For most of the last decade, my husband, Fred Grandy, has earned his living as a news/talk morning radio host in Washington, D.C. For most of the last year, he has hosted The Grandy Group, a morning drive-time show covering politics, foreign policy, and pop culture, along with the usual regional and local stories that make up any given day’s news. And like most morning shows either on radio or TV, The Grandy Group has most often been a comfortable blend of stories that were frequently serious but never too solemn, occasionally light-hearted but hopefully never light-headed — just the right mix of authority and affability.
Then I joined the show. Under the pseudonym of Mrs. Fred, I began harmlessly enough. I would show up every Friday at 8 a.m. and talk family and domestic stuff: raising a daughter in college, road rage in the Giant Foods parking lot. But about the time we as a nation began to learn and then wonder about the motives behind the proposed Islamic Center next to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, I started wanting more information. So I examined the actions and intentions of clerics such as Imam Feisal Rauf, the principal pitchman for Cordoba House. I studied organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America, the North American Islamic Trust, and CAIR. I looked into the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial that provided indisputable documentation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term strategy to infiltrate and subvert our educational, legal, and political systems in the United States. I studied the FBI reports that linked CAIR to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization, and found video footage of fundraising activities that began at a mosque in Florida and concluded with bags of cash being handed over to jihadists in Gaza. And I questioned why individuals like Abdulrahman Alamoudi, currently doing a twenty-year prison hitch for terrorist activities, had managed to become a special advisor to President Bill Clinton and a regular guest on Capitol Hill.
So Mrs. Fred Friday began to change. Now, instead of railing against cyclists on Old Georgetown Road, Fred and I were slowly connecting the dots between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, that body of 57 Islamic states (Palestinian Authority included) that has since 1993 openly claimed in the UN that human rights policy must be subservient to Sharia law.
For our efforts, Fred and I were sometimes called racists and Islamophobes, but our audience loved our shows. Calls and emails would pour in during and after these reports wanting to learn more about the slow but steady progress of civilization jihad. Why wasn’t Nidal Hassan stopped before he murdered fourteen people at Fort Hood? Why is he still not referred to as an Islamic extremist in the official DOD report on the shootings?
The demand for more information eventually culminated two weeks ago in a large public forum on Capitol Hill co-hosted by the radio station, the Heritage Foundation, The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Westminster Institute. Fred fielded a panel of experts on domestic terrorism who packed the house and left the audience wanting more.
Nevertheless, just a few days after the event, Fred was told to tone down the jihadist talk and make sure I did the same. I didn’t. In my February 25th report on how Christians had been arrested in Dearborn, Michigan, for simply talking about their religion to Muslims, I said something that outraged our management and was dismissed.
I’m not sure exactly what I said that they objected to, but if I had to guess, I’d guess it was how I concluded the show: “If I don’t return next Friday to continue this discussion, you’ll know that CAIR has successfully put pressure on WMAL — and the radical Muslims have won.”
Needless to say, my dismissal bothered me a tad. For a long time Fred and I have both believed the struggle against Islamic extremism is a secret war most Americans don’t even know we are fighting — and losing. We need more intelligence, not less.
When management disagreed, Fred felt his microphone had also been muzzled and he resigned. That bothered me too. Now he’ll be around the house all day.
But you know what really bothered me? It was waking up not 24 hours after our broadcast careers abruptly ended to learn two American soldiers on their way to Afghanistan had been shot dead at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, by some 21-year-old kid from Kosovo shouting “Allahu Akhbar” — the same thing Major Hassan shouted.
The president has called for a full investigation of the shooting, but in our multicultural universe that most likely means NOT going into the mosques, madrassas, and Islamic centers where jihad is openly preached and where this kid surely received his motivation if not his training. To do that would be politically incorrect.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Catherine Mann (a.k.a. Mrs. Fred) has had a long and diverse career in media and journalism. She has worked as a reporter, anchor, and TV morning show host in major markets across America. She was one of the original correspondents for the long-running Entertainment Tonight program and has most recently been a regular guest on The Grandy Group, WMAL radio’s morning news program in Washington, D.C. She is the author of three novels.