Andrew McCarthy Examines Jihadists in Americabr The Hoover Institution - Hoover Institutionbr Andrew McCarthy is a former assistant U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York. He led the 1995 terrorism prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others, all of whom are now serving long sentences for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.Now a senior fellow for the Foundation of the Defense of Democracies and a contributing editor to National Review Online, McCarthy is the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad."It is crucial to grasp...[the] Islamic notion of freedom, for it is the inverse of the Western conception." From this central idea, McCarthy discusses the "chasm between the Islam of Western fantasy and the Islam that actually exists," underscoring the fact that "jihadists are very adept at exploiting the freedoms that are available to them in Western democracies.