A couple of days ago, a New York Times “news analysis” caught my eye. The item seemed to argue that in the wake of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s army shooting and the discovery of five American citizens in Pakistan looking for trouble, it’s worth questioning the belief that American Muslims are less prone to radicalization than European Muslims:
There was the arrest of Najibullah Zazi, born in Afghanistan but the seeming model of the striving immigrant as a popular coffee vendor in Manhattan, accused of going to Pakistan for explosives training with the intention of attacking in the United States.
There was David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American living in Chicago, accused of helping plan the killings in Mumbai, India, last year and of plotting attacks in Denmark.
There was Bryant Neal Vinas, a Muslim convert from Long Island who participated in a rocket attack on American troops in Afghanistan and used his knowledge of commuter trains in New York to advise Al Qaeda about potential targets.
There were the Somali-Americans from Minnesota who had traveled to Somalia to join a violent Islamist movement.
And there were cases of would-be terrorists who plotted attacks in Texas, Illinois and North Carolina with conspirators who turned out to be F.B.I. informants.
Obviously, yes, the FBI has been busy this year. But let’s not take the wrong message from the recent string of attempted terrorist acts by Americans. The number of people we’re talking about is an extremely small sample of the American Muslim community. The existence of five or ten more plots in a given year hardly necessitates a re-examination of how we view the functions of American society (an American society where Muslims feel integrated and successful). The Swiss method of fighting Islamism would only make things worse here.
