Confronting the Threat
Shehzad Tanweer was the bright, Muslim son of a first-generation Pakistani immigrant into Britain. His father owned a fish-and-chips shop, and Shehzad, at 22, was a university student headed for a profession--the kind of story of immigrant assimilation that is so familiar in America. Instead, Tanweer became a murderer, killing himself and other fellow travelers in the morning rush hour on London's Underground.
Muhammad Bouyeri, born in the Netherlands, shot Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker and a descendant of the painter, six times while Van Gogh was bicycling in Amsterdam. Then he cut Van Gogh's throat and, with his knife, carved an Islamic manifesto on his victim's chest. Van Gogh's offense? He made a film about the oppression of Muslim women. In his trial, Bouyeri turned to Van Gogh's grieving mother to say, "I don't feel your pain. I have to admit that I don't feel sympathy for you. I can't feel for you because you're a nonbeliever." (The London bombers and the 9/11 hijackers weren't quite so fastidious: Anybody's blood was good enough to feed their depraved narcissism.)
Lost souls. The outrages committed in the name of Islam are doubly painful in Britain and the Netherlands because, besides the grief and suffering these young Muslim men have caused, there is the viciousness of their betrayal of trust in these notably--perhaps one should say excessively--tolerant European countries. These are the same nations that gave many Muslim immigrants a new start, nurtured their children as Britons and Netherlanders, and listened courteously to the venom of militant Muslim leaders who, like Tanweer and Bouyeri, had assumed the mantle of citizenship. Now, the British, the Dutch, and other European countries must confront the reality of homegrown terrorists in their midst--a more daunting challenge than dealing with infiltrators from abroad.
Economic deprivation does not explain this phenomenon. These killers are relatively well off, educated people, not the indigent and the uneducated. Europe has given sanctuary to second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants who may be even more radicalized than the first, a lost generation vulnerable to anyone who offers them an identity within the wholly imaginary community of their own Islamifascist creeds. This malignancy predates Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11, and the Bush administration. Militant British Muslims have blamed everything and everybody except themselves, conveniently overlooking the obscenity that it is fanatical Muslims inspired by them who are doing the killing.
In Britain today, there is broad public support for a crackdown. Such a move is more than justified. Britain has provided asylum to so many extremist Muslims that London has become the headquarters of Islamifascism in Europe. London's police chief estimates that there are hundreds of al Qaeda-trained terrorists in Britain. The list of terrorists coming out of London is quite extensive, including Richard Reid, the convicted shoe bomber, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who orchestrated the 2002 beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and the British bomber who walked into a popular Tel Aviv pub and killed three and wounded 60. After the London bombings, Islamic websites exhorted: "Rejoice, Islamic nation! Rejoice, Arab world!"
The aspiration of these radical Muslims is to make Islam the world's dominant religion. This kind of messianism and totalitarianism is almost incomprehensible in the West, with its long tradition of cherishing the life and liberty of every man, woman, and child. With 20 million Muslims in Europe, a population likely to double over the next 20 years, national borders are no defense against the insidious ideology of radical Islam.
What should America do?
First, we must tighten our scrutiny of people coming here. Most second-generation European Muslims are citizens of the European Union and, as such, eligible for U.S. visa waivers, which permit them to pass through U.S. immigration checkpoints easily. Greater scrutiny of such visitors is needed immediately. Two, we must harden our determination not to compromise with Muslim terrorism or explain it away by any mealy-mouthed "understanding" of it. "Explanations" of terrorism are unforgivable. It isn't war; it's murder. Terrorists aren't soldiers; they're criminals. Third, we must increase security funding for public transport by land, rail, and buses, where 16 times as many people travel every day as they do in airplanes. This must be done on a risk-based formula, as supported by the 9/11 commission--not as another pork-barrel program for greedy congressmen.
Fourth, we must invest more in intelligence and revise overly restrictive rules on its dissemination and use.
Today, we face a threat to the most fundamental values of our free and democratic way of life. In this modern version of the Thirty Years' War, there is only one objective: We must prevent the 21st century from becoming the century of terrorism.
This story appears in the August 1, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.