By Victor Davis Hanson
Monday, December 07, 2015
Why would Ms. Tashfeen Malik, who was born in Pakistan
but lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia, want to come to the United States?
She obviously hated the United States and its values, at
least enough to help stockpile an arsenal and to kill 14 people and wound
another 21 in San Bernardino.
Or for that matter, why did her husband and
co-mass-murderer Syed Rizwan Farook, if he was unhappy with his native America,
not return to his parents’ Pakistan, where he might, in greater peace, have
practiced Sharia law, memorizing his Koranic verses without the temptations of
crass and uncouth American culture?
Or why did not family members or friends notice the
couple’s assembling of a veritable arsenal of assault in their townhouse? And
if they did notice, why did they not help to protect their adopted country?
And why did a spokesman for the Council on
American–Islamic Relations (CAIR), Hussam Ayloush, as if suffering from a
politically correct tic, almost immediately tie terrorism in the U.S. with
American foreign policy? “Let’s not forget that some of our own foreign policy,
as Americans, as the West, has fueled that extremism,” he said. “ . . . We are
partly responsible. Terrorism is a global problem, not a Muslim problem.” Was
that pop exegesis designed to show Americans how CAIR abhors Islamic-inspired
terrorism inside the U.S.?
As part of the “Other,” the San Bernardino terrorist
tandem did not seem to direct their furies against the so-called dominant white
culture or white privilege, given that their innocent victims were of all races
and both sexes and representative of multiracial America, a country both far
more diverse and far more tolerant of diversity than, say, Pakistan.
Surely the Tsarnaev brothers were unhappy in Boston —
despite (or was it because of?) generous public assistance and attention. Could
not Major Nidal Hasan have returned to his parents’ native Palestine to better
practice jihad than murdering 13 and wounding more than 30 of his fellow Fort
Hood soldiers? Why stay in the U.S. instead of heading to the West Bank?
What exactly about UC Merced’s oppressive atmosphere set
off Faisal Mohammad’s stabbing of four fellow students? If, in his youthful
angst, he wished to romanticize about ISIS and his own identity, could he too
not have left the hated United States and found a more congenial environment in
the Islamic world, where there are no supposed losers deserving of death like
those at UC Merced?
Surely there was no need for more than two dozen Somalis
to immigrate to Minnesota, only to return home to sign up for jihad with
al-Shabab? Was Minnesota colder than they had unexpected, too stingy in its
public assistance, or known for its endemic racism?
For that matter, what exactly has driven Muslim
immigrants or their children to attack non-Muslims in America in nearly 50
instances since 9/11? Islamic spokespeople talk of hate crimes, but not of the
fact that Muslims as a group commit more hate crimes than they suffer, or that
the greatest target of hate crimes in America is the Jewish, not the Muslim,
community. How many Muslims by virtue of being
Muslims have been killed by non-Muslims since 9/11 in the United States?
And how many Muslims have killed non-Muslims by virtue of their being
non-Muslims? Is there such a word as unIslamophobia?
Who is in more danger in the West: a Western native who
draws a cartoon caricaturing all three major religions, thus including Islam,
or an immigrant who threatens him?
One can argue statistically that the number of Islamist
attackers is small compared with the pool of Muslim immigrants. It is, of
course, also true that mass shooters come in all races and religions, from the
cases of Columbine and Sandy Hook to those at the Oregon community college,
Virginia Tech, and Miami.
But no other common tie — no particular religion, no
political identification, no singular subset of mental illness — binds so many
mass shooters as do professions of Islamist radicalism, both among first-generation
arrivals and among their offspring.
Ostensibly, people leave the Middle East for the West, in
particular Europe and the United States, because it is an oasis, not the
hellhole many of them came from. We take for granted clean water, uncontaminated
food, competent medical treatment, religious tolerance, economic opportunity,
meritocratic hiring, political freedom, and respect for the individual
regardless of birth, class, and status. But that bundle is non-existent even in
the elite Gulf enclaves. Those Western characteristics are apparently universal
human wants, and they drive even Middle Eastern Muslims to seek out otherwise
entirely foreign landscapes of quite different cultures and attitudes.
For many Muslims, to have strep throat treated promptly,
to be accorded equality and respect while in a government office, and to be
free to say whatever one wishes are all worth putting up with watching men kiss
in public or women wear braless tank tops on planes, or seeing Christian
crosses everywhere, or watching commercials for Viagra and Tampax in the middle
of the evening news, or seeing so many apparently happy, content, and satisfied
people of so many races who do not have Islam in their lives.
Why, then, is radical Islamism, so antithetical to
Western values, still preached in American and European mosques? Do radical
Muslims in the U.S. and Europe realize that if they had had their way, they
would not have wished to emigrate to the U.S., given that it would resemble the
homelands they abandoned? The worldview of Tashfeen Malik, if enacted, would
eventually have turned San Bernardino into Islamabad; would Ms. Malik then have
left it for Portland?
Why is ISIS apparently attractive to hundreds, if not
thousands, of Western Muslim youth? Why is the FBI supposedly busy tracking
down radical Muslims residing in America, who presumably came here of their own
free will? Is it because the FBI is Islamophobic?
One obvious reason for these anomalies is a sort of
paradox. The more a Muslim youth enjoys casual sexual hook-ups, easy access to
liquor and drugs, and unapologetic secular indulgence, all the more the
voluptuary feels he has betrayed his culture, religion, and very identity — and
the more his eventual return to Islamic purity is likely to become extreme. No
one forced Mohamed Atta and his band of killers to become Western sybarites.
