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OPINION:
By now, I expect, you’re at least aware of the scandal rocking the United Kingdom. Over decades, thousands of young British girls were systematically raped and, in some cases, killed by immigrant gangs.
Police, politicians, social workers, and journalists refused to hold the criminals to account. Some helped cover up the crimes.
This scandal has received greatly increased attention only since New Year’s Day, when Elon Musk began furiously tweeting about it.
The members of the gangs have been identified as predominately Muslim men of Pakistani origin.
Brits infected by what Mr. Musk calls “the woke virus,” and fearful of being accused of “racism” and “Islamophobia,” refused to crack down on these vile criminals.
The British media spoke of “Asian grooming gangs” — as if Japanese hairdressers might be implicated.
Honest commentators, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali — a Somalia-born American citizen, author, and human rights activist — make clear that imams in British mosques teach that Islamic scripture authorizes Muslim men to sexually exploit infidel women.
It goes without saying that Muslim men of Pakistani origin who were not involved in these crimes bear no responsibility for what National Review contributing editor Andrew C. McCarthy has called the “rape jihad.”
But this scandal should raise questions about how Britain and other Western countries have subverted legal immigration and law enforcement to further woke visions of “diversity” and “multiculturalism.”
President Biden encouraged millions of foreigners to cross illegally and unvetted into the United States. “We’re trying to make it easier for people to get here, opening up the capacity to get here,” he acknowledged two years ago.
Americans reelected former President Donald Trump in large measure to end this tsunami of illegal immigration.
If Mr. Trump accomplishes that, can we also be confident that our legal visa and immigration system will strengthen America’s national security? There’s cause for skepticism.
Let me stress that most would-be immigrants from Muslim countries are not enemies of America. Indeed, some of the most ardent and courageous opponents of terrorism and jihadism I know came to America from Muslim countries.
But there is now a growing cohort of Islamic supremacists in American communities and especially on American university campuses.
This has been going on since the early 1990s. Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheikh,” was an Egyptian cleric who had issued a fatwa, a religious opinion, calling for the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Though he was on the U.S. State Department’s terrorism watchlist, he was permitted to legally enter and work in the U.S., where he developed a reputation as a great scholar of Islamic jurisprudence.
In 1995, he was convicted in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Mr. McCarthy led the prosecution and detailed the history in his excellent book, “Willful Blindness: A Memoir of Jihad.”
A few years later, the 19 individuals who would carry out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were allowed to legally enter the U.S.
It has since come to light that some had given false information on their visa applications. Those applications were inadequately scrutinized.
Fast-forward to this past New Year’s morning when Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar drove a rented pickup truck through a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing as many people as he could.
On the truck was a flag of the Islamic State. Hours before the attack, Jabbar had posted videos on Facebook expressing his commitment to the “war between the believers and the disbelievers.”
Jabbar was a Muslim American citizen. He lived near a Houston-area mosque, Masjid Bilal, whose imam, Eiad Soudan, is no exponent of moderate readings of Islam.
For example, at a Nov. 17, 2023, program in the Islamic Center of Greater Houston, Mr. Soudan told congregants that the Jews, whom he referred to as “Israelites,” seek to “take control of the economy” wherever they go, which is why Hitler — who, he noted, had a “nice mustache” — slaughtered them.
A video of his talk was posted by MEMRI, the indispensable Middle East Media Research Institute.
After the Bourbon Street attack, Imam Soudan advised congregants not to speak to investigators without consulting the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group that in 2008 was named an unindicted coconspirator in the largest terrorism financing case in American history.
As far as I can tell, Mr. Soudan was born in Syria and came to and remains in the U.S. legally. According to a 2020 study by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, close to eight out of 10 full-time paid imams in the U.S. are foreign-born.
How many of these imams encourage jihad? More than a few, based on the videos of sermons posted by MEMRI over recent years.
“It seems clear that the U.S. government is permitting the legal immigration of many individuals with Islamist, antisemitic and other extremist views,” Alberto Fernandez, MEMRI’s vice president, told me. “There doesn’t seem to be much effort being made to exclude those with theologies or ideologies inimical to American interests and values.”
American citizens, acting through their elected leaders, can decide who may enter the U.S. and for what purposes. It is neither racist nor Islamophobic to exclude advocates of jihad.
Personally, I favor immigration of people from all races, creeds, and colors from anywhere in the world so long as they want to become Americans, embrace the American values expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, contribute to America’s economy, and don’t threaten American security.
If Mr. Trump were to make that the guiding principle for a thoroughgoing reform of the legal immigration system, he would be — to coin a phrase — putting Americans first.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for the Washington Times.
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