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Can Islamic Extremism Grow on American Soil?
by
findingDulcinea Staff
The head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency talks of thousands of young men radicalized on U.K. territory; analysts ask what makes America safe from the proliferation of U.S.-born terrorists.
30-Second Summary
On Nov. 5, U.K. intelligence chief Jonathan Evans, director general of MI5, warned that his agency had identified 2,000 individuals in Britain who pose a national security threat. He added that the real number could be twice as high.
The July 7, 2005, attacks in London that claimed 52 lives were conducted by 4 suicide bombers, and all but one of them was born in Britain. So, should America be more concerned about homegrown terrorists?
An August 2007 study by the New York City Police Department concluded that “unassimilated Muslims in the United States are vulnerable to extremism, but less so than their European counterparts.”
That would appear to be the consensus. According to The Christian Science Monitor, “The nation’s history of inclusion has helped to defuse sparks of Islamist extremism.”
In other words, immigrants like it in the States, so they don’t rebel. It is an opinion shared by a Time magazine article titled “The American Exception.”
However, political philosopher Francis Fukuyama finds a more complex explanation for the difference between European and U.S. Muslim communities.
In his estimation, European societies differ from America in that they lack a strong sense of identity—indeed they take pride in its absence. Consequently, these countries are neither able to provide a sense of belonging to resident cultures nor to defend their own liberal values from alien influences.
Fukuyama concludes that to resist radical Islam, these nations “will need to uncover those positive virtues that define what it means to be a member of the wider society. If they do not, they may be overwhelmed by people who are more sure about who they are.”
The July 7, 2005, attacks in London that claimed 52 lives were conducted by 4 suicide bombers, and all but one of them was born in Britain. So, should America be more concerned about homegrown terrorists?
An August 2007 study by the New York City Police Department concluded that “unassimilated Muslims in the United States are vulnerable to extremism, but less so than their European counterparts.”
That would appear to be the consensus. According to The Christian Science Monitor, “The nation’s history of inclusion has helped to defuse sparks of Islamist extremism.”
In other words, immigrants like it in the States, so they don’t rebel. It is an opinion shared by a Time magazine article titled “The American Exception.”
However, political philosopher Francis Fukuyama finds a more complex explanation for the difference between European and U.S. Muslim communities.
In his estimation, European societies differ from America in that they lack a strong sense of identity—indeed they take pride in its absence. Consequently, these countries are neither able to provide a sense of belonging to resident cultures nor to defend their own liberal values from alien influences.
Fukuyama concludes that to resist radical Islam, these nations “will need to uncover those positive virtues that define what it means to be a member of the wider society. If they do not, they may be overwhelmed by people who are more sure about who they are.”
Headline Links: U.K. terror threat and LAPD plans to map Muslim communities
MI5: Al-Qaeda recruiting U.K. children for terror
Jonathan Evans, the head of U.K. domestic intelligence agency MI5, said that terrorists in Britain were radicalizing children as young as 15. He also said that MI5 had identified 2,000 potential terrorists, an increase from previous estimates “due both to improved coverage of extremist communities and to the continued flow of new recruits to the extremist cause.”
Source: The Daily Telegraph
The full text of Evans’s Nov. 5 speech is available online. Jonathan Evans prefaced his address with the following statement: “It is fairly unusual for the head of MI5 to speak at a media-focused event. But the issue of trust is highly relevant to the world of intelligence. All the more so as we tackle the most immediate and acute peacetime threat in the 98-year history of my service.”
Source: The Times of London
LAPD’s Muslim mapping plan killed
On Nov. 15, 2007, the LAPD dropped plans to develop a map of Muslim communities in Los Angeles to aid with the surveillance of potential extremists. News of the project has sparked weeks of protests from Muslim groups and civil libertarians. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Some critics said the LAPD plan seemed based on the European experience of isolated and often-distressed Muslim enclaves, a model they said doesn’t apply to the United States, where the Muslim population is far more dispersed.”
Source: Los Angeles Times
Background: Attacks and plots in the United States and Britain
On Nov. 1, 2007, a New Jersey baker was found guilty of supplying arms to five extremists accused of plotting an attack on Fort Dix, New Jersey. The men planning the raid had lived in the United States for years, but were all born outside the country. They are due to stand trial in January 2008.
Source: The Boston Globe
In May 2007, USA Today published an article alleging that U.S. security agencies were increasingly concerned with the terror threat from extremists who were radicalized on U.S. soil. According to USA Today, Justice Department records identified a dozen plots involving such individuals, though the article also states that in some of these cases (as with the Lackawanna Six, detailed below) the conspirators “had not focused on an American target.”
