(Wall Street Journal) Fouad Ajami - What can we make of a young man like Pakistani-born Faisal Shahzad, working for Elizabeth Arden, receiving an American MBA, jogging in the evening in Bridgeport, then plotting mass mayhem in Times Square? The Islamists are now within the gates. They fled the fires and the failures of the Islamic world but brought the ruin with them. From tranquil, banal places (Dubai and Qatar), satellite television offers an incendiary version of the faith to younger immigrants unsettled by a modern civilization they can neither master nor reject. This is a long twilight war, the struggle against radical Islamism. We can't wish it away. No strategy of winning "hearts and minds," no great outreach, will bring this struggle to an end. America can't conciliate these furies. The writer is a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
2010-05-11 08:11:44Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive