Yes, there have been a few home-grown American jihadists, but there is a lot of evidence that American Muslims are generally better integrated, and more supportive of the state in which they live than most of their European counterparts. There are several reasons for this, but one of the biggest is the First Amendment tradition of free speech and freedom of religion.
Comments Timothy Garton Ash ( In its rows about Islam, the US must avoid catching a European disease, The Guardian Wednesday 20 October 2010 ). Few commentators seem to have grasped the crucial point here. There are tiers of radicalisation. But the "threat" lies directly in the ability of Islamist terrorists to carry out attacks.
Free speech hardly ensures that radical Islamist threats will not happen. It means much conjecture about the motivations of terrorists, far too much on the "why" of home grown terrorism and not enough on the "how". No investigative journalist nor historian has yet convincingly documented how 9/11 and 7/7 happened by looking forensically at the evidence.
There needs to be a distinction made between Islamist radicalisation, how more people can be motivated to buy into the Al Qaida franchise, and more knowledge about the "how" of 7/7 in Britain actually happened. Otherwise, public discussion focuses far too much on secondary factors such as the nature of Islam, multiculturalism, free speech, etc.
TGA is correct that the USA does not seem to have the level of radicalisation. There are numerous reasons for this. One is that contrary to TGA's insistence, the USA does not actually have multiculturalism as a guiding policy. Muslims must sink or swim like many others who migrate there. There is no generous welfare state.
The USA is simply bigger than small European nation states. That means less potential for small ghettos and more dispersion. Moreover, the USA had no direct involvement with Empire in the Muslim World as France and Britain had which can act as a source of ancestral memory for those who have posited the ummah as a new revolutionary force.
Geographically, it is far from North Africa and the Middle East. Most immigrants who came to do the manual labour jobs were Catholics Latin Americans. Their value systems hardly clash with that of most Americans. Considering that, many of the more lurid and hysterical anti-Islam tracts come from the USA from those predicting "Eurabia"
Understanding how 9/11 or 7/7 were possible does not need ridiculous conspiracy theories but a better assessment of how US and British foreign policy colluded with Islamist terrorist networks across the globe to create proxies in the geopolitical struggle for diminishing oil and gas. There is much we still do not know about this.
In the British context, the security services colluded with Al Mujiharoun throughout the 1990s. Jihadists were allowed to fight in Bosnia and Kosovo. A tactic that went back to Afghanistan in the 1980s. This is mentioned even in Tim Judah's account of the wars in the Balkans. TGA has not taken any of these facts into account.
Too much hand wringing about integration and multiculturalism is made without understanding that the liberal society TGA admires so much just might be made possible by its over dependence upon oil in dangerous unstable regions. Much of the funding for Islamist fanaticism comes from Saudi Arabia.
The crude notion that foreign policy causes Islamist threats is accepted by both those who argue for a more interventionist foreign policy and Islamists who see that as inherent in creating the decadent society that Islamists see around them and hence resent. This is not a sentiment confined only to Islamists.
For as so many of the European elite have repudiated their nation state and the enduring European cultures that gave a sense of purpose and identity, there is increasingly nothing worth 'integrating' into. Calls for Muslims to do this breed further contempt for the West offers nothing but a phoney non-culture of pure consumerism.
With so many Europeans having little or no respect for their own history and culture whilst continuing to play the imperialist in the Middle East by supporting the USA in resource conflicts, it is hardly surprising that Islamists act upon that knowledge and see Western governments as vacillating and contemptibly weak.
Cities such as London have become dangerously deracinated. Few feel any sense of belonging. The meaningless steel and plate glass architecture, the new Crystal Palaces, and orange glare looming over countless warehouses ringed with the same steel fences used in places like the Sangatte refugee camp, induce a feeling of living in a ubiquitous nowhere land.
What Vaclav Havel said of Prague could be just as true as any large city in Europe,
What was until recently clearly recognisable as the city is now losing its boundaries and with them its identity. It has become a huge overgrown ring of something I can’t find a word for. It is not a city as I understand the term, nor suburbs, let alone a village. Apart from anything else it lacks streets or squares. There is just a random scattering of enormous single-storey warehouses, supermarkets, hypermarkets, car and furniture marts, petrol stations, eateries, gigantic car parks, isolated high-rise blocks to be let as offices, depots of every kind, and collections of family homes that are admittedly close together but are otherwise desperately remote.
.....all the time our cities are being permitted without control to destroy the surrounding landscape with its nature, traditional pathways, avenues of trees, villages, mills and meandering streams, and build in their place some sort of gigantic agglomeration that renders life nondescript, disrupts the network of natural human communities, and under the banner of international uniformity it attacks all individuality, identity or heterogeneity. And on the occasions it tries to imitate something local or original, it looks altogether suspect, because it is obviously a purpose-built fake. There is emerging a new type of a previously described existential phenomenon: unbounded consumer collectivity engenders a new type of solitude.
