from Real Clear Politics
originally published in WSJ
SATURDAY ESSAY Updated May 18, 2013, 11:29 a.m. ET
Swearing In the Enemy
One of the suspected Boston bombers was a naturalized citizen, and the
other was on his way. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, herself a new citizen, asks how we
might change the process of becoming an American to exclude those who hate
America.
On April 25, 2013, I took the oath to become a citizen of the United
States. Perhaps only those who have taken this oath can fully understand how I
felt that afternoon in Boston. I felt a strong sense of belonging, and tears
welled up in my eyes more than a few times during the hourlong ceremony.
I have no reason to doubt that the 1,834 other men and women who took the
oath with me also felt that special sense of homecoming. On that sunny
afternoon, it seemed unreal that just 10 days earlier, another new citizen of
this country had taken up arms against it—against us—in the very same city.
As the whole world now knows, that new U.S. citizen was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev,
only 19 years old. He had taken the oath just seven months earlier—on Sept.
11, in fact, a grim irony whose lessons we are still struggling to learn.
His alleged partner in crime and mentor was his elder brother, Tamerlan
Tsarnaev, who himself had applied for citizenship and was well into the
process, awaiting approval and the invitation to take the same precious oath.
That approval and invitation would surely have come, because Americans—we
Americans—are a generous people. And yet, strangely, today's debate about
immigration reform has little to do with keeping out people like Tamerlan and
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The Tsarnaev brothers are emblematic of the divided loyalties of our times—
and they are not the only ones. Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani national, is a
naturalized U.S. citizen who lived the American dream: He arrived on a
student visa, married an American citizen, graduated from college, worked his
way up the corporate ladder to become a junior financial analyst for a
cosmetics company in Connecticut, became a naturalized citizen at the age of
30
and then, a year later, in 2010, tried to blow up as many of his fellow
citizens as possible in a failed car bombing in New York's Times Square.
Prior to sentencing, the judge asked Mr. Shahzad about the oath of
allegiance he had taken, in which he did "absolutely and entirely renounce and
abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or
sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen."
The defendant replied: "I sweared [sic], but I didn't mean it." He then
expressed his regret about the failure of his plot and added that he would
gladly have sacrificed a thousand lives in the service of Allah. He concluded
by predicting the downfall of his new homeland.
Every naturalized citizen has a unique story to tell. My own journey to
America was not only geographical but also intellectual, emotional and
cultural. I grew up in Muslim communities in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia
and
Kenya. In my early years, these communities (with the exception of Saudi
Arabia) were moderate in their religious beliefs and practices.
But during my teenage years, I saw a change. Friends and family members
began turning to Islamic scripture, interpreted literally, for answers to all
their problems. I saw religious leaders who emphasized ritual observance
replaced by a new breed of imams who urged hostile action, even violence,
against Jews, "infidels," and Muslims who neglected their religious duties or
violated Shariah, the Islamic law.
I wasn't immune to the appeal of this new fundamentalism. I myself joined
the Muslim Brotherhood, a religious and social movement in which we were
urged to implement Shariah in our families, communities and nations. For a
young woman, this might mean strict obedience to her husband and quiet
propagation of the message; for a young man, it might mean seeking martyrdom
through a violent attack against the infidels. One person might contribute
money, another his home, yet another his political and social connections.
What
mattered was being united around the ideal of a world ruled by Shariah.
Over time, I began to question that ideal. My journey included a decade in
the Netherlands, where I lived a life of profound dissonance, mentally
vowing to remain steadfast in my faith while my lifestyle drifted further and
further from the narrow Islamic path. I knew that the freedom I experienced
in the Netherlands was supposed to be abhorrent and evil, yet I found
myself overwhelmed with gratitude for it and for the generosity with which the
Dutch people welcomed me and so many other émigrés. I discovered that I was
more comfortable with the idea of treating women, gay people, and people of
different races and faiths equally than I had ever been with the
strictures of Shariah.
It was this journey from a world dominated by strict adherence to religious
law into a world of freedom both for and from religion that led me to that
ceremony in Boston, where I finally became a citizen of the country that,
above all others, represents freedom to the world. I have devoted the past
decade of my life to working as hard as I can to expose the threat posed by
what I label, as carefully as possible, "political Islam."
It's a subject about which I know a great deal. Political Islam killed my
Dutch friend Theo van Gogh, who dared to collaborate with me in making the
film "Submission," which criticizes the mistreatment of women in the name of
Islam. Adherents of political Islam regularly threaten me, an apostate
from their faith. Political Islam eventually made my life in the Netherlands
impossible. If it were not for political Islam, I would almost certainly
still be Dutch.
