The twin horrors of the mass murder in San Bernardino and the attacks in Paris a few weeks before—both of which seem to have been inspired by the Islamic State—share one disturbing fact in common. They were perpetrated not by immigrants, but by their angry, alienated, lost children. The killers were native-born citizens of their lands. This is also true of other attacks by people identifying themselves as Muslims in recent years, such as the London transit bombings in 2005 and the assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004.
Who are these enraged young Muslims, and why do they feel so much hatred for their native countries? How did it happen that their parents—often first-generation immigrants just trying to get along and make a buck—kept their heads down and made no trouble, while the children who were generally better off economically were lured by a suicidal ideology networked into their minds from thousands of miles away?
We need to think about these problems now, because the political climate in both places, Europe and America, could not be more perilous. In the United States, the relentlessly Islamophobic Donald Trump outdid himself on Monday, calling for "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." Trump and other Republican presidential candidates like Ben Carson brazenly hurl insults and invective against Muslims abroad and impugn the patriotism of Muslim Americans.
The mass killing in San Bernardino, coming after the July attacks by Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez—the so-called Chattanooga shooter who killed five persons—only provided more ammunition, and the right wing media is engaged in unbridled and vulgar demonization of American Muslims. Never mind that according to the FBI most domestic terror attacks are carried out by right-wing white Christian men. The terrorist attacks in Paris in January and November have also deepened French Islamophobia, and increased the influence and audacity of the right wing in general and the National Front in particular. In fact, there has been a noticeable negative shift on the part of a growing number of Europeans towards Muslim immigrants and their descendants.
Americans pride themselves, justifiably, on doing a better job of assimilating their Muslim immigrants than European nations typically do. Although there are concentrations of Muslim immigrants in major cities, such as Dearborn, Michigan, the Muslim communities in America are mobile and an integral part of America’s major cities and their suburbs. There are no American versions of French banlieues, the decrepit, segregated suburbs where Arabs and Africans live in old housing projects. The percentage of Muslims with graduate degrees in the United States (26 percent) is almost identical with the larger population (28 percent), according to the Pew Research Center. The income levels tell a similar tale. Average Muslim household income of $100,000 is roughly the same as other Americans (14 percent Muslims, compared with 16 percent of non-Muslims).
And yet … plainly America is not immune. We must confront the hostility and violence of a Syed Rizwan Farook, the young Californian father of an infant daughter who shot down his co-workers in San Bernardino, apparently out of some rage over U.S. policy in the Mideast and Israel; or Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood doctor who killed 13 people in 2009; or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who although he wasn’t born in the U.S. appeared fully integrated until the moment he planted bombs at the Boston Marathon. And of course there was Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born, Yemeni imam who incited terrorist acts and became the first U.S. citizen killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a U.S drone in Yemen.
The problem in both America and Europe lies here at home, even if it is incited by networked extremists thousands of miles away. There is, in other words, something is very rotten in the state of integration in the West, and it is being exploited in a full-throated way by Islamic State propagandists. So we need to ask some hard questions about how we live together.
The Muslim communities in both America and Europe also must address some tough questions to themselves about finding a better balance between being integrated while remaining culturally distinct, as well as about the nature of their religious beliefs—the irreducible and impermeable Islam professed by today’s radical extremists versus the malleability and diversity of Islam through most of its history.
To put it simply, if we don’t find a better way to live together, then in the face of swiftly rising Islamophobia even the vast majority of Muslims who want to live peacefully in both America and Europe could find themselves dragged into the worst of all possible worlds—a broader conflict—by a tiny radicalized minority in their midst. (It would hardly be the first time in history that a generally peaceful community or nation has been lured into war by its extremists; think of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, or the Bolsheviks in Russia.) The ultimate nightmare, of course, is a dreaded “clash of civilizations” that Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio has been bruiting about recently, which Western leaders such as President Barack Obama (and George W. Bush before him) have long sought to avoid, and which ISIL and Al Qaeda desperately want to foment.
