Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest column at National Review Online investigates why Western targets prove so popular for terrorists.
China has a long record of persecuting its Muslim minorities. Russia has brutally suppressed the separatist movement of the predominantly Muslim Chechens with bombing and shelling. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered airstrikes against Syrian Muslims without much worry over collateral damage. India has zero tolerance for Islamic radicalism and hits back hard any time Muslim terrorists attack.
Given such severe backlash elsewhere, why do radical Islamists prefer to strike Europeans and Americans — from Paris and Brussels to Boston and San Bernardino? …
… Despite all of that extraordinary presidential outreach, the West remains under constant terrorist threats and episodic attacks, often from Muslim youths who were offered sanctuary in places such as Belgium, France, Massachusetts, and California.
There are a number of reasons why jihadists prefer to target Westerners.
The West is wealthy, sensual, and liberal, and it offers the chance of global publicity to killers.
Muslim immigrants from the Middle East prefer the higher standard of living in Paris than the abject poverty at home. But they also hate how such affluence insidiously tempts their own religious fundamentalism. They do not praise Europe for its generosity, but rather blame it for its decadence.
The West is obsessed with mandated equality. The Muslim immigrant — who often arrives without education, language facility, or money — easily learns how to blame his relative poverty on his hosts. He is rarely reminded that not being relatively well off in Frankfurt or Boston is still far better than being unsafe and poor in Yemen or Chechnya.