What made them slaves to their appetites was their very Islamic Puritanism,
which turned what was commonly available into forbidden obsessions: the more
taboo, all the more to be indulged in, and all the more to be regretted post
facto and the indulgence blamed on others when passions are drained and probity
returns.
Second, in many cases, the immigrant immediately asks
upon arrival, “Why do they have so much here, while we have so little back
home?” Do not expect him to cite everything from religious tolerance to
consensual government to freedom and market capitalism — not when there is an
accessible American dictionary of victimization, ranging from colonialism and imperialism
to oil and Israel. The new arrival from the Middle East need not turn on Al
Jazeera to be spoon-fed grievances, when he can listen to President Obama’s
apology tours or Cairo speech or breakfast sermons about high-horse Christians
and their millennium-old Crusades.
Third, we in America ask almost nothing of immigrants any
more. We do not care whether they come legally and will obey the law once
they’re here. We have no concern whether they can support themselves, or
whether they will become wards of the state. One need only review the careers
of Obama’s own immigrant aunt and uncle. We have no worries about whether they
learn English. They can hate or love America, as is their wont. If an immigrant
commits a crime against his hosts, we feel that we would commit a greater crime
by sending our ungracious guest home. Is that why ICE released 36,000 alien
lawbreakers in 2013 alone, preempting their deportation hearings, or why
347,000 criminal aliens are believed to be at large in the United States?
Citizenship as a cherished privilege has utterly
vanished. So has any idea of gratitude. A hallowed notion of legality, of being
more law-abiding even than native-born Americans, has disappeared among
immigrants. Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez — the five-times-deported illegal
alien and seven times repeat felon who shot Kate Steinle to death in San
Francisco — was only the most extreme example of what is possible under current
immigration law and practice.
At no time did Lopez-Sanchez thank the United States for
offering him a better chance than Mexico had — at least if repeatedly
committing felonies can be see as a form of not offering thanks. We deduce that
he believed things were better here than in Mexico or he would not have
reentered the country illegally so many times. Lopez-Sanchez, like the
Tsarnaevs, knew that the U.S. leaves immigrants alone, or perhaps, better yet,
romanticizes their difference, and provides, if not a legal amnesty for their
crimes, a psychosocial one.
Fourth, immigrants sense an identity-obsessed culture,
where diversity, not unity, brings career dividends. A teen can cross illegally
from the oppression of Oaxaca and almost instantly qualify for victim status
and affirmative action on the bizarre theory that American oppressions have
earned him compensation and reparations, as if he were psychologically damaged
by America while he was in Oaxaca or will be in America if he was not in
Oaxaca.
Hyphenation, not conformity, is preferred — and wisely
so. Poor George Zimmerman’s “white Hispanic” troubles arose from his
Americanizing his mixed-race identity rather than emphasizing a constructed
otherness by calling himself the more authentic-sounding Jorge Mesa. A fight
between Trayvon Martin and Jorge Mesa does not reach the White House, because
it furthers no particular agenda; it’s analogous to the weekend toll in Chicago
rather than a Ferguson teachable moment. Apparently, Zimmerman did not learn
the lesson that an upper-middle-class prep-schooler named Barry Dunham, whose
conniving African father had abandoned him, would have been a mere statistic.
But as Barack Hussein Obama he became a unique example of diversity, with all
its resonance.
At best, if a Muslim immigrant fully assimilates, to the
point where, as is true of most Americans, he cannot easily be identified by
his religion, or if his religion becomes incidental rather than essential to
his public persona, then he is rendered just an ordinary American. Perhaps he
even is in some danger of joining the unattractive majority not subject to
special dispensation. At worst, he can become a sellout in the eyes of his
local mosque and immigrant enclave. Emphasizing identity to its logical extreme
wins rewards in today’s America. We saw to what insane lengths this has gone in
the cases of the fabulists Rachel Dolezal, Elizabeth Warren, Shaun King, and
Ward Churchill.
Finally, the Muslim shooter understands that so many of
his hosts are naïve, ashamed of their own culture, unsure of their heritage,
and prone to apologize rather than criticize. They would likely not call the
authorities even if they spied preparations for terrorist activities —
believing that being called a racist is worse than possibly allowing violence
to ensue against the innocent. Note that Ms. Malik never thought that she might
have to tone down her suspicious activities, because her neighbors quite
magnanimously did not call the police.
Appeasement is a psychological disorder that affects both
the appeaser and the appeased. The more exemptions are granted the offender,
the more the grantor feels good about himself, and the more the offender loses
respect for someone seen as weak rather than magnanimous.
The United States government is too often seen as
wavering, concerned with political correctness, unsure of its values, easily
swayed by supposed victimization and refugee status, and terrified of charges
of racism and xenophobia. For the immigrant, there is everything to gain by
clinging to a foreign identity, showing disdain for the culture of his adopted
country, and romanticizing his abandoned homeland, and nothing of immediate
advantage in integrating, showing gratitude, and being critical of what drove
him out.
Add up all the above, and it is a miracle that we do not
have even angrier young immigrants and children of immigrants from the Middle
East.
San Bernardino is not the last we will see of the strange
nexus between radical Muslim immigrants hating the Middle East enough to
abandon it and then romanticizing it from a safe distance enough to kill their
generous hosts.
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