by From a story in The Globe and Mail The 22-year-old Mr. Abedi was identified Tuesday by Manchester police as the suspected bomber. British media reported that he was born in Manchester to parents who fled the violent repression of Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya. Little else is known about Mr. Abedi – British authorities have been tight-lipped about the investigation and only released Mr. Abedi’s name after it was leaked by U.S. officials – but his profile as the child of Muslim immigrants is similar to that of other recent Islamic State and al-Qaeda devotees who have brought terror to the cities of Europe. Second-generation immigrants born in France to parents who had immigrated from Algeria carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre in the centre of Paris in 2015. The
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Mike Kimel considers the following as important: immigration policy, Op-ed, terrorism, Uncategorized
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From a story in The Globe and Mail
The 22-year-old Mr. Abedi was identified Tuesday by Manchester police as the suspected bomber. British media reported that he was born in Manchester to parents who fled the violent repression of Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya.
Little else is known about Mr. Abedi – British authorities have been tight-lipped about the investigation and only released Mr. Abedi’s name after it was leaked by U.S. officials – but his profile as the child of Muslim immigrants is similar to that of other recent Islamic State and al-Qaeda devotees who have brought terror to the cities of Europe.
Second-generation immigrants born in France to parents who had immigrated from Algeria carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre in the centre of Paris in 2015. The Belgian-born children of Moroccan immigrants masterminded the shooting and bomb attacks on the Bataclan nightclub and Stade de France later the same year. All five perpetrators of last year’s bombings of the Brussels airport and subway had a similar profile.
“If the story of radicalization and Islamism in Europe is about anything, it’s about second-generation immigrants, children of immigrants who feel culturally dislocated … a sense of dislocation related to being brought up in Western culture and finding something doesn’t quite fit,” said Shashank Joshi, a senior fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies.
Of course, it isn’t just Europe. Think Omar Mateen, Syed Farook, Nidal Hasan, Nadir Soofi, and add to them any number of individuals raised in the US who made their way to fight for ISIS or Al Shabaab.
One would think that the children of immigrants would be particularly unlikely to want to cause to harm to their country. Their parents, after all, got lucky when they were able to come here. That is something they should know and a message they should pass on to their children. (Those feelings are something to which I can attest; on my father’s side, I am a second generation immigrant.)
But that decency and gratitude is clearly more than some people will show to their compatriots. And that is becoming more and more of a problem, particularly now that the terrorists have become vile enough to directly target children.
(Before you decide this is something we brought on ourselves by provoking people through our behavior abroad, bear in mind two things. The first is that pacifist countries like Sweden get the same treatment we do. The second is that Osama bin Laden told us a decade and a half ago that one of his goals was the “liberation” of al Andalus.)
Of course, none of this is to say that we don’t have atrocities committed by people who aren’t 2nd-gen-immigrants. We do, and too many at that. No decision made at the INS in the last few decades would have saved Americans from Dylan Roof or John Allen Muhammad. On the other hand, without the signature by an immigration officer a generation ago, Omar Mateen’s 49 victims would still be alive.
Now, we have the population we have. The next Mateen is already in the US, and the next Abedi is already in Europe, and they will kill more of us, and more of our children. But there is another Mateen and another Abedi that are a little farther out. They haven’t been born yet, and their parents are currently somewhere far away. For the sake of our descendants we had better figure out how to recognize not just those evil enough to perpetrate callous acts of violence, but also those who don’t have the decency to teach their children not to be evil themselves. And we damn well better make sure we don’t let them into the country.