Muslims assimilate better in the US than in Europe

WHEN Osama bin Laden was planning to attack the United States he decided not to recruit Muslim Americans for the terrorist mission. Instead, the attacks by Al Qaeda in New York and Washington on Sept 11, 2001, were planned in Germany and carried out by a group of non-American Muslims who were residing in Europe at the time.

Indeed, bin Laden recognised that many Muslims in Europe were feeling alienated from, say, German, French, and British societies, were drawn to radical Islamist ideas and activism and could therefore serve as a potential support group for the Islamist terrorists planning the attacks on the US. On the other hand, most Muslims living in America were integrated into the country's social-cultural milieu, saw themselves first and foremost as Americans, were opposed to using violence as a way of advancing the Islamic cause, and were therefore unlikely to provide assistance to the members of the cell that Al Qaeda dispatched to the US.

It is true that the Boston Marathon bombing which the Tsarnaev brothers - two young immigrants from the Muslim areas of the Russia-controlled the Caucasus region - carried out on April 15, 2013, demonstrated that Islamist extremist ideology does have the potential to attract even a few Muslim Americans. There have been a small number of mostly "lone wolf" terrorist attacks involving Muslim Americans, and there have been a few arrests of Muslim Americans for terrorism-related offences, almost all of which were for attempting to join a foreign terrorist organisation abroad, not for planning attacks in the homeland.