What is political Islam? It is not precisely the same as the spiritual
dimension of the faith. Islam is multidimensional. It has a religious and
social aspect but also a very strong political dimension. Political Islam is a
comprehensive vision of ideas and ideals derived from Islamic scripture as
interpreted by various scholars widely accepted as authorities on its
meaning. Virtually all of these scholars agree that Muslim societies must
accept
Allah as the sovereign power and struggle to abide strictly by Shariah law
as exemplified in the Sunna (the life, words and deeds of the Prophet).
Political Islam prescribes a set of specific social, economic and legal
practices in a way that is very different from the more general social
teachings
(such as calls to practice charity or strive for justice) found in the
spiritual dimension of Islam, Christianity, Judaism and other world religions.
All of this, obviously, flies in the face of the American—and more broadly
Western—ideals of religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
But most Americans ignore the fundamental conflict between political Islam
and their own worldview. Perhaps this is because they generally assume
that "religion," however defined, is a positive force for good and that any
set of religious beliefs, however unusual, should be considered acceptable in
a tolerant society. I agree with that.
The problem arises when those who adhere to a particular faith use it as
divine license to break the law. It is a wonderful truth about America—one of
its powerful attractions for millions of immigrants like me—that you may
think and say whatever you wish as long as you do not act on your beliefs in
a way that harms others. Unfortunately, a minority of the adherents to
political Islam wish to take violent action in support of their beliefs—
threatening the lives of innocents like those killed and maimed as they stood
watching the Boston Marathon.
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.
The challenge that this would-be bomber poses for us is not to change our
foreign policy or improve economic conditions in the Muslim world. We
already do that. The challenge is to uncover the deceit of such phony
citizens.
One measure employed during the Cold War was to question prospective
citizens about whether they had ever been members of the Communist Party, a
recognition that communism was an ideology fundamentally hostile to the
American
way of life. That question about the Communist Party is still asked today,
even though the threat posed by communism has receded to a few desperate
holdouts. I was surprised to encounter it not once but twice during my own
application process. And it got me thinking: Is it not time to update the
application form, substituting political Islam for Communism?
Of course, the question alone would do nothing to uncover deceit on the
part of a determined terrorist. But it would establish the principle that
adherence to political Islam, with its dreams of a society ruled by Shariah
(not to mention a world ruled by a restored caliphate), is incompatible with
the terms of the oath of allegiance.
During my application process, the Citizenship and Immigration Services
requested that I show up at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in downtown
Boston only twice—once for fingerprints and pictures, a second time for an
interview with a civil servant to review my application. It was a purely
bureaucratic procedure, empty of any larger moral or political meaning—as it
must have been for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Faisal Shahzad and as it would have
been for Tamerlan Tsarnaev, too.
The question now is whether the interview process should remain so devoid
of meaning. Is that what we want for the next zealot of political Islam who
wants to enjoy the benefits of American citizenship until the day he tries
to slaughter as many of us as possible?
A half-century ago, the U.S. turned away from the era when immigration was
restricted with the deliberate intention of keeping down the number of
Chinese and other ethnic groups, who were deemed undesirable. I have no wish
to
go back to those bad old days. There should be no discrimination on the
grounds of ethnicity or faith. But it is not enough to confine the current
debate on immigration reform to a narrow argument about the future of illegal
immigrants. I believe that we are entitled to filter out would-be citizens
who are ideologically and morally opposed to the U.S. and pose a threat to
its population.
Every applicant should be interviewed by an ethnically and religiously
diverse panel made up of experts on ideological extremism, who would then
advise the government on whether or not to allow the applicant to proceed
along
the road to citizenship. Muslim applicants need not feel singled out; the
panel would look out for any individual whose political convictions,
religious or otherwise, radically clash with the government and principles to
which the applicant is preparing to swear allegiance.
This would include any and all extremists who openly advocate or engage in
political violence as a means for attaining their ideal society. Examples
would include members of terrorist organizations such as the FARC in
Colombia, the PKK in Turkey, Aum Shinrikyo in Japan and so on. The most
important
question is not what they believe but what they do—or believe it would be
legitimate to do. Requiring candidates for citizenship to respond to
questions from such a panel might do more than all the other inconvenient,
expensive, and undesirable measures to combat terrorism that we currently put
up
with.
A big job to organize and implement? Absolutely. But such screening is
necessary to ensure that the U.S. continues to draw and naturalize people who
are genuinely attracted by what makes the country great and who want to make
their own contribution to that greatness, while keeping out enemies bent
on our demise.
"I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of
evasion: so help me God." Those closing words of the Oath of Allegiance
are now etched indelibly in my memory. But as I said them, I thought of the
Tsarnaev brothers, whose mental reservations about America grew to the point
that they were prepared to sow murder and mayhem.
Immigration reform that does not make it harder for such people to settle
in the U.S. would be, to say the least, very incomplete.
Ms. Hirsi Ali is a founder of the AHA Foundation and author of "Infidel"
and "Nomad: My Journey from Islam to America." She is a fellow at the Belfer
Center of Harvard's Kennedy School and a visiting fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute.
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