Source: USA Today
Four suicide bombers attacked London on July 7, 2005, killing 52 and injuring 770. Out of the three bombers, all but one was born in Britain, as explained in a detailed BBC overview of the attacks.
Source: The BBC
In the summer of 2002, six U.S. citizens from Lackawanna, New York, pled guilty to supplying material support for terrorism. PBS profiles the terrorists, who were all of Yemeni descent, and provides a timeline of their activities. They were sentenced to between 7 and 10 years in prison. The men, all in their twenties, had trained with the Taliban in Afghanistan, though it is not believed that they were planning an attack on U.S. soil at the time of their arrest.
Source: PBS
Opinion & Analysis: Domestically produces radicals
Muslim extremism in Britain
The Heritage Foundation, a think tank dedicated to the promotion of “conservative public policies,” responds to the recent report from the head of Britain’s intelligence service by calling on the U.K. government to apply stricter laws and give the police greater powers to combat homegrown extremism. “The U.K. must also refuse to tolerate Islamic militancy in its midst, which seeks to destroy British society and impose a Muslim state,” writes Nile Gardiner. “Islamic clerics who preach treason and violence should be deported and banned from re-entering the country.”
Source: The Heritage Foundation
British author and self-styled “contrarian” Christopher Hitchens attributes the rise of U.K. Islamic militancy to two factors: the “shady exiles from the Middle East and Asia who are exploiting London’s traditional hospitality”; and “the projection of an immigrant group that has its origins in a particularly backward and reactionary part of Pakistan.” Hitchens writes that warnings about this problem have been circulating for years thanks to prominent Britons of Asian descent, such as the novelists Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali and Hanif Kureishi.
Source: Slate
Muslim extremism in the United States
In August last year, in the wake of another foiled terrorist attack planned by U.K. citizens, Time magazine probed into the differences between the U.S. and European Islamic populations. The first important difference it highlights is the simple one of scale: Muslims in America account for less than 1 percent of the total population; in Britain they represent almost 3 percent of the nation. However, Time argues that the most important difference is that America has greater respect for religion than Europe: “In Europe, by contrast, Muslims are resented and marginalized precisely because their religion threatens strong secular values.”
Source: Time magazine
In an article titled “Radical Islam finds U.S. ‘sterile ground,’” The Christian Science Monitor concludes that economic and social differences between Europe and America keep the latter relatively free of extremism. In the United States, “Muslims are thriving economically around the country,” reports the Monitor. “In Britain, by contrast, two-thirds of Muslims live in low-income households.”
Source: Christian Science Monitor
In August 2007, a 90-page NYPD report explored the threat from homegrown U.S. terrorists. The New York Times reports that, although the report was clear in stating that the threat from such extremists was less significant than in Europe, there were a number of complaints that the police were encouraging racial profiling.
Source: The New York Times
Dina Temple-Raston spent three years researching the Lackawanna Six, the U.S.-born men who trained at an Afghan terrorist camp. In The Washington Post, Temple-Raston concludes that the six did not represent much of a security threat: “None of them seemed eager to put what they had learned at the training camp to use.” After their time in Afghanistan, “The young men could hardly wait to get back home. They faked injuries and left the camps early. Nearly all the men returned to the United States hoping that they could put their brush with Islamic extremism behind them.” That might have happened, and of the decision to arrest the men in 2002, the writer says, “It’s difficult not to see the timing as political.”
Source: The Washington Post
Global extremism
Political theorist Francis Fukuyama argues that Islamic extremism can be helpfully compared to the battles for recognition fought by marginalized groups throughout the West in the 20th century. Those groups—such as blacks, gays and lesbians—struggled to be accepted by society at large. The Islamic version of this conflict is complicated by the fact that “modern liberal societies in Europe and North America tend to have weak identities.” To resist radical Islam, these nations “will need to uncover those positive virtues that define what it means to be a member of the wider society. If they do not, they may be overwhelmed by people who are more sure about who they are.” He also states that the “nature of national identity, however, is somewhat different in North America than it is in Europe, which helps to explain why the integration of Muslims is so difficult in countries like the Netherlands, France and Germany.”
Source: Prospect Magazine
Reference Material: U.K. census data
U.K. census data shows that in Britain “unemployment rates for Muslims are higher than those for people from any other religion.” In 2004, 13 percent of British Muslims were unemployed, compared to 4 percent of Christian men and between 3 and 8 percent for other religious groups.
Source: The U.K. government’s Office of National Statistics
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