Will America Learn the Lessons of Sept. 11?

• Paying the price for foolish policies

Early on the morning of Sept. 11 five Middle Eastern men arrived at Boston's Logan airport just before their flight to Los Angeles took off, and bought one-way tickets with cash. This was a set of circumstances that should have resulted in immediate detention but did not. Both in 1999 and in 2000, Arabs who were kept from boarding planes sued airlines for "racial profiling," so at Logan no one dared stop what had every sign of being a hijack gang. The men went on to fly their plane into the World Trade Center in New York.

The events of Sept. 11 are the most spectacular consequence to date of two of the most self-destructive policies the United States has ever pursued: open immigration and the refusal to acknowledge group traits. Those five men should never have been let into the country, and they should have been profiled immediately as potential terrorists. With more than 6,000 Americans dead, billions in property damage, trillions in lost stock values, an airline industry on the brink of collapse, and the economy entering a recession, is there any chance our rulers have learned anything?

Immigration and National Security

One of the most obvious lessons begging to be learned is that diversity is not a strength. Even the most benighted liberals would be hard-pressed to state just what the United States has gained from seven million Muslims within its borders. And it is the presence of these seven million -- many of them Middle Easterners -- who gave the terrorists a plausible context here and permitted them to move from university to flight school to mosque to rent-a-car counter without attracting the slightest attention.

Some had been in the United States for several years, presumably imbibing the vapors that, we are told, can turn anyone into a happy member of the "first universal nation." They were unaffected. They were true to their blood, true to their religion, true aliens in the profoundest sense. And it is clear that many Middle Easterners living in our midst share their convictions, if not (yet) their willingness to die for them.

Although authorities are not certain of the identities of all 19 hijackers, at least 15 and perhaps all entered the United States legally. They came on tourist, business, and even student visas. Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian said to have been the ring-leader, entered the country from Germany in June, 2000, on a student visa. The Germans already had their eye on him as a possible bomb-thrower, but the INS either didn't know or didn't care. During his years in the West, he adjusted to the point of downing five Stolichnaya vodkas four nights before the attack, but he was still determined to kill as many of us as possible.

Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazami showed up in San Diego in November 1999. They went in and out of the country at will, and started taking flying lessons in May, 2000. Hani Hanjour, a Saudi Arabian who probably piloted the plane that hit the Pentagon, had lived in the United States on and off since 1990. In 2000, he got a student visa to study English at a one-month program given by ELS Language Centers in Oakland, California. He used the visa to enter the country but never showed up for class. The ELS people didn't get word from the INS that Mr. Hanjour had even gotten a visa, so they had no idea he was in the country. Even if they had told the INS their "student" was AWOL it would probably have done nothing; once someone is in the country legally, the INS doesn't much care what he does. One year later, this now-illegal, overstay alien helped kill Americans.

It is not as if we weren't warned. Eyad Ismoil, the man convicted of driving the truck full of explosives used to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993 was also in the country after overstaying his student visa.

And then there is Zacarias Moussaoui, a Moroccan Frenchman, who was arrested before the attacks, on August 17. He had been nosing around a Minnesota flight school, asking for simulator training on commercial jets. This was an odd request for someone who had never even soloed in a single-engine propeller plane. It was odder still that he said he didn't care about taking off or landing; all he wanted to know was how to steer. The flight school people alerted the police, who picked him up on a visa violation. Even before Sept. 11, French authorities told us he was a suspected terrorist, but our security wizards didn't put two and two together.

Some people think Mr. Moussaoui was the "20th hijacker." Three of the flights were commandeered by five men but the fourth -- which failed to hit its target and was probably downed when passengers swarmed the hijackers -- had only four terrorists on board. Mr. Moussaoui has refused to talk.

Others have refused to talk. Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammed Azmath, both Muslims from India, got on a cross-country flight from Newark at about the same time the hijackers boarded their flights. After their plane was grounded in St. Louis, they were found with box cutters, hair dye, and $20,000 in cash. Were they part of a fifth team but got cold feet? Were they on a practice run for a later attack? They won't say.

