The Washington Post has a story titled "Arrests Suggest US Muslims, Like Those in Europe, Can be Radicalized." Unlike the New York Times, which has done some spectacularly bad reporting on the Muslim diaspora, the WaPo story is not quite so terrible.
The point of the story is that this European trend of radical domestic Islam might have shifted to America.
The authors write that Muslims in America are more "prosperous" than their European counterparts, which is why they're less prone to radicalism. This is true, but in saying so the authors ignore an obvious question: why are Muslims in Europe so poor? Could it be years of terrible racial discrimination? Europe seems to have problems adjusting to its growing Muslims population, and I'm not just talking about the infamously Islamophobe French.
The countries of modern Europe, unlike the US and India, were founded upon the principle of ethnic self-determination. Their modern identity is rooted in exclusion, which might be why they have so many issues dealing with diversity now.
The careful headline on the WaPo article tries (subtly) to make a compelling argument for why this story deserves to exist at all, but I am not convinced. The United States has had domestic terrorists for years - the infamous Weather Underground, the white power movement, the Black Panthers, abortion clinic bombers - so why is the WaPo suddenly so interested in covering "domestic terrorism?"
By comparison to India, America doesn't have a big domestic terrorism problem. In India, a country of constant insurgencies grand and small, it takes more than few rogue discontents to make news in a national paper.
I'm always fascinated by how India manages to contain so many different types of people without really containing them at all. The pressure is intense and inconceivable. Consider this: we have every major religion known on Earth BUT we have one of the highest rates of endogamy of any nation. Indian Hindus can mix with Muslims for years (can do business with them, even!) and still have the most retrograde views. I wish I could say that was the exception, but it's not.
My different views of these nations are partly shaped by my own different experiences. In the United States, I belonged to an anti-establishment community by virtue of the fact that I was a racial minority. The real knuckle-dragging racists avoided me or at least shut up in my presence. In India, I'm part of the majority, so I have no such shield.
And yet, I can't help but feel that in India our diversity has hampered us more than it maybe needs to have. Consider the main topic in today's news: legislators in Andhra Pradesh, one of India's biggest states, just sliced off part of the state and turned it into its own separate state. Students are raising flags in the streets, other students are tearing them down. Nearly 100 members of Parliament have threatened to resign.
There are separatist movements in the South, the North, the Northeast. Everyone wants a share of land, and no one wants to share it with someone they see as being from outside their clan.
The last major separatist movement in the United States was the Civil War, and we all know how that ended.
Of course, it's a bad comparison. Most Americans don't really have any historical claim to the land they live on, except maybe for Native Americans. Most tribal Indians have lived on the same patch of land since the first modern humans moved out of Africa 75,000 years ago.
National experiences with diversity are, by their nature, diverse. India and the United States are very different countries. And on the other hand, it's probably a bad idea for me to make generalizations because a) I'm not a scholar and b) my experiences are personal, and therefore specific. They can't necessarily be extrapolated. I did say above that Indians seem to have retrograde views about Muslims, but that may just be the middle- and upper-class North Indian merchants whom I know. And I could say that all Americans live together in joyous harmony, but that's really only the educated upper-class urban youth I went to high school with on the East Coast.
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