Matthew Vadum - Team Jihad: How Sharia-Supremacists Collaborate with Leftists to Destroy The United States

A t a moment when a motley crew of demonstrators, protesters, and violent urban thugs has repeatedly joined forces not just to make known their unhappiness with the Donald Trump administration, but to bring chaos to American streets and to seek the destruction of our constitutional order there is an urgent need to understand who is organizing, funding and leading these cabals. Their banners, placards and slogans provide incomplete answers. Indeed, it seems that many of the marchers themselves fail to understand who is pulling the strings that propel the seemingly disparate Muslim Brothers, Black Lives Matter operatives, radical feminists, anarchists and other hard leftists to coordinated confrontation with law enforcement and the rest of American society.

Unfortunately, our preparedness for confronting the array of such forces committed to the destruction of traditional Western values and civilization as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution has faltered badly in the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001. That is due, in no small measure, ironically to the successful influence operations waged against our national security leadership by adherents to the same ideology that animated the attacks of that fateful day: Islams Sharia doctrine. As a result, that leadership has been rendered incapable of confronting these enemies by name, identifying accurately what impels them, let alone achieving a decisive victory over them and their ideology.

As Matthew Vadum persuasively documents in Team Jihad: How Sharia-Supremacists Collaborate with Leftists to Destroy the United States , the jihadists success in this regard is not entirely attributable to the seductiveness of their information and influence operations. They owe much to the decades-long march of cultural Marxism through the key pillars of American society: academia, faith communities, government (especially national security), law enforcement, and media.

After all, it was communist, leftist, and progressive operatives who successfully promoted the notion that the Judeo-Christian principles laid down by the Founding Fathers were, at best, outmoded and, at worst, a force for ill in the world. In this shared antipathy to the traditional religious values that inspired and nurtured Western civilization, Islam and the left found grounds to make common cause: They could set aside their own divergent ideologies and desired end states for the time being and join forces to bring down America.

The emergence of the contemporary Red-Green axis coincided with and contributed to the undoing of a counterintelligence mindset in official U.S. circles. Effectively neutralized was any appreciation of the threat posed by influence operations and, in particular, their perpetrators inside the United States. These dynamics contributed greatly to the collapse of our Intelligence Communitys ability to protect against hostile propaganda, whether of the communist or taqiyya varieties, and subversive infiltration by their practitioners.

That vulnerability was made all the more ominous by the ties between Western leftists and jihadists who were recruited, trained and, in some cases at least, managed by the Soviet Union and its feared security service, the KGB. Over the years, we have learned much about such operations from declassified information like the Mitrokhin Archive and the Venona Papers. Defectors like Ion Pacepa from Romanias secret police and brilliant researchers like Diana West in American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on our Nations Character have illuminated how communist agents stoked the flames of Islamic terrorism and infiltrated deeply inside the ranks of the U.S. government.

Now, with this newest contribution to the Center for Security Policys Civilization Jihad Readers series, Matt Vadum helps clarify the decades-long collaboration among such forces, collaboration that for too long operated mostly in the shadows. He brings to the work a remarkable record of expertise and scholarship. He is an award-winning investigative journalist, who has published widely on issues related to leftist infiltration and subversion within American society. Mr. Vadums superbly researched new material and in-depth analysis complements two other books in the series: James Simpsons The Red-Green Axis: The Left, Islamists and the Erasing of America and Star Spangled Sharia: The Rise of Americas First Muslim Brotherhood Party, the first book to document the Muslim Brotherhoods bid to become a political force in the United States.

Highlights of Team Jihad include a wealth of historical detail about when and how the left and Islam first made common cause and the myriad ways in which they continue to do so today, notably through the shared use of psychological warfare tools that include name-calling, intimidation, and the distortion and suppression of facts and their opponents speech. On campus, in the mainstream and social media, and the streets of America, cultural Marxists and jihadis now work hand-in-hand to demean our culture, destroy the nuclear family, trash the nations heritage and undermine non-Muslim religious communities.

Mr. Vadum also shows how such mutually reinforcing subversion is being underwritten by the lefts wealthy donors and foundations. Their shared loathing for America, its traditions and Constitution and for Western civilization, more generally has translated into literally billions of dollars expended to weaken Americans faith in themselves and, thereby, to help undermine the resolve needed to defend constitutional freedoms against both cultural Marxism and Islamic supremacism.

While significant changes in U.S. domestic and foreign policy now are in prospect under the Trump administration, far too much time already has been lost. Most Americans still lack an appreciation of the lead Americas enemies have been afforded because of myriad past failures to understand and confront them effectively. They can, nonetheless, see the mayhem exploding all around them, mourn the loss of brave local law enforcement officials and feel outrage at the serial, toxic assaults on their cherished values.

Matthew Vadum has, with his lucid and highly readable style, rendered a real public service by making his extraordinary research accessible to all of us concerned about what is happening to the country we love. While our anti-American foes are clever, hate-filled, tenacious and well-funded, they are now exposed. With their masks pulled off and their nefarious, shared agenda laid bare, they should prove to be no match for an American people informed at last and engaged in the defense of country and Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.