http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324767004578486931383069840.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStoriesThis is a "center-cut" clip of the article. I would urge anyone who finds this article written by a recently accepted for citizenship immigrant Muslim, to read the whole article. This is filled with facts and a perspective we are not used to seeing from an immigrated and naturalized Muslim.
<It is reasonable to ask yourself: How many more young men like Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are already living a double life in America, ready to take up arms for the cause of political Islam? And how many more will be naturalized this year? None? That seems pretty unlikely.
In a 2011 Pew survey, 1% of American Muslims said that suicide bombings were "often justified"—a tiny proportion, to be sure. The overwhelming majority of American Muslims want to lead peaceful lives. But 7% of those surveyed said that suicide bombers were "sometimes justified," and 5% said they were "rarely justified." Taking Pew's conservative estimate that Muslims now constitute 0.6% of the adult population of the U.S., this means that more than 180,000 American Muslims regard suicide bombings as being justified in some way.
Still more worrisome, a 2007 survey by Pew revealed that Muslim Americans under the age of 30 are twice as likely as older Muslims to believe that suicide bombings in defense of Islam can be justified. The same survey revealed that 7% of American Muslims between the ages of 18 and 29 had a "favorable" view of al Qaeda.
To repeat: The proportion may be small, but the number of Americans committed to political Islam and willing to contemplate violence to advance it is surely not trivial. And rising immigration from the Muslim world is likely to increase the proportion of Americans sympathetic to political Islam.
A 2013 Pew report revealed the extraordinarily large proportion of Muslims around the world who favor making Shariah the official law of their own countries: 91% of Iraqi Muslims and 84% of Pakistanis, for example. Comparably high proportions favor the death penalty for apostates like me. Are immigrants to the U.S. drawn exclusively from the tiny minority who think otherwise? I doubt it.
When trying to explain the violence of some political Islamists, some Western commentators blame hard economic circumstances, dysfunctional family circumstances, confused identity, the generic alienation of young males and so on. In other quarters, the mistakes of American foreign policy are advanced as an explanation. Even if one accepts these arguments—and these factors may indeed play a role in exacerbating the sense of violent alienation among many young Muslims—it remains hard to understand why a convinced political Islamist would sincerely want to become an American citizen.
The naturalized citizen swears to "support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…bear true faith and allegiance to the same…[and] bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law." Naturalized citizens tie their own destiny to the destiny of this society, not their former one, for better or worse. So the potential bomber takes an oath to defend the Constitution and the U.S. against all enemies, while committed in his heart to a radically different political order.>
