Hats off to Congressman Peter King for conducting hearings on the risks of domestic infiltration of radical Muslim jihadists. We have for too long deferred this conversation, and it shouldn’t be and isn’t about intolerance or discrimination, for Americans of all people do not need to be lectured about tolerance–our very creed is grounded in it, however imperfectly we have sometimes practiced it. But this discussion should also be broadened to include the insidious concept of multiculturalism and how it has undermined our creed and our commitment to assimilation of foreign cultures as policy.
And we should also have another discussion, or rather we should encourage our Muslim intellectual class to have it, and that is a discussion about the core philosophical underpinnings of the Muslim faith. For as I have previously noted in my review of The Closing of the Muslim Mind by Robert Reilly, Islam must return to the ideological choices it made in the period from the ninth to the twelfth century that began its divergence with the West. These ideas are not a radical perversion of Islam, they are part and parcel of Islam itself, have been embedded for a millennium, and are inimical to reason. We’re talking about a reformation here and, like it or not, we cannot avoid being in the middle of it.
