By David French
Monday, September 19, 2016
Here is a plain, inarguable truth: A series of Muslim
immigrants and “visitors” are responsible for killing more Americans on
American soil than the combined militaries of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.
Two more attacks over the weekend left 38 Americans wounded, and it appears
that both were carried out by Muslim immigrants.
In Saint Cloud, Minn., Dahir Adan’s family identified him
as the man who stabbed eight people in a mall before being shot and killed by
an armed civilian, an off-duty police officer named Jason Falconer. Adan’s
family said he was born in Kenya. In New York, police arrested an
Aghan-American named Ahmad Khan Rahami after a shootout. He’s a “person of
interest” in bombings in both New York and New Jersey that injured 29.
Despite making up a tiny fraction of the American
population, Muslims are responsible for exponentially more terror deaths than
any other meaningful American community. Even if you use the Left’s utterly
ridiculous standard of “terror deaths since 9/11” (why exclude America’s worst
terror attack when calculating the terror threat?), Muslim terrorists have
killed almost
twice as many people as every other American faction or demographic
combined.
Yet when any politician or pundit suggests restrictions
or even special scrutiny applied to Muslim immigrants — especially Muslim
immigrants or visitors from jihadist conflict zones — entire sectors of the
Left (and some on the right) recoil in shock and horror. Whenever there’s a
terror attack, there’s an almost palpable desperation to determine that the
attacker was not Muslim and the attack had “no connection” to international
terror, in spite of the fact that it is now ISIS and al-Qaeda strategy to inspire lone wolves.
The simple explanation for this desperation is that
there’s a fear that any terror attack helps Donald Trump win the presidency.
But the desperation long predated Trump’s rise. It’s a desperation born out of
the realization that facing actual facts about the Islamic world threatens an
entire, absurd ideology of “diversity” that views different cultures (except of
course for the hated Christian oppressor) as the equivalent of Neapolitan ice
cream — each flavor and color has a distinct taste, but it’s all still sugary
goodness.
The reality is different. The Muslim world has a severe
problem with anti-Semitism, intolerance, and terrorism. As I’ve documented
before, using data from Pew Foundation surveys, it’s plain that more than 100
million Muslims have expressed sympathy for terrorists such as Osama bin Laden
or for barbaric jihadist groups such as ISIS. Hundreds of millions more express
support for the most intolerant forms of sharia law. Telethons in Saudi Arabia
have raised vast
sums of money for terrorist causes, and jihadists have been able to recruit
hundreds of thousands of fighters to deploy against Americans, Israelis, and
our Muslim allies.
Given these facts, why is it bigoted to propose plainly
constitutional ideological litmus tests? How is it bigoted to halt — absent
compelling extenuating circumstances — immigration from jihadist conflict zones
or jihadist-dominated regions? We have implemented ideological tests before,
during the Cold War, when there was an active national-security threat. We
should do so again.
However, as
long as we’re facing facts, it’s also critical to remember that while the
effective use of American military force and effective border controls can
limit the jihadist threat, only Muslims can truly reduce the reach of jihadist
ideology. American Christian rhetoric, secular religious arguments, and
diversity-speak are largely irrelevant to the internal Muslim debate about the
meaning and interpretation of the Koran and the various hadiths.
That makes it all the more important that we double down
on our support for proven Muslim
allies. The Kurds, for example, are perhaps our most stalwart allies (outside
of Israel) in the entire Middle East. The current Egyptian regime is a declared
enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has
called for a “religious revolution” within Islam. If we don’t want extensive
American ground forces engaged in permanent ground combat in the Middle East,
we need local allies. It’s that simple.
And that means there are no easy answers. Politicians
have to shed their illusions about the Muslim world and admit the sad fact that
mass immigration from jihadist zones — even of refugees — carries with it
profound risks. At the same time, entirely walling off the nation from Islam is
neither feasible nor prudent. We must cultivate relationships with key allies
under the principle of “no better friend, no worse enemy.”
Genuine alliance with America should be the path to true
international engagement and access to international markets. But access cannot
be unconditional. We must close our borders completely to those who embrace
Islamic fundamentalism. Those who come from a jihadist-dominated region must be
forced to provide a record of their alliance and affiliation with American
values and interests before they are allowed in.
This isn’t invidious discrimination; it’s evidence-based
policy-making. It’s not bigotry; it’s national defense. When “diversity” brings
death, it’s time to shed fairy-tale ideologies and recognize grim truth. The
Muslim world has a problem. It’s time our nation responded accordingly.
No comments:
Post a Comment