.)

 

The Brotherhood is the largest, most influential Islamic movement in modern history. The memo not only defined its mission to a tee; it emphasized a golden opportunity to use the West’s own freedoms and culture against it — destroy us by our own “hands” as well as the “hands” of “the believers” (sharia supremacists) operating “from within.”

 

And what do we see? Since the massacre at Bondi Beach, Hanukkah celebrations have been canceled in Queensland, Melbourne, and Sydney. Paris has canceled its New Year’s Eve celebration and an open-air concert on the Champs-Élysées; with about 1.7 million Muslims in the Parisian metropolitan area, now about 15 percent of the population and a source of constant unrest, French officials decided they could not hold the event securely.

 

Elsewhere in Europe, major cities are trying to go forward with their festivities, but warily and under phalanxes of police. How could it be otherwise after last Christmas Eve? Remember? A Saudi-born jihadist — a doctor who had been living in Germany for years — raced an SUV through a crowded market in Magdeburg, killing six Germans and injuring more than 200. (All together now: We may never know the motive.)

 

That was just a few days before New Year’s Eve, when another jihadist slammed his white truck into a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, murdering 14 and wounding dozens. An FBI supervisor straight out of central casting from the Obama-Biden era (soon, we’ll be saying Mamdani era) raced to the microphone to pronounce that the bureau, of course, did not deem the attack a “terrorist event”. . . ISIS flag in the truck notwithstanding.

 

The New Orleans attack is worth pondering. It was carried out by Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old black man — an Army veteran born and bred in Texas. Naturally, whenever a Muslim living in the West carries out a terrorist attack, especially a Muslim who is native to the West, there commences handwringing over the supposedly befuddling mystery of how he came to be “radicalized.” This remains a numbing routine — we somehow are still astonished 46 years after the Iranian revolution, 32 years after the World Trade Center was bombed, and 24 years after that complex was obliterated the same day the Pentagon, too, was struck by suicide-hijackers, mostly Saudis and all sharia supremacists.

 

Trump’s Exemplary Saudis

 

President Trump couldn’t praise Saudi Arabia enough in his deals, deals, deals speech there this spring (“forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos”). At the time, Israel continued to fight a seven-front war — a war that persists despite his inoperative 21-point plan (with Hamas’s allies, particularly in Turkey and Qatar, gradually erasing Trump’s call for Hamas to disarm). Yet, the president hailed a “great transformation” from jihadist bloodletting to peace driven by economic development. The real problem, he insisted, were the “Western interventionists” presuming to give the Saudis “lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs.”

 

As he intervenes in the Middle East under the illusion that the sharia supremacists are allies (they may be his friends, but they will never be our friends), the president faulted the “Western interventionists” for “intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”

 

Oh, and he does?

 

I wonder if the president has seen the guidance that the State Department — very much including his State Department, now in his second term — gives to Americans considering travel to Saudi Arabia. For example:

 

While in Saudi Arabia, you are subject to local laws. If you violate Saudi laws, even unknowingly, you may be expelled; arrested; imprisoned; held without trial for lengthy periods of time; interrogated without counsel; subject to corporal punishments, including lashings; or executed.

 

That’ll pop your head up, no? Not too far, though: The Saudi regime executed 345 people by beheading in 2024.

 

About a third of executions in the country are for drug trafficking. (Contrary to the “Western interventionists” who tried to acquaint the Saudis with due process, the Trump Caribbean bombing campaign reeks of Saudi standards.) But that, of course, is not the half of it. Drug dealing and alcohol consumption are treated severely because of sharia strictures drawn from Islamic scripture. Death sentences, imprisonment, and public floggings are also imposed for adultery and apostasy from Islam.

 

And if you’re thinking about visiting Saudi Arabia, leave your rainbow flag at home. The State Department warns “LGB Travelers”:

 

Same-sex sexual relations, even when consensual, are criminalized in Saudi Arabia. Violations of Saudi laws governing perceived expressions of, or support for, same-sex sexual relations, including on social media, may be subject to severe punishment. Potential penalties include fines, jail time, or death.

