All conversations with our good friend Bill Bennett are interesting, but – despite the depressing circumstances that prompted it – I especially enjoyed the one we had on his radio show this morning about the “homegrown” terrorism canard that was the subject of my post last night.
To reiterate, young Muslims are being “radicalized” by Islamic supremacist ideology, not by France, America or whatever other Western country they happen to be in when they embrace the doctrine. I am not saying Muslims are not being radicalized here at home. To the contrary, I have several times noted that former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi joined the Brotherhood while he was a college student in California. Yes, he was born in the Islamic-supremacist cauldron of Egypt, and it was there that he eventually rose to the top ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood, but it was here that he entered those ranks. I have also written a widely circulated book, The Grand Jihad, which outlines the history of Islamic supremacism in the United States, with particular attention to the network built here by the Brotherhood over the last half-century, with lots of Saudi help. The mission of that network is to recruit young Muslims and indoctrinate them in Islamic supremacism.
The point is that what is “radicalizing” Muslims is not America and the West. Quite the opposite: it is an ideology alien to the West and hostile to Western principles of liberty, equality and the rule of reason.
That critical fact, which we must confront if we are to deal with what threatens us, is obscured when commentators claim terrorism is “homegrown.” The expression “homegrown” implies that it is something innate in America (and the West) that is catalyzing extremism – our culture, our economy, our foreign policy, our past sins, etc. In actuality, the extremism is of a very specific kind – Islamic extremism, for it is Islam that the radicals are extreme about. That extremism is implacably opposed to America. It is better understood as anti-home than “homegrown.”
Bill, as always, made the sage observation that there are two sides to this equation. Yes, Islamic-supremacist leaders, taking their cues from outside the West and peddling a foreign ideology, are radicalizing young Muslims in the West. But they are having success doing so precisely because the West has lost its cultural confidence.
Western education and popular culture inculcates in students the belief that Western principles and the policies of Western governments are the main cause of the world’s problems – that they are more of a threat than “violent extremists” who are simply reacting to oppression. An anti-American ideology should not be able to advance in America. But when we get to the point where students at Harvard can convince themselves that the United States is a greater threat to the world than ISIS, then we have created an environment hospitable to an anti-American ideology.
That’s the homegrown problem: not the foreign Islamic supremacist ideology but the domestic self-loathing that welcomes it.