Ten of the hijackers did not come to America until July, just a few months before the attack. They were the muscle for the assaults, and spent their time lifting weights and practicing knife fighting. Many of them appear not to have spoken a word of English, but got visas and blended in just fine in multi-culti America.

The State Department manual for consular officers says not to issue visas to people who have planned or committed terrorist acts, but "mere membership" in a recognized terrorist group does not automatically disqualify a person, nor does "advocacy of terrorism." As the National Commission on Terrorism reported last year, "In spite of elaborate immigration laws and the efforts of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the United States is, de facto, a country of open borders."

The hijackers therefore got into the country with no trouble at all, and just overstayed their visas. Approximately 40 percent of our estimated 11 million illegals did the same thing: arrived legally and didn't go home. The United States does not have a system for figuring out who hasn't left when he should have. Failure to keep track of foreigners has now proven fatal.

Many of the foreigners who do go back, and who don't kill any of us while they are here, should never have been let in either. The State Department says Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Sudan all sponsor terrorism. Nevertheless, during the five-year period between 1991 and 1996 we let in 10,000 of their nationals on student visas. One of these was an Iraqi who got a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering at Michigan State University and is now the top scientist in the Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Three of the Iranians have also gone home to work on nuclear weapons. What is the use of calling countries "terrorist states" and then teaching their citizens how to make A-bombs? Senator Dianne Feinstein of California argued at first for a six-month moratorium on student visas but later backed off, saying she would be satisfied with better ways to keep track of no-shows and overstays.

The country that sends the largest number of students to the United States is China. There were 54,000 Chinese in American Universities last year, and they were not studying music theory or history of film. The FBI reports that many physics and aeronautics students are outright spies, while others are happy to report back to Beijing on everything they learn. As FBI director Louis Freeh testified back in 1998, "some foreign students are then encouraged to seek employment with U.S. firms to steal proprietary information." In the long run, educating Chinese is far more stupid and dangerous than educating Arabs (see book review, p. 9). China is a huge, racially homogeneous nuclear power with an ancient hunger for hegemony and an abiding hatred of the West (see book review, AR Feb., 2001, p. 7) It has the potential to make Osama bin Laden's efforts against us look like harmless pranks. All our jabber about a "diverse society" and "one world" only makes us vulnerable to people who laugh at foolishness of that kind.

Nests of Support

The FBI is now in the process of trying to root out the network that made the events of Sept. 11 possible. One nest of support may have been in Laurel, Maryland, the home of Moataz Al-Hallak. He is a radical imam who once had a congregation in Arlington, Texas, but moved to Maryland. One of his Texas protégés, Wadih El-Hage, was convicted this year of helping bomb the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The imam was born in Syria, makes frequent trips to Arab countries, and is now a U.S. citizen. At least six of the 19 hijackers spent as much as several weeks just a few miles from Mr. Al-Hallak's home, and the FBI wants to know how friendly they were. How did this America-hater become a U.S. citizen?

Jersey City, New Jersey, is another cozy roost for terrorists. Just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, it has one of the largest Arab populations of any city in America, and was the base for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian cleric who has a mosque in Jersey City, was convicted in 1995 of masterminding the attack. He was known for Khomeini-style sermons blasting the United States. What was he doing living here, teaching Arabs to hate us? Perhaps it was some of his followers who were detained and questioned after they held roof-top tailgate-style parties where they cheered and whooped as they watched the World Trade Center burn. The FBI is already holding a score of Jersey City Arabs, and is looking into whatever support they may have provided the hijackers.

