Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria recently noted that the United States has to deal with far fewer instances of domestic terrorism in part because American Muslims “are generally middle class, moderate and well assimilated. They believe in America and the American Dream.”
McClatchy’s Matthew Schofield followed up on this point with a terrific piece exploring why the U.S. — the preferred villain for terrorists (“the Great Satan”) — suffers from fewer attacks than our European allies.
Karl-Heinz Kamp, the security policy coordinator at Germany’s prestigious Konrad Adenauer research center, said it was easy to understand why.
“The U.S. has a historical advantage; America is still the land of opportunity to the whole world. The people moving there believe the American dream of social mobility,” he said. “In Europe, we’ve historically treated our immigrants as hired help, and waited for them to finish the work they arrived for and go home.”
Bob Ayers, a security and terrorism expert with London’s Chatham House, a foreign-policy research center, thinks that immigrants to the U.S. actually become Americans, giving the United States a huge advantage in avoiding homegrown al Qaida terrorists. Europeans encourage immigrants to retain their native cultures, causing them to be ostracized more readily.
“The Islamic population in the United States is better assimilated into the general population, whereas here, in Germany, in France, they’re very much on the outside looking in,” he said. “When people get disaffected, sadly, there’s not much loyalty to country in that sort of situation.”
Kevin suggests this message should be “stapled on the foreheads” of far-right members of Congress. I suspect most of the conservative foreign policy establishment could use the lesson, too.
[T]errorist groups have a hard time prospering unless there’s a critical mass of tolerance for their ideology in the surrounding population. In Europe, that critical mass exists — though only barely. In the United States it doesn’t, and terrorist attacks are rare.
In the long run, reducing the tolerance for al-Qaeda and likeminded jihadist groups in the Middle East is the only way we’ll ever permanently reduce the threat of Islamic terrorism. This — not military action — should be the single most important guiding principle of our foreign policy. Maybe starting in January 2009 it will be.
Occasionally, we’ll see thought pieces from prominent far-right foreign policy experts who suggest there are two ways to address a global terrorist threat: military confrontation (their preferred approach) or a defensive wait-to-get-attacked posture. It never seems to occur to them that the progressive approach — intelligence gathering, law enforcement, and diplomacy (winning “hearts and minds”) is the only sensible strategy.
Indeed, the right seems intent on doing the exact opposite. Because Muslims believe they can prosper and excel in American society, they’re far less likely to embrace a radical ideology. Because they’re not relegated to the status of second-class citizens, they take pride in being Americans. Far too many conservatives, therefore, believe the U.S. should go out of its way to ostracize American Muslims more.
The eight suspects connected to the recent London terror plots were Muslim men who were doctors or medical professionals. Yesterday on Fox News’s Your World With Neil Cavuto, right-wing radio host Mike Gallagher argued that there is “nothing wrong with suspending the opportunity for Muslim doctors to enter the United States until…we sort this thing out.” He also advocated the practice of racial profiling because “all the terrorists are Muslim.”
These conservatives see a healthy relationship that works, and have decided we should intentionally undermine it.
The mind reels.