Multiracialist chickens come home—but not to roost

Once again, as so often since Sept. 11, the arrest of American-born terrorist Abdullah al-Muhajir, or Jose Padilla, or whatever his name this week may be, shows what's wrong with the multiracialist mythology on which contemporary America purports to be founded. For all the fashionable goop and hoop-la about the glories of "diversity," the truth is that having many different races in the same country and the different and conflicting cultural beliefs and values that go with them is a sure formula for anarchy.

Mr. Padilla, of Puerto Rican extraction, was a member of a Latino gang, was involved in a murder as a teenager and involved again in threatening someone with a pistol in a car incident. Somewhere in the course of this profound spiritual odyssey, he decided that Islam was the path for him, and somewhere further down the same road he apparently signed up with the Al Qaeda boys, to help them scout out suitable targets for nuclear terrorism in his native country.

Inevitably, his case is being compared with that of John Walker Lindh, currently on trial for fighting in Afghanistan with the Taliban. But Mr. Lindh is at most an unstable religious nut who claims he never fought against Americans or America. Mr. al Muhajir, on the other hand, never fought at all. He just helped plan mass murder. If it's authentic treason you're looking for, forget Mr. Lindh. It's al Muhajir who fits the wanted poster.

But Mr. al-Muhajir isn't exactly alone. Only the week before his arrest was announced, U.S. News and World Report unveiled profiles (forgive the word) of what it called "more than three dozen American jihadists, many of them previously unknown." What the magazine says about these chaps ought to tell us something about the kind of society we've allowed to evolve in this country.

"Unlike the 9/11 hijackers, who spent only months here, many are U.S. citizens, native born or naturalized. Most put down roots here, attended schools, ran businesses, and raised families. A majority appear to be Arab-American—Egyptian, Saudi, and Palestinian immigrants—or fellow Muslims from lands as far afield as Sudan and Pakistan. But a fair number are African-Americans, who make up nearly one-third of the nation's Muslims." [U.S. News and World Report, July 10,2002, “Made In The U.S.A.”]

Readers of this passage are probably expected to gasp in dismay: How is it that Americans, native born or naturalized, could so blatantly hate and betray their own country? Maybe a Benedict Arnold or an Alger Hiss every now and then, or maybe a few spies who commit treason for money or other gain, but what we are talking about here is different: an entire subculture that is not only profoundly alien to America and the West but hates them to their core.

Americans really shouldn't be too amazed that Arabs and Muslims are so ready to sign up for the jihad against their adopted country. Their religion, their ethnicity and their culture all separate them from the United States, as do the same forces among other immigrant subcultures.

Nor should the presence of American blacks among the "jihadists" be any more surprising. What else would you expect of a subculture convinced it has been the eternal victim of white America, that denounces George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as a slave owner and a racist, that believes that O.J. Simpson was framed by whites and the CIA invented AIDS to commit genocide against blacks? It is entirely probable that such a subculture will produce people who would like nothing more than to exterminate America and every white person in it. Indeed, it's hard to see how it could produce anything else.

Nevertheless, most Americans, and certainly most of our political and cultural elites, will be amazed and surprised. The myth that America is "based on a creed" and is therefore open to everyone who can be persuaded to accept the creed (or at least repeat its platitudes) implies that such hatred and disloyalty can't exist. The companion myth that a "credal nation" or a "proposition country" can enjoy unlimited diversity of race, culture and religion implies the same thing.

Nine months after Sept. 11, most Americans still can't imagine that mass immigration and its unexamined dogma of multiracialism made possible the communities of aliens who have lived, worked, been educated and raised families here and in many cases were actually born here and who at the same time hated everything and everyone with any connection to the white, Christian, Western America that welcomed them. You can create all the bureaucracies and drop all the bombs you want, but until Americans learn that the multiculturalist myths they have been taught are not only wrong but suicidal, we will not be safe from the terror these enemies within want to inflict on us.

June 17, 2002