The hijackers who took off from Dulles Airport took advantage of a different kind of immigrant network that let them get Virginia driver's licenses even though they were not residents. An American applicant has to show a Virginia lease or utility bill in his own name to prove residency, but the state waives that requirement for "refugees." They get by with a notarized residency form cosigned by a state resident, and an identity form cosigned by a lawyer. There is a brisk trade in bogus forms of this kind, and Herbert Villalobos is being held for dummying up papers for the hijackers. He was probably not in on the plot, but was uncovered only because he served the wrong customers.

In fact, the FBI says it has known for several years about four or five bin Laden groups (al Qaeda cells) operating in the United States. Each cell has fewer than a dozen members, and although authorities have been eyeing them, they came here legally and have not committed any known crimes. The FBI thinks they lie low, gather intelligence, support active terrorists, and wait for a good opportunity to swing into action.

Another purpose of these "sleeper" cells seems to be to make enough money to keep from draining the al Qaeda treasury. "Cells live off the land," says Jonathan Winer, a former State Department security official. "Once they've gotten seed money, they have to be self-sufficient." Some of these groups, which are probably operating in more than a dozen countries around the world, also benefit from a network of wealthy Muslims in the United States, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, who feed money to them through Islamic charities. So far, the FBI has found no connection between these cells and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Just as the hijackers looked into flying crop dusters, some of these lurkers got special permits to haul dangerous chemicals. Nabil Almarabh, a former Boston cab driver with ties to Mr. bin Laden, has a Michigan permit to haul hazardous waste, and an investigation found 20 more people who had gotten such permits by fraud. No doubt, the plan was to dump a truck load of dioxins into the water supply somewhere. Such are the charming neighbors our "diverse" society thoughtfully imports for our edification from all over the world.

Most of those who would like to kill us have no doubt kept their thoughts to themselves. Not so Abdou Larabou Moussa, originally from the Muslim country of Niger, who came to work after the attacks, celebrating loudly. He taunted his colleagues at Kay Chemical in Greensboro, North Carolina, and showed up the next day in military fatigues still gloating. "It was incredibly inappropriate," appears to be the extent of outrage mustered by a company vice president, who nevertheless reports Mr. Moussa has been fired.

Likewise imprudent were three Middle Easterners who were seen cheering and jumping for joy in the Meadowlands area of New Jersey after the attack. They were found to be illegals, and now face deportation.

The British paper The Guardian had no trouble tracking down "Americans" who feel the same way. "The only take you can have on it as a Muslim," says 14-year-old Mohamed Aissaoui, in the idiomatic language of the Brooklyn-born. "You're a Muslim first and American second," he explains. "If they [the terrorists] were doing it for a good cause," says this citizen of the United States and fine example of diversity, "then God bless them."

Some apparently peaceable foreigners here legally have decided to go home, now that terror has come to America. "We came here looking for economic security and to build professional careers," says Mariana Bruzzone who moved from Argentina to Miami. Now she and her boyfriend have bought tickets for Buenos Aires. Mahmoud Farahat, an Egyptian who recently graduated from the University of Miami, may also go home. The attack "ends the whole idea of America as a free country, where people from everywhere are supposed to go," he says, as if he should know. Rodolfo Araujo is a Colombian radiologist who has lived in America for 38 years. Now, he has decided to go back to Columbia when he retires -- despite a civil war that kills thousands every year. Other fair-weather Americans are no doubt clearing out, too.

In Hong Kong, visa applications have dropped by 70 percent since the bombing; pretending to be an American doesn't seem worth the bother anymore. Not surprisingly, visa requests remain unaffected in the world's most wretched countries. Ghanaians and Chadians still want to come to America despite the killings.

Mexicans appear to be happy to see America bloodied. Ana Maria Salazar is a Mexican-American who was a high-ranking defense official in the Clinton administration and now teaches at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. After the attack, she told her students that if Mexico really wants to be treated as an equal partner it must stand with America against terror. The students remained silent. But when another professor said the United States was a bully and did not deserve Mexican support, they burst into sustained applause. In September, Australian national radio reported that Mexicans were happily buying up T-shirts that say "Osama bin Laden is my hero," and that rubber masks of the terrorist leader were selling well.

