WHEN
Osama bin Laden was planning to attack the United States he decided not
to recruit Muslim Americans for the terrorist mission. Instead, the
attacks by Al Qaeda in New York and Washington on Sept 11, 2001, were
planned in Germany and carried out by a group of non-American Muslims
who were residing in Europe at the time.
Indeed,
bin Laden recognised that many Muslims in Europe were feeling alienated
from, say, German, French, and British societies, were drawn to radical
Islamist ideas and activism and could therefore serve as a potential
support group for the Islamist terrorists planning the attacks on the
US. On the other hand, most Muslims living in America were integrated
into the country's social-cultural milieu, saw themselves first and
foremost as Americans, were opposed to using violence as a way of
advancing the Islamic cause, and were therefore unlikely to provide
assistance to the members of the cell that Al Qaeda dispatched to the
US.
It is true that the Boston
Marathon bombing which the Tsarnaev brothers - two young immigrants from
the Muslim areas of the Russia-controlled the Caucasus region - carried
out on April 15, 2013, demonstrated that Islamist extremist ideology
does have the potential to attract even a few Muslim Americans. There
have been a small number of mostly "lone wolf" terrorist attacks
involving Muslim Americans, and there have been a few arrests of Muslim
Americans for terrorism-related offences, almost all of which were for
attempting to join a foreign terrorist organisation abroad, not for
planning attacks in the homeland.
According
to terrorism expert Charles Kurzman, from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, since 9/11, Muslim-American terrorism has
claimed 37 lives in the US, out of more than 190,000 murders during the
same period. Mass killings in 2013 led to 137 fatalities, more than
three times the victims killed by Muslim-American terrorism in the US
since 9/11. "The Boston Marathon bombing, like the handful of other
terrorist attacks in the US by Muslim Americans in the dozen years since
9/11, remained an isolated, rare incident," according to Mr Kurzman.
So
it's not surprising that American law enforcement agencies have been
treating the possible threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism as a
manageable issue rather than the kind of existential crisis that seems
to be of great concern to European governments and citizens in countries
with large communities of Muslim immigrants as demonstrated by the
recent massacre in Paris. Almost every large metropolitan police force
in the US collaborates with Muslim American communities that may be
targeted for recruitment by Al Qaeda and related extremists, and most of
these agencies report that they have established a high level of trust
with these communities, helping to develop actionable information.
That
Muslims in America have been less susceptible to anti-Western Islamist
ideology than Muslims in France and other European countries is a
reflection of a broader trend, including the fact that the US, unlike
most of the European countries, is an immigrant society, and it has a
much longer history of absorbing non-European immigrants, so citizens
are accustomed to seeing a wide diversity of immigrants. Hence, there is
less of a Muslim immigrant versus non-Muslim immigrant polarisation in
the US than in Europe and a much smaller difference in assimilation
between non-Muslim and Muslim immigrants.
That
is not to say that there has been a surge of anti-Muslim sentiments in
the US in recent years. Members of groups on the political and religious
right have been stirring fears that Muslims plan to impose Syariah law
on the American people, and there has been a major controversy over the
plan to build a mosque and Muslim cultural centre on the site in New
York City where the World Trade Centre was located ("Ground Zero"). But
leading American public figures dismissed the anti-Muslim hysteria and
expressed support for the building of the Muslim centre.
One
of the main differences between the US and Europe is the size of their
respective Muslim populations. The US Census Bureau does not collect
data on religious identification, but according to various estimates,
there are around two million Muslims in the US, presenting less than one
per cent of the population. That compares to around five to six million
Muslims who live in France and Britain and constitute a higher
percentage of the population.
At the
same time, while Muslim immigrants who reside in European countries tend
to represent one ethnic and national group (Turks in Germany; South
Asians in Britain; North Africans in France), the Muslim population of
the US is more diverse. About a quarter of them are African Americans,
members of families who had converted to Islam, while the rest are
immigrants or children of immigrants, mainly from Arab and South Asian
descent. This kind of pluralism makes it less likely that Muslim
Americans would consider themselves as being part of a cohesive and
unified immigrant group in their dealings with the non-Muslim majority,
and hence no "us versus them" mentality.
In
contrast to their conditions in France and other European countries,
Muslims in the US have in general done quite well. Just visit the leafy
neighbourhoods in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest concentration
of Muslims and Middle Easterners in the US and then see the
poverty-stricken and crime-ridden suburbs near Paris where Muslims live.
It's quite a difference.
Indeed,
according to various studies, Muslim immigrants of Pakistani and Iranian
descent have education and income levels higher than American-born
whites and include many business executives, scientists, engineers, and
medical doctors, and quite a few millionaires and even billionaires. In
general, 45 per cent of Muslim immigrants report annual household income
levels of US$50,000 or higher, which is slightly above the national
average. Famous Muslim Americans include such celebrities as boxers
Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson; billionaire Shahid Khan, owner of the
Jacksonville Jaguars; comedian Dave Chappelle; former US Ambassador to
Iraq and Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad; and Congressman Keith Ellison.
And
most opinion polls do show that the majority of Muslim Americans feel
at home in America. One reason for that is that Americans in general
tend to be more religious than Europeans, creating a cultural
environment that is more conducive to the lives of devout Muslims who
want to practise their religion. So while 49 per cent of Muslim
Americans attend a mosque on Fridays, 45 per cent of Christian Americans
go to church service every Sunday.
At
the same time, while 65 per cent of Muslim Americans feel that they are
Americans first and not Muslims, only 45 per cent of Muslims in Europe
feel that they are German, French or British and not Muslim first,
according to an opinion poll conducted by the Pew Research Centre.
The
same poll also suggests that the majority of Muslim Americans, unlike
their fellow Muslims in Europe, share the western values of the
non-Muslim majority. Hence, more than 60 per cent of Muslim Americans -
compared to 50 per cent of Muslims in Europe - think that life is worse
for women in Muslim countries. The majority of Muslim Americans are very
concerned with Islamic extremism; only around 30 per cent of
Muslim-Europeans are. And only 2 per cent of Muslim Americans believe
that suicide bombings of civilians can be justified, compared to 25 per
cent of Muslims in Europe.
Explaining
the differences between the treatment of Muslims in Europe and the US,
Ed Husain, a fellow in the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that he
was "a product of immigration and multiculturalism" who was born and
raised in England to Indian parents, has lived and worked in Syria and
Saudi Arabia, "and now New York is my home".
Mr
Husain was grateful to Europe "for all that it has given me, but it
continues to fail to provide a 'sense of belonging' to its immigrants
and their children". In the US, "immigrants are accepted; in most of
Europe, they are just tolerated", he declared.
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