The difference in Muslim behavior in the U.S., as compared to that demonstrated in Western Europe, is owed primarily to several factors.
First, and most important, the Muslim population is a much smaller proportion of the American population — scarcely 1%. And of even that 1%, most of the Muslims are homegrown Black Muslims, whose own easygoing and at times even syncretistic interpretation of Islam in the past caused the orthodox at Al Azhar to refuse to recognize Elijah Mohammad’s group as really Islamic at all.
But what if there were not 3 million Muslims (two million of them identified as belonging to the “Black Muslims”) but rather 15 million — that is, 5% of the total population — or even 30 million, or 10% of the total population, as may already be true in France? Wouldn’t local Muslims, already so aggressive and unyielding in the demands of their so-called representative groups (e.g. CAIR), be far more aggressive and even more demanding, even more uncooperative with the authorities on matters of security, even more aggressive in demands to changes in our legal and political institutions, in our schools, in our social understandings and arrangements, in our everything?
Second, the non-Muslim population of the United States contains far more believing Christians and self-identifying Jews than anywhere in “post-Christian” Western Europe. They are powerful and self-confident, and will not yield as the French and English have yielded. America is a more violent society. Part of that violence includes a willingness, even an eagerness, to have those who threaten that society suppressed — thank god — unapologetically.
Third, the pre-existing mental pathologies that have helped Muslims to find allies of sorts in the countries of Western Europe are antisemitism, which remains a permanent presence in the Western world which nothing can eradicate, but which in the United States, for all sorts of reasons (including the identification of so many Americans, including the earliest Puritans, with the Israelites, and the role of the Old Testament in American intellectual and religious history) has been reduced far below its European levels. The second pre-existing mental pathology cleverly exploited by Muslims and their willing collaborators in the countries of Western Europe has been anti-Americanism, strongest in France and England, less strong in Germany and especially, thank god, in Italy — and visible on this side of the Atlantic only among media figures.
Fourth, Muslims are not provided with as many benefits paid for by Infidel taxpayers as they are in Western Europe, and so cannot rely on the dole for their every need, nor on fiddling the system to the degree that is now de rigueur in England and France. They need, therefore, the good will of non-Muslim customers and employers. This may — for a while, even a long while — inhibit open political activity for the advancement of Sharia principles. After all, if one realizes that one’s contribution to CAIR or one’s open support for Muslim goals may cause direct economic losses, one may hesitate.
Fifth, in this country there are many more non-Muslim refugees from Muslim lands — Christians who are descended from those Maronites who arrived between 1880 and 1940, or Jews who left Arab lands but did not go to Israel, or pockets here and there of smaller sects, including Assyrians and Chaldean Christians — who are able to provide to those around them unpleasant monitory truths about Islam and its tenets, its attitudes.
Sixth, there are far more people in this country who have remained in possession of their senses, and who are quite capable of refusing to accept the party line of the members of MESA Nostra, and to find out for themselves about both the theory or doctrines of Islam and about Islam in practice — as evidenced by 1350 years of Islamic conquest of non-Muslim lands and by the subsequent subjugation, and killing or forced conversion or reduction to the status of dhimmi, of the vanquished non-Muslims.
Seventh, given all that, it is cleverer to wait, to bide one’s time. Who knows what will happen in ten years, or twenty? Why make moves too soon, when there is such a danger of imperiling oneself and one’s ability to remain in this country, at this point?
But no one should remain sanguine. Look at Mike Hawash in Oregon, that Intel engineer, earning $360,000 a year, with his American wife and Little-League playing children, and the stout stand-by-your-man support of Intel executives, who nonetheless returned to that old-time religion. That old-time religion turned out, for “Mike” (Maher) Hawash, to be Islam. So after 9.11.2001 it was off to western China in the hopes of reaching Afghanistan and killing fellow Americans who were, for Mike Hawash and all the Mike Hawashes of Islam, not fellow Infidel citizens of an Infidel nation-state, but enemies to be killed — because they were Infidels, and because they stood in the way of, represented an obstacle to, the spread and future dominance of Islam. And the would-be murderer in Chapel Hill, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, gunning his SUV and running over non-Muslim students, was the son of secular Iranians in exile — but he, too, in a moment of intellectual and vocational confusion, apparently found Islam. And in finding Islam, he became the would-be Jihadist who would kill Infidels who had done nothing to him. Why? Because that was what Allah wanted, that was what Muhammad wanted. He spelled it all out in long handwritten letters written while in custody. And there are many such — people who are outwardly fine, until one fine day they are not so fine, and then, whatever the reasons, they have at hand someone to blame, someone to kill — the Infidel.
In Afghanistan, or right here in Chapel Hill, or New York City, or anywhere at all.