President Vicente Fox has been trying to cut a dashing figure on the world stage, and has been lobbying for a seat on the U.N. Security Council. In keeping with this role, he wants Mexico to give America high-profile support but his countrymen are having none of it. They equate applauding America with subservience. The newspaper Reforma drew up a scorecard of how supportive different countries have been of the United States. Mexico tied with China for next-to-last, just ahead of Iraq and Cuba.

There have been few reports on how Mexicans already in the country reacted to the terror, but at least one student at the overwhelmingly-Mexican Century High School in Santa Ana, California, appears mainly to have been bored. "I'm tired of hearing about this already," said Joanna Guadard of the attacks, disappointed that her usual television programs were temporarily off the air.

And, indeed, when the House of Representatives voted after the attacks to authorize use of the military to help stop drugs and terrorists at the border, Hispanics were prominent in the opposition. As Rep. Silvestre Reves, Democrat of Texas, explained, "We are a country if immigrants, where civil rights are protected, so we must continue to make sure that actions are not taken which are contrary to these principles." Heidi Storsberg, a federal legislator in Mexico City agrees: "We are very worried about the possible militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border and the eventual spread of nationalistic, xenophobic and racist sentiments." Fernando Garcia of the Border Network for Human Rights in El Paso explains that any anti-immigrant sentiment on account of the attacks is just racism.

European Connection

Muslim immigration has made Europe a congenial home for terrorists, just as it has the United States. The German city of Hamburg is a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, and several of our hijackers spent time there. Mohammed Atta studied engineering there in the 1990s, and is reported to have converted to radical Islam during that period. It is now thought likely that the whole Sept. 11 mission was originally planned in Hamburg. German authorities say there are as many as 30 Islamic terrorist cells in the country, and that out of 3.1 million Muslims some 3,250 are "potential extremists."

Since the attack, possible accomplices have been arrested in Holland, Spain, and Belgium. In Madrid, police collared six Algerians with night vision goggles and state-of-the art forging equipment that could be used to make anything from passports to airplane tickets. One of the men was keeping a diary of his thoughts as an aspiring suicide bomber.

On Sept. 13 in Belgium, police arrested two suspected terrorists, one Tunisian-born, and the other Moroccan. One week later police searched the tiny Egyptian restaurant the two operated in the heart of Brussels' large Muslim district. They found 220 pounds of sulfur and 13 gallons of acetone -- the ingredients used in the homemade bombs that destroyed two American embassies in East Africa. Authorities think the materials were to be used to blow up NATO headquarters or perhaps the American embassy in Paris.

Britain, with its large Muslim population and loose border controls, is a Mecca for terrorists. Scotland Yard now believes 11 of the 19 hijackers traveled to England during the year, and that five of them attended an important strategy session there in June. British police say Lotfi Raissi, an Algerian flight instructor based in London, gave four of the hijackers flying lessons. The United States is seeking his extradition for conspiracy to commit murder.

London-based Islamic leader Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed has rejoiced in the attacks and publicly instructed Muslims to kill anyone -- including Muslims -- who helps non-Muslims in any military action against Muslims. He has even issued a fatwa, or Islamic death order, against Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf because Pakistan has reluctantly agreed to join the "war on terrorism."

Likewise in London, a 24-year-old Muslim named Mohammed Jameel claims to run a military-style training school for militants. He recruits young men at mosques and shows them videos of camps in Afghanistan where men train to fight "un-Islamic" regimes like those of Britain, the United States, and Israel. Mr. Jameel says he has sent hundreds of young British Muslims to fight in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

It is worth noting that the enterprising Mr. Jameel is British born and bred. For many Arabs, an entire lifetime in the West only encourages them to hate us. Raed Hijazi, born and educated in California, is a good example. He became radicalized through contacts at the Islamic Assistance Organization in Sacramento, and traveled to Afghanistan where he trained at al Qaeda bases. Able to move freely around the world on his U.S. passport, he ended up in Amman, Jordan, where he took part in a plot to blow up American and Israeli tourists in a millennium attack that was supposed to kill thousands on Jan. 1, 2000. Today, this U.S. citizen is in a Jordanian prison, after being arrested along with 26 accomplices, and faces a possible death sentence.

