When Islamists Strike, Never Blame Society

After Islamist terrorists killed 17 people in and around Paris in January, the trend was to drone on about how the attacks pointed to France's failure to integrate Muslims. But our latest attack at home, at a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tenn., highlights the insanity of blaming ourselves.

The ingredients for the “blame-France” critique were simple.

First, talk about France's housing projects. Extra points for showing off your sophistication in using the word banlieue. “The housing project that was home to Amedy Coulibaly” — one of the Paris terrorists — “is a concrete labyrinth so scary that doctors refuse to make house calls and mail workers won't deliver parcels,” the AP reported.

Next, talk about police brutality in those projects. Remember when the cops chased French teens in a Paris suburb in 2005, causing two of them to seek refuge in a power substation and die of electrocution?

After that, mention joblessness, inequality and racism. “France is scrambling to remedy the inequities highlighted by the Charlie Hebdo attack,” New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman wrote, “troubles that have ... alienated Muslim and migrant youths. ... France must also reckon with its abiding racism, which pushed poor and unwanted citizens out from central Paris.”

Then talk about France's policy of “extreme secularism” — that is, people are supposed to identify as French first, and can't wear religious dress to school. “Demanding cultural assimilation may backfire,” wrote the L.A. Times' Doyle McManus.

Finally, suggest France's military intervention in Mali is upsetting people who see an Arab world under Western attack.

All of these forces, the theory goes, combined to radicalize and alienate Muslims — forcing them to kill.

To see how absurd this theory is, apply it locally.

Last Thursday, Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez killed four Marines. Though Abdulazeez was born in Kuwait, he grew up mostly in ... Tennessee. His neighbors told the Times he was “an all-American boy, handsome and polite.” He wasn't poor. His father was an engineer, and he, too, had an engineering degree.

Last month, Dylann Storm Roof killed nine black people in a South Carolina church. Did he do it because we're failing to integrate white boys?

What about the Tsarnaev brothers, who inflicted the 2013 marathon attack on Boston, killing four? They grew up in Cambridge, Mass. Did Cambridge fail to integrate them? As for poverty, inequality and racism: The younger Tsarnaev, Dzhokar, was a popular student at an elite college.

Further from home, consider Seifeddine Rezgui Yacoubi, who murdered 39 people, including 30 British, on a Tunisian beach last month. Yacoubi, 23, had a future: He was an engineering student.

And just like Roof, Yacoubi could hardly claim that Tunisia failed to integrate him.

France, like America, isn't perfect.

Police brutality and racism exist, just like here. Housing projects can be dangerous, just like here. You can find food-delivery people who refuse to deliver to lower-income housing in Westchester County. And France, with one-fifth our murder rate, would freak out at our housing-project homicide levels.

Plus, lots of cultures aren't integrated. Jehovah's Witnesses won't salute the flag, and ultra-Orthodox Jews won't shake women's hands. Many religious groups are fighting the settled law of the land with their opposition to gay marriage and birth-control mandates. As long as they don't kill anyone, so what?

Blaming a lack of integration for terrorist attacks is an insult to all of the Muslims (and other minorities) who suffer racism and who have to struggle harder to get a job, but don't kill anyone and do perfectly well in life.

Sometimes the obvious answer is the hard one — so people ignore it.

Dylann Roof killed black people because he hated them. Islamist terrorists kill people for similar motives of hatred or revenge.

And while you're maybe more likely to embrace these ideologies if life is not going great for you, the world is full of people with serious problems — from unemployment to loneliness — who would never dream of harming a soul.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post