The Missing Link

February 28, 2006

Wednesday Column

In an essay about the threat that radical Islamic immigrants pose to Western societies Francis Fukuyama offers this sound analysis: “Governments need to clamp down on extremists and jihadists in ways that do not risk further alienating minority communities; their aim must be to integrate moderate Muslims better while avoiding a right-wing populist backlash.�

Let’s understand his advice by applying it to a hypothetical situation.

Imagine that another terrorist attack occurs within the United States, and that Islamic radicals are behind it.

The government might round up all those already under surveillance as suspected terrorists. It might round up all foreigners from terrorist sponsoring nations on expired visas. It might round up all foreigners from terrorist sponsoring nations. Or it might round up all immigrants from terrorist sponsoring nations, even those who are United States citizens.

Some Americans, supported most vocally by a faction on the political right, would argue that all immigrants from terrorist sponsoring nations should be detained and questioned—when the stakes are as high as American lives better safe than sorry, they’d argue.

Many would object, myself included, that profiling so broadly is wrong, and that all United States citizens possess constitutional rights prohibiting such a round-up regardless of their nation of origin.

Francis Fukuyama may well agree with that.

But if I’m interpreting his quotation correctly he’s saying something more: that rounding up, for example, all immigrants from terrorist sponsoring nations shouldn’t be done for practical reasons.

I think that is correct.

A great struggle now exists between radical Islamists who hope to destroy Western societies and the rest of us, who hope to defeat them. Anyone who pays attention to how many fellow Muslims these radical Islamists kill can attest to the fact that moderate Muslims and radical Islamists are antagonists.

Here’s the question: does the antagonism between those two groups surpass the antagonism between moderate Muslims and the west?

At present it does.

But if certain far right policies are adopted in the United States or Europe—if one’s core liberties are gravely threatened simply because one is a Muslim or comes from a terror sponsoring nation—Muslims will find themselves in an awful predicament.

They will be forced to choose between a society treating them unfairly despite their innocence… and Islamic radicals whose ideas they don’t share, but who offer refuge, support and protection.

What would happen if the United States or a Western European nation began rounding up all Muslims? All Muslims would suddenly find themselves antagonists to that nation, with moderates and radicals forced together by a society suddenly out to get them all.

The same phenomenon can occur on smaller scales.

If we wrongly imprison a dozen Somali immigrants from an enclave in Manhattan, other Somalis within that enclave will be more inclined to mistrust our government and its safeguards, and some will embrace radical Islam, however wrongly, as the appropriate response. It is human nature among some to act as though your enemy’s enemy is your friend, particularly when that supposed friend is offering help, as radical Islamists looking to recruit are apt to do. Other Somalis may only begin attending a radical mosque themselves; perhaps one among their sons, thus exposed to the radicalism, will be the only one to take up the radical jihad.

In this hypothetical, safeguards to ensure the dozen Somali immigrants wouldn’t have been wrongly detained would’ve eliminated one terrorist as surely as a CIA agent assassinating a terrorist somewhere in the world.

There is an important lesson here for our discourse on immigration and terrorism: aggressive action can and should kill terrorists, but reducing the number of terrorists can also be a matter of carefully ensuring that we do not meanwhile create terrorists by wrongfully persecuting Muslims.

Among some Americans today there is a certain antagonism toward anyone who condemns abuses like those that occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison, or who questions whether sufficient safeguards are in place to prevent people from being wrongly accused of terrorism, or who opposes racial profiling for terrorists.

It is said that these people are naïve, that they are valuing the rights of terrorists over the lives of Americans, or that they don’t understand what it takes to win the War on Terror.

One convincing counterargument—an entirely pragmatic one—is that carefully preserving the rights and liberties of Muslim Americans, apart from being the right thing to do, is the surest way of keeping moderate Muslims where their beliefs ought to put them: squarely allied with us against the terrorists.

That alliance helps our success in the War on Terrorism, as do those who cultivate it.

Posted by Conor at February 28, 2006 04:12 AM