Paul Marin, Columnist
Ideology: Liberal Republican | Writing From: Constanta, Romania

On Christmas Day, the United States, despite its military might and draconian airport security procedures, reaffirmed its vulnerability when an incompetent terrorist tried to detonate an improvised explosive on board of Northwest Airlines flight 253 to Detroit. Through the nature of the attacker, a Western-reared college student attending one of the world’s best universities, this latest incident reveals the threat of Western-grown terrorism. Military might and airport security, as the Christmas incident shows, cannot prevent Al-Qaeda from recruiting disenchanted Muslim youth raised in the West. What can diminish the risk of such an attack is the removal of the perceived unbreakable barrier between Muslim communities and the Western majority’s community.

For many native Westerners, such a barrier may not appear, but it exists, and every immigrant has felt it someway. This aforementioned barrier is not formal, linguistic, ethnic, or cultural; centuries of immigration have shown that those barriers can be easily surpassed. This stigmatizing barrier consists of the implied messages Westerners — at times involuntarily — send to Muslim communities suggesting that there are underlying major and irreconcilable differences between the Westerners and Muslims. Practically, these implied messages draw a line in the sand between “us, the normal ones” and “you, the different ones.” An example of these implied messages is the way that US and Western European leaders address the international Muslim community: they refer to it as the “Muslim World” as if the Earth is divided into two different, conflicting worlds, “the normal West” and the “Muslim World.” What adds the most poison to the phrase the “Muslim World” is neither the fact that it throws the unique ethnic identities of all who are Muslim in the same pot, nor the fact that it differentiates international communities through religion. The poison comes from the use of the word “world” because “world” implies the existence of an independent and secluded entity — like a different and unknown planet.

To see the danger of such divisive messages, first ask yourself sincerely if you would befriend someone who you consider to perceive you as irreconcilably different. And when the vast majority of people in your immediate proximity are the same people who you perceive to be regarding you as irreconcilably different, your social interaction becomes minimal. Without interacting with the majority, minorities of any kind can never be integrated, and without first being part of a society, access to friendships becomes much more difficult in absence of people of “your kind.” And lack of friendship can make one vulnerable to those prying on your disaffection. Like gangs. Or Al-Qaeda.

The pattern of isolation, estrangement, vulnerability to “bad influences,” and turning to violence is evident in the life of Umar Abdulmutallab, the terrorist on board of Northwest Airlines Flight 253. According to an ABC News report, Abdulmutallab felt lonely without some “true Muslim friends” and turned to the internet to find them. And Al-Qaeda gladly filled the void.

It is true that the vast majority of Muslim youth living in the US or Western Europe do not resent the majority communities in these countries because of Barack Obama’s use of phrase “Muslim World.” But a majority of them, like most minorities or immigrants, may have encountered this barrier between them and the majority. And to a select few it is so destructive that they turn to Al Qaeda — and it only takes one skilled person to down an airliner with a bomb.