MONO OR BUST:

Don't Ignore Western Europe, Terrorism Expert Warns U.S.: Many Muslims Are Alienated by Multicultural Continent's Inability to Assimilate Them, Dean at Johns Hopkins Says (Walter Pincus, 9/08/05, Washington Post)

Western Europe is a core recruiting ground for Muslim terrorists that is being overlooked given the U.S. focus on Iraq and the Middle East, according to Francis Fukuyama, academic dean of Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

The failure of European countries to assimilate their large and growing Muslim populations in the era of globalization has caused an alienation among the young that has created a "hard core for terrorism," Fukuyama said in Washington at a bipartisan policy forum on terrorism and security, sponsored by the New America Foundation.

"Fixing the Middle East is only part of the problem. It is a West European problem, too," Fukuyama said. He pointed out that the leaders of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks came out of a cell in Hamburg and that most of the extremists participating in the more recent bombings in Spain and England were born in those countries.

Fukuyama's analysis squares with recent CIA conclusions about the importance of Western Europe, where, as one former senior intelligence official put it yesterday, "there are 10 million Muslims . . . that are not integrated into their societies."

Fukuyama called this one area of the war against terrorism in which U.S. and European interests merge and joint cooperation has begun to be productive. The Europeans "need to understand American assimilation" because their approach of "multiculturalism has been a failure," Fukuyama said.

The problem isn't that the immigrants reject Europe's historic culture, but that Europeans do.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 8, 2005 11:55 AM