We must stop blaming ourselves for terrorism
Douglas Murray writes at The Telegraph:
How many more excuses are we going to make before we face the facts? How many more fifth-rate, sixth-form debates will we have to sit through? Why, whenever any act of Islamist terror is carried out on Western society do we race to ask all the wrong questions, all based on the central fallacy that this is somehow our own fault? We wring our hands and make excuses. And then we blame ourselves. “What did we do to make this happen?” we ask, time after time.
Unfortunately, there are always people on hand eager to feed our self-absorption and ignorance. “It is your foreign policy,” they say. Perhaps after Brussels people might question this response a little more searchingly. Aside from Bhutan, Belgium probably has the least interventionist foreign policy of any country in the world.
True.
Other apologists answer that terrorists are moved to blow up trains and gun down people in cafes because they feel disenfranchised and ostracised, with few employment opportunities. This is particularly strange when you consider that there is record unemployment in Southern Europe right now and none of our cities has yet been visited by a jobless Catholic Italian modelling a suicide vest. It is about poverty, excuse-seekers say. Yet nobody from the most deprived estates of Glasgow has yet carried this idea to its illogical conclusion.
It’s silly that some try to ignore the religious motivation of Islamic terrorism.
The problem of Islamic extremism is caused – astonishingly enough – by Islamic extremism. As France, Belgium and many other societies can now attest, the larger your Muslim population, the larger your Islamic extremism problem. Not because most Muslims are terrorists. Obviously not. But because that “small minority” we always hear about grows proportionally bigger the larger the community is. What matters is the numbers, the density (thus their ability to hide and be hidden) and the type of Islam that is followed. Given Europe’s current demographic trajectory this poses a pretty terrifying problem which we’ll have to face up to one day. But in the meantime it remains so much more comfortable to blame the only people we’re kidding. Ourselves.
The type of Islam followed is key. We should reject discrimination against Muslims, but when deciding who is allowed to immigrate to NZ, we should strongly test whether their beliefs are compatible with NZ values. One easy test is whether they support the death penalty for apostasy. Anyone who does should not be allowed to migrate here.