The Wrong Solutions

Addressing the same topic as did the WP editors, the editors of the Wall Street Journal provide their own prescriptions to dealing with radical Islamist terrorism:

It’s tempting but probably wrong to think that France has a unique jihadist problem because of its relatively large Muslim population (about 7.5% of the country) and the immigrant ghettoes where they congregate. These certainly are breeding grounds for radicalism. Yet the United Kingdom has Birmingham, the Islamist petri dish for the London subway bombers, and the U.S. sheltered the killer Tsarnaevs in Boston and the Somali immigrants in Minnesota who’ve gone to Syria.

America may have a better historical record of assimilating diverse peoples, but that was when the U.S. had a less fragmented national culture and an elite that was more confident in Western values. The Internet, for all its benefits, also makes it possible for young men in the West to be inspired or recruited by jihadist networks around the world.

It’s hard for me to come up with a prescription more wrong-headed than those of the WSJ’s editors: they want more military action (against DAESH in Syria and Iraq) and heightened surveillance. Not only is increased surveillance impractical as the murders in France have shown us, what do they envision? A Stasi that spies on everybody all of the time? And I would have thought that the last fifteen years might have taught us the lesson that not every problem can be solved by applying enough force.

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