Kahlil Deek, also a U.S. citizen, was in on the plot too. His job was to review the targets, including a fully-booked Radisson hotel. The Jordanians nabbed him as well, but are not sure they have completely wiped out this terror cell. There is little doubt there are plenty of "Americans" who feel just as our fellow-citizens Mr. Deek and Mr. Hijazi do, but have not yet gone into action.

So, what is the country going to do about all this? At first the Justice Department asked for authority to lock up foreigners thought to be terrorists, and deport them without presenting evidence. The law would apply not only to visitors but to legal residents with green cards, and asylees, who can't now be deported. Later, Attorney General John Ashcroft had second thoughts and withdrew this plan. Now he is asking for the right to use foreign intercepts of Americans' communications abroad. At present there are Fourth Amendment limits on wiretaps, and U.S. authorities cannot use evidence from other countries that would be illegal if gathered by American surveillance.

The INS already has the right to lock up illegals indefinitely if there are "extraordinary circumstances," and by October 5, it had rounded up 156 people on immigration charges. It is convenient to be able to hold on to illegals, but illegals shouldn't be here in the first place. In the same period, the Justice Department had arrested more than 400 other people, whom it was holding without bail on minor offenses like traffic violations and misdemeanors. Most of them were not likely to be charged with helping the terrorists, but the FBI wanted to keep them handy. Legal specialists said it was unprecedented that such a large number of people be held in that manner, but judges allow this under special circumstances.

Some people think we need a national ID card. President Bush is reportedly horrified at the idea, but does not rule it out completely. A number of European countries have them. In France, anyone without a passport or carte d'identité can be hauled in for questioning. The British are likely to start issuing them, too. In a poll taken after the Sept. 11 attack, 85 percent of Brits say they like the idea. No fewer than 70 percent of Americans do, too. Chairman Larry Ellison of the database company Oracle says he would donate the software needed for ID cards.

What no one seems to be talking about are the most obvious steps of all: secure the borders, eliminate birth-right citizenship, and kick out anyone who fits the terrorist profile. As things stand today, Osama bin Laden and 12 pregnant wives could sneak across the porous Mexican border and he could become the father of 12 new American citizens. It is hard to think of a system better designed to destroy itself. The other obvious step is to throw out all illegals. We don't even need new laws for that. Another obvious step is to grant visas with much greater care, and to set up a system to track foreigners still here after their visas run out.

If the United States had properly guarded borders and did not hand out citizenship like candy, there would be no need for the inspections, intrusions, delays, eavesdropping, and harassment officials say are now necessary for our security. Not all that long ago, when Americans were either white or Negro, a Saudi hijacker would have been conspicuous.

The other obvious thing people are talking about, but mostly saying the wrong things, is racial profiling. This should be used routinely both domestically and at our borders. Citizens of the European Union do not need visas to come to America, but there are now millions of Arabs, Pakistanis, Turks, Indians, etc. who are EU citizens. If they show up waving European passports, we should treat them exactly as we would Arabs, Turks, etc. There are phony, white-hating Europeans just as there are phony, white-hating Americans, and it is dangerous to pretend otherwise.

Unfortunately, the perpetrators of the next act of mass terror are probably already here. Carrier groups in the Persian Gulf won't stop them. Airport security checks won't stop them either, if they decide to go low-tech and machine- gun Penn Station or Yankee Stadium. It's tough for the ones who mean well, but we should throw out every young foreign man known to be a devout Muslim. Foreigners are in this country at our pleasure, and if they displease us, out they go.

