Andrew McCarthy is either a liar or a fool

"I believe many of the attorneys who volunteered their services to al Qaeda were, in fact, pro-Qaeda or, at the very least, pro-Islamist."
Andy McCarthy, National Review's The Corner

Andy McCarthy is either a liar or a fool.

If attorneys who represent terror suspects in American courts are "pro-Qaeda," that means they were glad to see the Twin Towers come down, glad to see the Pentagon burning, glad to see a hole in the side of the U.S.S. Cole and glad to see the carnage and death dealt at America's African embassies in the 1990s.

If attorneys who represent terror suspects in American courts are merely "pro-Islamist," that means that they desire to see sharia law imposed on Americans and a caliphate established to rule the entire Islamic world -- which, eventually would be the entire world.

And under either scenario, the folks who want to see these things happen are embedded in the most elite precincts of the American legal system! But there is, of course, no real evidence to support either contention, just McCarthy's own speculation. The absence of such evidence -- combined with an 10-second Occam's Razor examination of why American lawyers might be offering their services to terror suspects -- renders McCarthy's theorizing dubious. He either knows this and is a liar, or he believes his own rhetoric and is a fool.

Either option renders him deserving of the utmost contempt.

To be fair, McCarthy tries to backtrack a little bit from his own statement, writing the following words later in the post:

You can be pro-Islamist, and even pro-Qaeda, without signing on to the savage Qaeda methods. And the relevant question with respect to progressive lawyers is not so much whether they are pro-Qaeda as it is whether, as between Islamists and the U.S. as it exists, they have more sympathy for the Islamists. 

Wait. What? What distinguishes Qaeda as a form of Islamism is its embrace of violent methods. Is there an un-armed Sinn Fein analogue to Al Qaeda that nobody knows about? No? OK, then: McCarthy's clearly full of crap here. The relevant question with respect to McCarthy is whether or not he knows he's full of crap. Either way, he's trying to get away with his slur on American lawyers without having to own the ramifications of his own words.

This much is clear: Andrew McCarthy is either a liar or a fool.

Related: Conor Friedersdorf on Andy McCarthy's un-American slurs.