Unlike Stephen Green or James Joyner, I think the threat to the West from Islam is one that is purely of our own making. There is not a single Islamic country that could wage a successful war against the first world countries, nor is there much risk that would come from "alienating" the Islamic world.
I would like to point out one very simple fact about the Islamic world that gets missed: they need us at least as much as we need them. Take a serious look at where most of the Islamic countries in OPEC get their technology from. Infidel countries, that's right. They cut us off on oil, we cut off exports to them and suddenly they find that oil doesn't provide spare parts for their vehicles, none of which are built locally (for a variety of reasons). Within a few years, their computerized components begin to fall apart, and if you thought that vehicles were hard to repair...
The tangled web that we have woven with the Islamic world is one that is squarely our collective fault. Westerners don't want to admit that we are playing Russian Roulette when we invite Muslims into our borders. No one seems to find it just a little daft that we invite a religious group where it seems that at least 1 out of 20 of its members is a bonafide sociopath who is dedicated to working with other like minded sociopaths for the complete destruction and subjugation of the host society. I could be wrong, but I would say that immigration and student visas are the *ahem* root causes of actual acts of terrorism on Western targets by Muslim terrorists.
There was a time when the Republicans would have launched an investigation into treason for a politician and his family for being close friends to a royal family that sponsors anti-American terrorism. Today, if the Democrats had any testicular or ovarian fortitude (which presupposes functional genetalia, unfortunately), they would be rightfully holding McCarthyesque investigations of the Bush family for their ties to the Saudi royalty.
One thing is for sure, and that's that we had some semblance of common sense during the Cold War and World War II that we don't have today. We didn't allow Soviet citizens to come here unfettered without any oversight, nor did we allow the KGB to set up recruiting booths on college campuses, which is what we tolerate the Saudi-based Wahabi death cult doing in our Islamic communities. Leaders don't make excuses, victims don't bring it on themselves, idiots do both of those things.
That is why we stand to lose the War on Terror.
Meanwhile, we seem to be doing a bang up job of reforming Afghanistan! And wouldn't relations between religions in America be just wonderful if we had these guys working for Habitat for Humanity?
"a bang up job" - Oh oh oh I think I'm into that too!
"Russian roulette" -- well said. I'm open to relaxing immigration controls when this war against radical Islam is over, which may be decades away.
Visiting or studying in the U.S. is a privilege, not a right. Unfortunately, we approach immigration just as we do airport security, as if we did't know who the enemy was.
Rush Limbaugh made a good point that half the reason militants hate America is that the ones that came over on student visas get fed through the political correctional institution that tell them how evil America is.
Dave Kopel points out,
Like I said, deconstruction is our enemy.
I think it remains to be seen just how much of the reason that they hate us is the result of the university. Their behavior and views toward us has not changed much in the past nearly 1,400 years that Islam has waged jihad against non-Muslims.
I have no doubt that that is part of the problem, but let's not kid ourselves. It is nothing more than a justification after the fact for many of them.
Gotta disagree with you, Mike.
The Arabs, to speak of nothing of the Northwest Africans (quasi-Arabs, like Samaritans were to the Jews), Persians, Pakis, Indian, Chinese, or Indonesian Muslims, started out the twentieth century, culturally speaking, with a qauasi-blank page.
The Arabs had been under the heel of Ottoman Turks for several centuries by this point. The Ottomans, were the face of Islam during that time. The Ottomans, religious differences nonwithstanding, were actually europhilic and consider themselves then, as Turks do now, more part of the occident than the orient. The Muslim world, under its heel, was just a badge of superiority, on par with the badge of superiority other European powers wore with their colonial ventures. Hence, the Turks tacitly desired to be "one of the boys".
The Ottomans looked down on Arabs as backwards and wothy of being nothing more than the sanjaks they were relegated too. Sure, the Koran was read in classical Arabic. But this degree of reverence was in many ways a paralell to our reverence for the ancient Greek civilization: only in token.
Then came Lawrence, "of Arabia". (Ever see Hollywood Knights? BEEP-BEEP!) And the Arabs began to trade a heavy hand of rule for a less heavy one, namely the British. They were promised something that had never been known in living memory, self rule. Taking the antogony of Zionism off the table, A people suddenly freed of all they had ever known began to grasp for something to galvanize the sense of self-identity and rule that now seemed almost within reach.
The Twentieth century in the Arab world is the sad tale of European Pupeeteering of pseudeo-kingdoms and mismanagement. Hence the anomoly of a Christian-dominated province of Lebanon, which had not existed before, and a Hashemite King ruling over Bedouins and Palestinian tribes in Trans-Jordan. The Arabs, not keen on trading puss for piss, then turned to the marxism and Arab national socialism that was a variant of Nazi variety.
Munich did well in potraying much of the Arab struggle against Zionism and the West not as a clash of religions, but of secular ideologies, as this was the case for most of the 20th century. The PLO were marxist, for the most part, as best I recall. Ba'athist Egypt, Syria, and Iraq were all secular social ideologies. It must also be remembered Iran was quitely neutral towards Iran until the late seventies.
The religious tinge to the struggle in that religion actually began shortly after the reconquoring of the Temple Mount. When either agnostic Began or Ben Gurion, I don't recall which, placed a prayer in the Weeping Wall. This image was captured on television. Here was a secular jew, doing a religious thing. The image was powerful to Muslism who saw this, as they had for most of the century been brainwashed with the same secular-proletariatism that much Eurasia had been poisoned with. Contrary to all that they had been indoctrinated with, image=substance as there was suddenly a seeming connection to victory and the worship of the extant God. A similar example of this image=substance spawned the Rastafarian relgion, earlier in the century. So in a sense, television was to blame.
Meanwhile, not far off. Religious Muslims were being tortured by their secular overlords in Egypt. It is here that the violent strain of jihad we know today was born. The image of a secular jew, warring in the name of secular zionism, empowered by worshiping God was the fuel doused, and the Islam born of suffering at the hands of a godless, Marxist state, was the spark.
What's the point of this rambling historical anecdote? Well, it's just that we mustn't see the battle against militant Islam as the consecutive culmination of something that began 1400 years ago. "Militant Jihad", as seen on television, is a product born within the confines of our living continuum. It is a product of very 20th century post-modernism that supplanted the secular marxism that came before it. It is also falacious to view this as a battle from time immemorial because that belief is indeed the very product and conclusion of militant jihadist thinking, itself. And in believing that, we risk of running into the trap of whomsoever frames the terms of the debate, win the argument.
There are 1 billion Muslism on this Earth. To lump them all abstractly into some dialectical battle is no less falacious than the helter-skelter race wars envisioned in the sixties.