"ISLAM'S NOWHERE MEN" – AT 8:11 P.M. ET:  That's the title of a brilliant piece by Fouad Ajami in today's Wall Street Journal, reflecting on the man, Faisal Shahzad, who wanted to blow up Times Square last week:

"A Muslim has no nationality except his belief," the intellectual godfather of the Islamists, Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, wrote decades ago. Qutb's "children" are everywhere now; they carry the nationalities of foreign lands and plot against them. The Pakistani born Faisal Shahzad is a devotee of Sayyid Qutb's doctrine, and Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was another...

...The Islamists are now within the gates. They fled the fires and the failures of the Islamic world but brought the ruin with them. They mock national borders and identities.

And...

Nowadays the Islamic faith is portable. It is carried by itinerant preachers and imams who transmit its teachings to all corners of the world, and from the safety and plenty of the West they often agitate against the very economic and moral order that sustains them. Satellite television plays its part in this new agitation, and the Islam of the tele-preachers is invariably one of damnation and fire. 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.

And home, the Old Country, is never far. Pakistani authorities say Faisal Shahzad made 13 visits to Pakistan in the last seven years. This would have been unthinkable three or four decades earlier. Shahzad lived on the seam between the Old Country and the New. The path of citizenship he took gave him the precious gift of an American passport but made no demands on him.

It's the "no demands" that should worry us.  It's true.  We make no demands on those who become new citizens. 

From Pakistan comes a profile of Shahzad's father, a man of high military rank, and of property and standing: He was "a man of modern thinking and of the modern age," it was said of him in his ancestral village of Mohib Banda in recent days. That arc from a secular father to a radicalized son is, in many ways, the arc of Pakistan since its birth as a nation-state six decades ago. The secular parents and the radicalized children is also a tale of Islam, that broken pact with modernity, the mothers who fought to shed the veil and the daughters who now wish to wear the burqa in Paris and Milan.

We have our own equivalent – the immigrant family whose children reject the "old ways," and their children, who want to explore them again. 

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. These men of nowhere—Faisal Shahzad, Nidal Malik Hasan, the American-born renegade cleric Anwar Awlaki now holed up in Yemen and their likes—are a deadly breed of combatants in this new kind of war. Modernity both attracts and unsettles them. America is at once the object of their dreams and the scapegoat onto which they project their deepest malignancies.

COMMENT:  Another superb piece by Ajami, one of the few scholars of Islam who refuses to drink the Kool-Aid and do the multicultural dance.  He warns us, just as Churchill warned Britain in the 1930s.  Churchill's warnings were ignored, and the Second World War resulted.  Will Ajami be ignored?  Will we face Islamist nations armed with nuclear weapons, and the will to use them?  Those are the great foreign-policy questions of the next two decades.  I'm not sure of the answers.

May 10, 2010