 

To repeat what I’ve related over the years, the harsh treatment of homosexuals is drawn straight from the Koran and has always been rudimentary in sharia.

 

In his May 13 speech, President Trump gushed praise for “the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi” (in the United Arab Emirates, another of “America First’s” new favorite countries), which, he said, have been “brought about by the people of the region themselves . . . developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies.”

 

Sure. But have you ever noticed that the president doesn’t speak of the marvels of Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia’s two most important cities? Indeed, when he visits, the coverage somehow never captures them.

 

That is because, as a non-Muslim, the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, is deemed unfit to set his feet on the ground in those places. Sharia is systematically discriminatory against non-Muslims. As the State Department admonishes, “Non-Muslims are forbidden to travel to Mecca and parts of Medina, the cities where two of Islam’s holiest mosques are located.”

 

That is in the same guidance section in which our government warns potential travelers:

 

·         Saudi authorities do not permit criticism of Islam or Muslim religious figures, including on social media.

 

·         The government prohibits the public practice of religions other than Islam. Non-Muslims suspected of violating these restrictions have been jailed and/or deported. Church services in private homes have been raided, and participants have been jailed and/or deported.

 

·         Muslims who do not adhere to the strict interpretation of Islam prevalent in much of Saudi Arabia may encounter societal discrimination and constraints on public worship (emphasis added).

 

·         Public display of non-Islamic religious articles, such as crosses and Bibles, is not permitted.

 

The bit about “the strict interpretation of Islam prevalent in much of Saudi Arabia” is worth pausing over. Letting the veil slip from its default transnational progressivism, the State Department does not say the Saudis follow an incorrect interpretation of Islam. Just a strict one. Which is to say: one that is faithful to fundamentalist tenets. Those tenets have been set in stone by authoritative sharia jurisprudents for about a millennium.

 

Under them, the systematic discrimination does not solely target non-Muslims and non-heterosexuals. Women, too, are a principal focus. State’s guidance about Saudi Arabia explains that “married women, including non-Saudis, require their husband’s permission to depart the country, while unmarried women and children require the permission of their father or male guardian.” Foreign women who are widowed or divorced from Saudi men are not permitted to remove their children from the country. The guidance about how the Saudis pursue their own unique vision gingerly suggests that readers consult State’s “travel tips for Women Travelers.” Without mentioning Islam or sharia, these helpfully explain:

 

Some destinations have rules against certain behaviors or speech. Others may have different rules or expectations about women’s clothing and appearance. Tight-fitting clothes, sleeveless shirts, or shorts, for example, may not be acceptable.

 

Yup.

 

Classical Sharia

 

The State Department’s guidance for travelers is helpful. If you really want to understand sharia, the fundamentalist culture — meaning the law and framework for society — in which Muslims in Islamic countries are raised, you should peruse Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law. It is endorsed not only by the International Institute of Islamic Thought, which is the Muslim Brotherhood’s think tank, but by the sharia scholars of al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning since the tenth century.

 

A decade ago, after jihadists carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France, I did a deep dive into its provisions.

 

The harsh Saudi treatment of apostasy? The aforementioned manual explains it:

 

Apostasy from Islam is “the ugliest form of unbelief” for which the penalty is death (“When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed”). (Reliance o8.0 & ff.)

 

Some other provisions worth repeating:

 

·         Jihad means to war against non-Muslims.” (Reliance o9.0.)

 

·         As commanded in . . . Sura 9:29 [of the Quran], non-Muslims are permitted to live in an Islamic state only if they follow the rules of Islam, pay the non-Muslim poll tax, and comply with various conditions designed to remind them that they have been subdued, such as wearing distinctive clothing, keeping to one side of the street, not being greeted with “Peace be with you” (“as-Salamualaykum”), not being permitted to build as high as or higher than Muslims, and being forbidden to build new churches, recite prayers aloud, “or make public displays of their funerals or feast-days.” (Reliance o11.0 & ff.)

 

·         Offenses committed against Muslims, including murder, are more serious than offenses committed against non-Muslims. (Reliance p1.0 & ff; p2.0-1.)

