In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the immigration policies in France and across Europe have come under scrutiny with some contending the Paris attacks were a natural result.
"For several decades, the country has invited immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa en masse
— first to bolster the labor force in the rebuilding years that followed World War II, then out of multicultural impulses that prevailed over prudential considerations. That radical Islam was transplanted to France, grew in strength and extent, and bore this week’s hideous fruit was not difficult to predict. The same is not unlikely in Sweden, Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere,"
argues Ian Tuttle in a column for National Review Online.
Tuttle further contends that as the Muslim population in American has grown over the years, the "incidence of radicalism" has risen.
He says the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon carried out by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2003 case of the "Lackawanna Six," who were Yemeni immigrants convicted of providing material support to al-Qaida, and the May 2014 arrest of another Yemeni-born man on charges he was trying to recruit Americans to join the Islamic State (ISIS), are examples of that radicalization.
A recent editorial in Investor's Business Daily echoed Tuttle in drawing a line between immigration and national security.
"If enough trained jihadist fighters get into the country, they could band together and launch regular car bombings and tactical assaults, effectively orchestrating insurgencies in our cities, including the capital,"
asserts the Jan. 8 editorial.
And just last week
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a possible Republican presidential candidate, suggested France re-examine its immigration policy toward Muslims and consider restricting the number who enter the country.
"I think also you got to secure your country. That means maybe that every Muslim immigrant that wishes to come to France shouldn't have an open door to come," he told Fox News' Sean Hannity during an appearance on Hannity's radio show
.
While the financing and weapons may have come from abroad, Cherif Kouachi and Said Kouachi, the terrorists who perpetrated the Paris murders, were French citizens,
according to the Boston Herald.
Others, however, argue that the response in the West should not be to allow the Charlie Hebdo attacks to inspire anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant sentiments.
"But you don't change a nation in a single traumatic act. 9/11 didn't do it; Newtown didn't; Ferguson didn't. And the Paris attacks won't either. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigration sentiment, along with the rise of the far right, has been developing for years. A new tolerance won't come easy. Ironically, the same democratic values and freedom of expression and movement that the West defends will be used by jihadis
— and the alienated Muslim communities on which they feed
— to sustain their radical effort," writes Aaron David Miller, vice president and a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars,
in an op-ed on CNN.com.
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