The Park51 Mosque Is a Win for Muslim Extremists

Rambling, non-poker posting time. Caution: This is a political issue.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few weeks, I'm sure you've come across the news that there are construction plans for a mosque in NYC, a couple blocks away from Ground Zero. Unfortunately for us all, this is very, very bad news. Before you left-wingers start saying I'm trampling the Constitution and the right wingers start saying "I told you so," let me explain why it isn't bad news for the reasons most people have been talking about lately.

I studied International Relations not too long ago, and we covered things like National Security and that little ol' problem of Muslim extremists. Pretty extensively. And I can say with almost absolute certainty that the Park51 mosque debate will increase the number of violent, Islamic extremists in the United States. That's right, I said the "debate" would. Let me walk you through how this happens, giving you a bit of history that the FBI and CIA have found out since 9/11.

Basic Recruitment in Armed Groups

So how do those guys recruit people to blow themselves up and kill innocent people in cruel acts of terrorism? By rallying the marginalized, downtrodden section of a society and giving it a "higher path" where a culture of murder and terrorism is embraced.

Society's marginalized people suffer. They begin to resent the majority because it spurns them. For the extremist looking for followers, this presents an opportunity. They show the downtrodden that the society those people live in is out to destroy their ideals, their culture, and their livelihood. They snatch them from their suffering and their aimless lives, shoving them how the cruelty of the world isn't really their fault, it's society's. They give them a renewed sense of purpose in life with the "higher path," and the recruits' newfound sense of pride, self-respect, and self-righteous anger will lead them to do whatever you want them to, up to and including butchering innocent people. It's a universal recipe, used throughout the world by warlords and armed groups everywhere.

Application to Radical Islam

The "higher path" in the Islamic extremists' case is a twisted version of Islam. It's simple for them to corrupt the message because the Quran is in such a high, pure, and perfect form of Arabic that literally NOBODY can perfectly translate it anymore. It is not too difficult for extremist imams to turn "Jihad for the defense of Islam" into "Jihad for murdering anyone for the promotion of OUR Islam" when they teach it to gullible people who can't read Allah's divine work for themselves.

The societal marginalization of Muslims came after 9/11.

As humans, people tend to be bigots when dangerous things happen. We fall into an "Us vs. Them" mindset because our brains like to make confrontation simple. It's the product of thousands of years of evolution and survival in a world where quick stereotypes helped mankind to survive. If something is big and has large teeth like what ate your friend last week, but isn't exactly the same as that other beast, it's better to assume that it's deadly and kill it or run away than it is to ponder the various possibilities in search of the truth while being eaten. So we all naturally stereotype to simplify our decision making processes.

The 9/11 attacks were an act of strategic genius by Osama bin Laden that used this human tendency against us. The resulting backlash against the Arab Muslim community after 9/11 was enormous because our attackers were Arabs and "did it in the name of Allah." Ding, the stereotype switch goes off in peoples' heads, and suddenly every Arab is subconsciously feared to be a Muslim terrorist.

You had old, conservative fogies trying to run down Muslim women to "save America," kids nicknaming or outright calling their Arab classmates "terrorists." It was not a good time to be an Arab in the Western world, particularly if you were Muslim. As a group, they became marginalized by society's predictable and misdirected hatred.

As became clear in the years since, Islamic, al-Qaeda-inspired militants made full use of this. Arab Muslims became a marginalized part of the Western world. As a result, militant recruitment into terrorist cells increased. Not in Arab, Muslim countries, but in developed, first world nations like the United States and the UK. What’s worse, these recruits have full access to any number of targets in their countries of residence. The terrorist plots in NYC and the terrorist cells popping up in London were the new breed of extremist; these terrorists were not foreign nationals formally tied to a vast organization plotting the downfall of the US. They were dangerous in a new way, being local residents who could come and go as they pleased, almost completely isolated and self-sufficient, separate from al-Qaeda. All of these cells were created within the span of a few years, something that was literally unprecedented in the history of Islamic extremism; all because of 9/11. Thankfully, the post-9/11 NYC and London plotters and the shoe and Christmas day bombers were incredibly inept and got caught thanks to the vigilance of ordinary citizens and the efforts of law enforcement, but it only takes one to slip through security, one lucky group flying under the radar to do incredible damage.

The 2004 bombings in Madrid, Spain show that in spectacular and tragic fashion. It was an attack planned, coordinated, and executed by Muslim extremists who were Spanish locals "inspired" by al-Qaeda through the internet. It's impossible to catch them all when they pop up on your home ground. What's even worse is that the cycle is a self-propagating, positive feedback loop. You carry out a terrorist attack, society recoils from Muslims, you get more converts to the cause. Repeat.

The Park51 Mosque debate is a cog in the wheel of that process.

Whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf realizes that or not is a matter of some debate (personally I think he's just misguided and self-righteously naive), but his decision to build the mosque and community center in an emotionally significant area has put the wheel in motion.

People react strongly to the news of the Muslim mosque. It's a polarizing piece of news that it's being built near Ground Zero. Either you're against it because you feel it's too soon, too close, insensitive and inflammatory, or you are for it, citing freedom of religion, its several-block distance from Ground Zero, and the need to uphold Constitutional protections for all. And of course, because it's a polarizing piece of work, the issue has gotten vast amounts of media coverage and has become an important debate in the public arena, spreading that polarizing, confrontational idea around the nation.

This is creating the same bigotry and backlash against Muslims that we saw post-9/11. We have conservative right wingers, the most strongly evolved stereotypers, going completely off the walls and protesting not just the "Ground Zero Mosque" but also other mosque projects around the country. There is national blowback against the Muslim community, and it's all over the news. Again.

No, we won't tolerate that community center and mosque here because it's insensitive, because Islam in general is clearly bad. Congratulations to us and our highly evolved, stereotype reasoning.

Recruitment season is on its way. It is now more likely than ever that there will be yet another "home grown" terrorist plot in the US. Maybe we will catch them. Maybe not.