You’ve heard the narrative from the Beltway punditry: Our Muslims are better assimilated than Muslims in Europe. Our Muslims are more Westernized, less radicalized.Well, it’s a false narrative.
We are seeing the horns of a Muslim insurgency in this country. We are being Europeanized. And we need a counterinsurgency plan not just in Afghanistan but right here at home.
While our leaders are too politically correct to even think about such a thing, they are starting to at least recognize the problem.
Even President Obama, who still won’t utter the M word, notes the rise in “extremists within our borders.” So does his Homeland Security chief, who just months earlier fixated on white militia groups as the main domestic terror threat.
“We are seeing young Americans who are inspired by al-Qaida and radical ideology,” echoed DHS secretary Janet Napolitano, while still failing to name the source of that ideology. “Home-based terrorism is here.”
And for the first time, a senior Justice Department official has gone on record saying the U.S. is turning into Europe, with Muslim citizens becoming more and more hostile toward the government, and plotting and carrying out more acts of homegrown terrorism.
“If there was ever a subconscious belief in the counterterrorism community that our society is different from Europe and therefore we don’t have to worry about problems like they’ve had, the activities in Minneapolis demonstrate we can’t think that way,” said Patrick Rowan, who led Justice’s national-security division when the government first started investigating the case of the 20 young Somali-American men who quit college and gave up promising careers in Minneapolis to join al-Qaida’s jihad in Somalia.
The FBI fears the recruits — who have U.S. passports — may use their terror training to come back and attack their own country. One of them already carried out a suicide bombing, becoming the first American to do so.
“We should all be on guard,” said Ralph Boelter who heads the FBI’s Minneapolis field office.
As we dig in deeper in Afghanistan, hostility among our own Muslim population will only grow deeper. And as we import more refugees from Muslim countries, demands for Shariah (think: Taliban) law will only grow shriller. Consider that:
* A new Gallup poll finds American Muslims are most likely to report feeling anger compared with the overall population — making even more of them ripe for radicalization.
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