 

·         The penalty for spying against Muslims is death. (Reliance p50.0 & ff; p74.0 & ff)

 

·         The penalty for homosexual activity (“sodomy and lesbianism”) is death. (Reliance p17.0 & ff.)

 

·         A Muslim woman may marry only a Muslim man; a Muslim man may marry up to four women, who may be Muslim, Christian, or Jewish (but no apostates from Islam). (Reliance m6.0 & ff. — Marriage.)

 

·         A woman is required to be obedient to her husband and is prohibited from leaving the marital home without permission; if permitted to go out, she must conceal her figure or alter it “to a form unlikely to draw looks from men or attract them.” (Reliance p42.0 & ff.)

 

·         A non-Muslim may not be awarded custody of a Muslim child. (Reliance m13.2–3)

 

·         A woman has no right of custody of her child from a previous marriage when she remarries “because married life will occupy her with fulfilling the rights of her husband and prevent her from tending to the child.” (Reliance m13.4)

 

·         The penalty for theft is amputation of the right hand. (Reliance o14.0)

 

·         The testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. (Reliance o24.7)

 

·         If a case involves an allegation of fornication (including rape), “then it requires four male witnesses.” (Reliance o24.9)

 

·         The establishment of a caliphate [the sharia-governed state] is obligatory, and the caliph must be Muslim and male. “The Prophet . . . said, ‘Men are already destroyed when they obey women.’” (Reliance o25.0 & ff; see also p28.0, on Muhammad’s condemnation of “masculine women and effeminate men.”)

 

Ancient Antisemitism

 

These are not rules that al-Qaeda or Hamas made up. This is classical Islam, and it is steeped in Jew hatred, the doctrinal basis of which I outlined a couple of weeks ago. Besides the history of Muhammad’s military campaigns against Jews, it includes the prophet’s assertion:

 

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

 

This passage is in the original Hamas charter, but not because Hamas made it up. The jihadists were quoting from scripture — a hadith (i.e., a passage from authoritative collections of the words and deeds of Muhammad) known as Sahih al-Bukhari 2926.

 

This, finally, is the main point. Sharia is drawn from scripture and, in Islam, scripture is not deemed to be inspired as it is in Judeo-Christian tradition. It is understood to be the verbatim directive of Allah, which preexisted time and is immutable.

 

It is fair enough to observe that what I’ve outlined is not the only construction of Islam and sharia — although, if it were a fringe interpretation, one might wonder why the State Department would see the need to warn potential travelers about what they could be getting themselves into. The point is that this is authoritative Islam.

 

When we talk about moderates and reformers in the West, we are talking about Muslims who choose not to follow these dictates and who argue that they can be “evolved” and “contextualized.” They are our allies; they have accepted Western culture and American constitutionalism. They are invaluable to the West’s fight against sharia supremacism — in law enforcement, intelligence, and the military. That’s why we prefer to think of them — however irrationally — as representing the real Islam. There are, however, many interpretations of Islam. The moderates and reformers are never going to represent the dominant one in the places from which Muslim immigration launches and in the Western enclaves influence by the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

Authentic Muslim moderates and reformers are countered by the most influential scholars in the lands where Islam predominates. Those authorities maintain — logically, if dismayingly — that Islamic doctrine says what it says, that humans have no authority to alter Allah’s own eternal directives, and that — since we’re talking about an eternally applicable framework for human life — it makes no sense to “contextualize” the aggressive, bellicose, discriminatory scriptures the West finds troubling. How could Allah, in taking the trouble to prescribe standards for all time, intend that standards developed in the seventh century — the age of the prophet himself, and of dramatic Islamic ascendancy — be nullified in modern times?

 

So, the inevitable next time a jihadist atrocity prompts the grating “how was he radicalized?” debate, I suggest asking: Who is the radical? Is it the Muslim whose actions are consistent with the doctrine as written and inculcated for centuries in the Muslim Middle East, or the Muslim who insists — against all evidence to the contrary — that violent jihad against scriptural enemies of Islam is no longer operative?