Homeland Security and Predatory Immigration

While criticizing the Bush and administration for its on-going historic blunder in Iraq (and the Democrats for their fecklessness in dealing with the crisis) Camille Paglia worries that the next act of Islamic terror on America soil could lead to even more foolish responses from Washington.

Should there be another major attack on U.S. soil, even Democrats suspicious of Republican hype would snap into survivalist mode, where defense of hearth and home is an elemental instinct. What Bush and company puff as the "war on terror" is no mirage: radical jihadism, exacerbated by the arrogant stupidity of our invasion of Iraq, does indeed threaten the very existence of Western civilization, whose peace and prosperity depend on a complex infrastructure and communications system vulnerable to catastrophic disruption by small bands of ruthless saboteurs.

Paglia is correct that Islamic terrorists can cause great disruption to our society with acts of terrorism (like September 11), but she is wrong that they can destroy the West. Islamic terrorists are not the real threat to the West: the current Western mindset is the real existential threat to Western Civilization. The mindset that opened the borders of Europe, Australia and North America to millions of immigrants from non-Western lands; the mindset that praises "diversity" instead of excellence; the mindset that says the West cannot discriminate in favor of its own people or core beliefs; the mindset that sees every problem in the Third World as the result of Western greed; the mindset that decrys Western science, philosophy and politics as myths no better than those spouted by any shanty-town shaman, and even less worthy of consideration. The most fanatical jihadis haven't the resources or the skill to destroy the West (as much as they might like to). The ambition so far exceeds their reach that the only way they can harm the West is to hijack Western airplanes and crash them into buildings, or fill backpacks with explosives and detonate them in airports or on traincars.

None of this represents an existential threat to the West by itself. It is the West's reaction to these atrocities and the operating ideology that threatens the West by making it vulnerable to such attacks. There would be no threat to Islamic terror in Europe or America if there weren't large groups of Muslims living in these places. If the West had acted rationally over the past few decades, accepting immigration in small numbers and only from other Western countries, European police would not be tracking thousands of hate-filled jihadis in London, Berlin, Paris and Rome.

President Bush argues that the U.S. must continue to drain its treasury and the blood of its young men in Iraq's sterile sands because if we don't "the terrorists will follow us home." Of course, Bush unwittingly concedes the point: they have to come here to hurt us. The solution, then, is obvious: stop them from coming here. Police and defend the borders, refuse to issue visas to people from Muslim nations, or Muslims from any nation. Monitor the ports and prosecute those who try to evade immigration laws (from employers on down). Invite Muslims currently living in the U.S. to leave. Provide extra scruitiny to those Muslims who remain. But has President Bush done any of this? Quite the opposite. He has left the borders broken and undefended, apologized to foreign nations for American immigration law, and welcomed tens of thousands of new immigrants from Muslim nations. This is what makes America (and by extension Europe and Australia) vulnerable to Islamic terror.

Nor are the terrorists unaware of the West's huge blindspot and the ideology of cultural suicide currently in fashion throughout the Western world. In his latest column, Rod Dreher examines documents from the Holy Land Foundation - an Islamic organization whose leaders are currently on trial, accused of raising money in the U.S. for Islamic terrorists in Palestine - and discovers that Islamists have a well-thought out game plan for exploiting the West's suicidal plunge:

The FBI captured it in a raid on a Muslim suspect's home in Virginia.

This "explanatory memorandum," as it's titled, outlines the "strategic goal" for the North American operation of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). Here's the key paragraph:

The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a "Civilization-Jihadist" process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.

The entire 18-page platform outlines a plan for the long haul. It prescribes the Muslim Brotherhood's comprehensive plan to set down roots in civil society. It begins by both founding and taking control of American Muslim organizations, for the sake of unifying and educating the U.S. Muslim community – this to prepare it for the establishment of a global Islamic state governed by sharia.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory out of a bad Hollywood movie – but it's real. Husain Haqqani, head of Boston University's Center for International Relations and a former Islamic radical, confirms that the Brotherhood "has run most significant Muslim organizations in the U.S." as part of the plan outlined in the strategy paper.

The Islamists haven't been able to produce a society capable of crawling out of the squalor and intellectual poverty of the seventh century, but they are smart enough to know another civilization's death wish when the see it. And perfectly willing to act on it.