If Muslims can’t recognize the terrorists among them, how can we?

Hugh Fitzgerald points out how whenever a young Muslim turns into a suicide bomber, his friends and family express their shock at this event, since he had been a nice, quiet chap. Fitzgerald then asks some logical questions flowing from this fact:

And if Muslims themselves, in Iraq, in Israel, in Egypt, in Morocco, in Tunisia, in Algeria, and elsewhere, have expressed great surprise, not in all but in many cases, at the son or brother who ended up as a suicide killer, how much more difficult, how impossible, really, for Infidels, innocent of Muslim ways, innocent of the fantastic ability to conceal, overwhelmed and confused by Muslim apologetics and rhetoric, disinclined to see the scope or nature of the menace because to recognize it is simply too upsetting, then how nearly impossible it must be for those Infidels to avoid being deceived. And this happens all the time, individually, and collectively, about all sorts of matters….

Not all Muslims feel their Islam in that way. But we, the Infidels, cannot detect who receives Islam in what way. [emphasis added.]

When will this government, when will other Western governments, when will the press, manage to understand that ideas matter, and that Islam is essentially an idea, a very primitive Idea, but an Idea, a geopolitical Idea … ?

These ideas must be taken seriously. One cannot blandly assert that “only a few” Muslims are a problem. How does one know this? How does one know which Muslim, perhaps both outwardly and inwardly content with his life, will never prove susceptible, not to some wild extra-Islamic doctrine, but to Islam itself?

Since we cannot know which Muslims may turn from quiet peaceful types to terrorists, and since even the leading proponent of the “moderate” Islam idea says that 10 to 15 percent of the world Muslim population are either terrorists or supporters of terrorists (other observers make much higher estimates), we must, Fitzgerald concludes, radically restrict Muslim immigration. But Fitzgerald’s conclusion doesn’t go far enough. Based on his own, unanswerable logic, there is no way that we can be free of the specter of domestic Islamic terrorism as long as a large population of Muslims remains among us.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 01, 2006 06:03 PM | Send