Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said Thursday on “Fox & Friends” the government must ignore political correctness when fighting terrorism.

McCarthy was discussing the case of a woman detained by ICE at a radical Muslim compound in New Mexico, after it was discovered she was living in the U.S. illegally for 20 years. McCarthy soon made connections between the compound case and an investigation he led back in 1993. (RELATED: Judge In New Mexico Compound Case Accuses Prosecutors Of Discrimination)

“The alleged ringleader of this compound in New Mexico is the son of somebody who came up in our investigation back in 1993,” McCarthy said. “He was on a list of people who we thought could come up in the investigation or could come up in the trial.”

“The important thing … is he was a fairly renowned, I would say notorious, Sharia supremacist preacher at a mosque in Brooklyn,” he continued. “And the ideology that they preached was that Muslims in the West should start enclaves or parallel societies where they both prepare for violent action against the host country and try to live their lives in accordance with their strict interpretation of Sharia.”

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McCarthy said the case from 1993 taught him the Islamic terrorist threat is driven by “ideology” and is allowed to flourish under the shield of political correctness.

“If we learned anything in that trial, it was that this is an ideologically driven threat,” McCarthy said. “If you pretend that the ideology is important. If you try to investigate it without taking — without considering the ideology because of political correctness, you’re always going to be behind the eight ball.”

“I mean, look, this country has been at war since 9/11. And it’s been at war with an ideology,” he concluded. “That has to be taken into accounts along with the other evidence that they find in the compound.”

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