People assuage that by more frantic consumerism, a form of "inner migration". If not, then the anxiety created by what Emile Durkheim termed anomie is by darker psychopathological fantasies about the destruction of Western Civilisation, Freud's spirit of thanatos, the death instinct.
Those looking for total explanations that rationalise their relatively low status in Europe as Muslims look at the decadence around them and connect the consumerism and sexual freedom necessarily with the oppression of the ummah.
And Islamists see it in the foreign policy of shedding Muslim blood for the oil that makes "them" wealthy and "us" poor. This feeds off post-colonial resentments and the idea that Islamists represent the real "Wretched of the Earth" posited by Fanon with respect to Africa and black power movements in the 1960s.
Hence the reason why Muslim states are backwards is thus not due to any cultural inferiority: on the contrary precisely because Islam is superior that the West must do everything to destroy these cultures, make Muslims decadent and to divide and rule the Middle East and Asia to control the resources that tiny elites and most Westerners benefit from.
This trope continuously appears in most Islamist propaganda across the spectrum, from the updated Third World revolutionary anti-colonial ideology reflected through the prism of Islam offered by Soumaya Ghannoushi and the Muslim assiciation of Britain, to the express pathological hatreds of factions of fanatics such as Islam4UK, Al Mujahiroun, et al
To use Roger Scruton's terms such grievances become transferable: they are suffering along with Muslims in Palestine, Iraq, Bosnia, anywhere where the West has promoted a hypocritical foreign policy to enrich itself and install client elites at the expense of the Muslim majority. Thus "Our suffering is your wealth and privilege".
TGA's nuanced liberal pieties are well meaning but fail to understand the underlying cause of tensions between the West and what is simplistically called "the Muslim World". Demonisation of an entire religious tradition is a knee jerk reaction. Yet that alone does not explain the terrorist threat.
The horrid reality is that unless the dependence upon oil and gas, and hence the necessity of meddling in the Middle East and Central Asia can be avoided, no less than the ceaseless immigration from artificially impoverished states in the Middle East is addressed, terrorism will continue in the West.
Free speech is obviously important. Yet true knowledge is hard to gain. Few politicians want a real honest look at the causes of Islamist radicalisation. In any case, the "War on Terror" suits their need for a pretext to intervene in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, both crucially concerned with geopolitics and energy security.
Scruton in his The West and the rest: Globalisation and the Terror Threat, however, tends to overlook the extent to which terrorism has become part of a "transferable pretext", to rationalise the wars from Afghanistan to Iraq that are concerned with energy security. And how the security services colluded with Islamists throughout the 1990s.
There needs to be far more research done in to how these networks were nurtured by the CIA and MI6 as part of the New Great Game in Central Asia through to the Balkans. Only then can we understand how the Islamist threat came into being in the first place and understand how dependence on oil and gas locks the West into intractable conflicts.
Comments Timothy Garton Ash ( In its rows about Islam, the US must avoid catching a European disease, The Guardian Wednesday 20 October 2010 ). Few commentators seem to have grasped the crucial point here. There are tiers of radicalisation. But the "threat" lies directly in the ability of Islamist terrorists to carry out attacks.
Free speech hardly ensures that radical Islamist threats will not happen. It means much conjecture about the motivations of terrorists, far too much on the "why" of home grown terrorism and not enough on the "how". No investigative journalist nor historian has yet convincingly documented how 9/11 and 7/7 happened by looking forensically at the evidence.
There needs to be a distinction made between Islamist radicalisation, how more people can be motivated to buy into the Al Qaida franchise, and more knowledge about the "how" of 7/7 in Britain actually happened. Otherwise, public discussion focuses far too much on secondary factors such as the nature of Islam, multiculturalism, free speech, etc.
TGA is correct that the USA does not seem to have the level of radicalisation. There are numerous reasons for this. One is that contrary to TGA's insistence, the USA does not actually have multiculturalism as a guiding policy. Muslims must sink or swim like many others who migrate there. There is no generous welfare state.
The USA is simply bigger than small European nation states. That means less potential for small ghettos and more dispersion. Moreover, the USA had no direct involvement with Empire in the Muslim World as France and Britain had which can act as a source of ancestral memory for those who have posited the ummah as a new revolutionary force.
Geographically, it is far from North Africa and the Middle East. Most immigrants who came to do the manual labour jobs were Catholics Latin Americans. Their value systems hardly clash with that of most Americans. Considering that, many of the more lurid and hysterical anti-Islam tracts come from the USA from those predicting "Eurabia"
Understanding how 9/11 or 7/7 were possible does not need ridiculous conspiracy theories but a better assessment of how US and British foreign policy colluded with Islamist terrorist networks across the globe to create proxies in the geopolitical struggle for diminishing oil and gas. There is much we still do not know about this.