Nothing as sensible as this will happen, of course, until more Americans are dead. Attorney General John Ashcroft has been promising that the war on terrorism will be fought "with a total commitment to protect the rights, the constitutional rights and the privacy of all Americans." This is another way of saying no racial profiling -- at least not officially. President Bush went out of his way to visit an Islamic center just a few days after the attack, and tell us how wonderful Muslims are.

As a practical matter, there will be plenty of racial profiling. Several commercial pilots have already tossed passengers off their planes for no other reason than other passengers thought they looked dangerous. The FBI has asked for the confidential records of thousands of foreign students, particularly those with Middle Eastern names. And now that the word has gone out to companies that haul hazardous materials or dust crops to be on the look out for suspicious characters, does anyone think they are going to give Norwegians or Southerners or Englishmen special scrutiny?

A few days after the attack, the San Jose International Airport piously announced its security measures "will be the same for any human being," but the murder of 6,000 Americans seems to have knocked a glimmer of good sense into at least a few people. In a Sept. 22 article, the New York Times had no trouble finding blacks who said Arabs spook them these days. "Yes, I'd be aware of them, I'd be nervous," says Ron Arnold, who adds, "I've been racially profiled all my life." Not surprisingly, although blacks have been complaining for years about racial profiling, they are the most eager to profile Middle Easterners. According a Gallup Poll, 71 percent said Arabs -- citizens or not -- should get greater scrutiny at airports. Only 57 percent of whites thought so, which means 43 percent have been so brainwashed they think we have to be as suspicious of grandmothers as of tough-looking young Arabs.

Needless to say, jumped-up Arab spokesmen have started lecturing us on the deeper meaning of America. Profiling would just not be "what this country is all about," says Nadeem Salem of the Association of Arab-Americans in Toledo, Ohio. Yaser Bushnaq, president of another Arab group called Solidarity US, says the current investigation is nothing more than harassment of Arabs, and has advised fellow Muslims they have the right to refuse to talk to the FBI.

It is true that there has been some unnecessarily aggressive profiling, but not by the authorities. The best known is the case of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a turbaned Sikh killed by someone who thought he was shooting an Arab. There have been scattered reports of revenge attacks all around the country: people have tried to set fire to a mosque in Seattle, run over a Pakistani woman in Huntington, New York, and shoot a Moroccan gas station attendant in Palos Heights, Illinois. In London, thugs reportedly stomped on an Afghani taxi driver paralyzing him. There have also been nasty exhortations on the Internet to kill all Muslims.

The boneheads will always be with us, but there are boneheads on both sides. At a private Muslim school in Garden Grove, California, called Orange Crescent, the principal told his students their phone lines are probably being tapped. Teachers encourage the view there is no proof Muslims were involved in the attack. "There are people out there who just hate Muslims," explains the principal.

And in Saudi Arabia, our ally in the war on terrorism, citizens are doing their own profiling. Anti-white sentiments are palpable, and expatriates are keeping indoors. Those who go out may be spat on or have stones thrown at them. Many white women feel so uncomfortable they are leaving the country. One European reports that where he works, Saudis were so happy the day after the attack, they were hugging and kissing each other.

Lessons, anyone?

The British have promised to streamline extradition proceedings, and have tumbled to the view they should not grant asylum to anyone suspected or convicted of terrorism. The Dutch, paragons of sheep-to-the-slaughter "multi-culturalism," are beginning to wake up. Agence France Press reported on Oct. 3 that anti-foreigner remarks, which were absolutely taboo before Sept. 11, are now common, and that even a few politicians are openly doubting the success of multi-racialism. In the three weeks after the attack there were 90 reported incidents of mostly verbal abuse of Muslims, an unheard of figure in ordinary times. A poll found that more than two thirds of the Dutch say they think any Muslim who approved of the attacks should be kicked out of the country. "Democratic" Holland will no doubt fail to act on the wishes of its people, but it is encouraging to see a little spine among the supine. Similar sentiments are no doubt sweeping France, Germany, and Italy.

