Assimilation
Like TAP’s Mark Leon Goldberg, I’ve stayed one block from the exact spot in Tavistock Square where the #30 bus exploded last week. In fact, I was able to dig up a picture of myself and a friend with the devastated block in the background. As my dad wrote in a tongue-in-cheek email about our family’s connections to all the bombed locations, “I take these attacks personally.”
Goldberg makes some great points in his post:
The point is that the people who want to kill me by bombing my city’s subway will likely be the children of Muslim immigrants to Western Europe. For, like Bouyeri (and the Madrid bombers, for that matter), those guilty of the mass murder in London last week were home-grown children of Muslim immigrants to Western Europe. Thus, the loose talk that Matt’s been flagging by champions of the Iraq War about how the appropriate response to London is to invade this or that Middle Eastern country is not only idiotic, but patently dangerous.
Rather, a more appropriate course would be to talk about demographic trends in Europe and the complicated process of integrating generations of Muslim immigrants into the fabric of mainstream society. Incidentally, this is something that the United States handles with generally greater ease than Western Europe. And while it may not earn conservative pundits the knee-jerk plaudits from their sycophants, raising these questions will have a far greater impact on American security than the number of countries we invade in the Middle East.
One would think American conservatives would take heart in the idea that the US does a better job than Europe at assimilating immigrants from diverse cultures, in part due to our relative lack of a welfare state, and that this assimilation makes us safer from terrorism. But then again, America doesn’t seem to have any conservatives anymore.