In the British context, the security services colluded with Al Mujiharoun throughout the 1990s. Jihadists were allowed to fight in Bosnia and Kosovo. A tactic that went back to Afghanistan in the 1980s. This is mentioned even in Tim Judah's account of the wars in the Balkans. TGA has not taken any of these facts into account.
Too much hand wringing about integration and multiculturalism is made without understanding that the liberal society TGA admires so much just might be made possible by its over dependence upon oil in dangerous unstable regions. Much of the funding for Islamist fanaticism comes from Saudi Arabia.
The crude notion that foreign policy causes Islamist threats is accepted by both those who argue for a more interventionist foreign policy and Islamists who see that as inherent in creating the decadent society that Islamists see around them and hence resent. This is not a sentiment confined only to Islamists.
For as so many of the European elite have repudiated their nation state and the enduring European cultures that gave a sense of purpose and identity, there is increasingly nothing worth 'integrating' into. Calls for Muslims to do this breed further contempt for the West offers nothing but a phoney non-culture of pure consumerism.
With so many Europeans having little or no respect for their own history and culture whilst continuing to play the imperialist in the Middle East by supporting the USA in resource conflicts, it is hardly surprising that Islamists act upon that knowledge and see Western governments as vacillating and contemptibly weak.
Cities such as London have become dangerously deracinated. Few feel any sense of belonging. The meaningless steel and plate glass architecture, the new Crystal Palaces, and orange glare looming over countless warehouses ringed with the same steel fences used in places like the Sangatte refugee camp, induce a feeling of living in a ubiquitous nowhere land.
What Vaclav Havel said of Prague could be just as true as any large city in Europe,
People assuage that by more frantic consumerism, a form of "inner migration". If not, then the anxiety created by what Emile Durkheim termed anomie is by darker psychopathological fantasies about the destruction of Western Civilisation, Freud's spirit of thanatos, the death instinct.
Those looking for total explanations that rationalise their relatively low status in Europe as Muslims look at the decadence around them and connect the consumerism and sexual freedom necessarily with the oppression of the ummah.
And Islamists see it in the foreign policy of shedding Muslim blood for the oil that makes "them" wealthy and "us" poor. This feeds off post-colonial resentments and the idea that Islamists represent the real "Wretched of the Earth" posited by Fanon with respect to Africa and black power movements in the 1960s.
Hence the reason why Muslim states are backwards is thus not due to any cultural inferiority: on the contrary precisely because Islam is superior that the West must do everything to destroy these cultures, make Muslims decadent and to divide and rule the Middle East and Asia to control the resources that tiny elites and most Westerners benefit from.
This trope continuously appears in most Islamist propaganda across the spectrum, from the updated Third World revolutionary anti-colonial ideology reflected through the prism of Islam offered by Soumaya Ghannoushi and the Muslim assiciation of Britain, to the express pathological hatreds of factions of fanatics such as Islam4UK, Al Mujahiroun, et al
To use Roger Scruton's terms such grievances become transferable: they are suffering along with Muslims in Palestine, Iraq, Bosnia, anywhere where the West has promoted a hypocritical foreign policy to enrich itself and install client elites at the expense of the Muslim majority. Thus "Our suffering is your wealth and privilege".
TGA's nuanced liberal pieties are well meaning but fail to understand the underlying cause of tensions between the West and what is simplistically called "the Muslim World". Demonisation of an entire religious tradition is a knee jerk reaction. Yet that alone does not explain the terrorist threat.
The horrid reality is that unless the dependence upon oil and gas, and hence the necessity of meddling in the Middle East and Central Asia can be avoided, no less than the ceaseless immigration from artificially impoverished states in the Middle East is addressed, terrorism will continue in the West.
Free speech is obviously important. Yet true knowledge is hard to gain. Few politicians want a real honest look at the causes of Islamist radicalisation. In any case, the "War on Terror" suits their need for a pretext to intervene in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, both crucially concerned with geopolitics and energy security.
Scruton in his The West and the rest: Globalisation and the Terror Threat, however, tends to overlook the extent to which terrorism has become part of a "transferable pretext", to rationalise the wars from Afghanistan to Iraq that are concerned with energy security. And how the security services colluded with Islamists throughout the 1990s.
There needs to be far more research done in to how these networks were nurtured by the CIA and MI6 as part of the New Great Game in Central Asia through to the Balkans. Only then can we understand how the Islamist threat came into being in the first place and understand how dependence on oil and gas locks the West into intractable conflicts.