In the United States, there have already been a few small, welcome changes. Less than a week before the attack, George Bush was telling the world the United States has "no more important relationship in the world than the one we have with Mexico." He doesn't seem to have much time for his amigo Vicente these days, and the chatter about amnesty for Mexican illegals has stopped.

The day before the attack, former President William Clinton was in Australia imparting wisdom to a select group of 35 business leaders. His theme was that Australia must remain open to immigrants and cultivate diversity. "The President believes the world will be a better place if all borders are eliminated," reported Tom Hogan, president of Vignette Corporation and host of the gathering. Mr. Clinton might not sing the same song today.

Likewise, Jesse Jackson is too busy pretending the Taliban invited him to come mediate the crisis to have gotten very far with what was supposed to be his number one post-Durban conference priority: reparations for slavery. Hillary Clinton is thankfully out of the news, and what were once boomed as burning issues -- whether to let people sue HMOs and if old people should get free drugs -- have faded into the insignificance they deserve.

The more important lessons, however, are likely to be lost. To the already undeceived, the events of Sept. 11 are the most powerful and dramatic proofs yet of the bankruptcy of any number of fashionable myths, but the willfully blind will find ways to stay that way.

First, race and nationality are crucially important. Every one of the 19 terrorists was clearly and obviously Middle Eastern. The attackers, and those picked up around the world in the wake of the attack, have been Saudis, Egyptians, Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans. All are Muslims. What is more, years of residency in the West, and even European or American citizenship have proven to be no impediment to murderous hatred of America. Mohammed Atta and several others were radicalized while living in the West. The attacks have also uncovered American- and British-born Arabs -- citizens -- who hate America just as intensely as Iraqis or Palestinians who live under the threat of American-made bombs. There could be no clearer evidence for the persistence of racial, ethnic, and religious loyalty. For these people, as for millions of other non-whites who live among whites, the idea of assimilation is a huge joke.

Second, the United States must protect itself against aliens. It is now like a man without a skin, open to infection at any time. And it is the height of folly to pretend that all foreigners are equally likely to want to kill us. So far, the only foreigners who have shown themselves to be intent on murder have been Arabs. Now that American troops are killing Muslims, does anyone believe the revenge killings that will surely come will be the work of Argentines or Australians?

Whatever Ben Wattenberg or William Clinton may say, we live in separate camps divided by race, religion, language, and culture. It is true that we have had our own home-grown mass-murderer, Timothy McVeigh, but he represents a purely domestic, purely American phenomenon. We can be completely confident that people of our own camp -- whites -- will not slip into our country and try to kill us.

Once again, it will probably take several thousand more dead Americans, killed at the hands of Middle Easterners, before our country officially wakes up to the obvious: that Arabs -- like all foreigners -- have no right to come here. Once they are here, they do no discernible good and much harm. The obvious response is to keep them out and send home the ones who are here.

Apparently it takes murderous outrage for brainwashed Americans finally to realize "diversity" may not be so grand after all. If, because of these terrible attacks, the country manages to turn a calculating eye on the costs and benefits of playing host to millions of Arabs, the red-ink dead-loss bottom line should raise questions about other groups. What earthly good do Cambodians, Nigerians, Guatemalans, Haitians, and all the rest of them do the country?

In the longer term, what do these attacks say about the presence of Mexicans in our midst? Is it impossible to imagine a sharp diplomatic or economic conflict with Mexico after which we wake up to find millions of "fellow Americans" at our throats? It is probably already too late for the United States to assert robust national interests against Mexico without starting an insurrection. Even without an international crisis, Mexican irredentists and American-born reconquistadors are scheming to take over the Southwest. Who is to say their efforts to rid the area of whites will not some day include bombing and mass murder? Mexican terror will be infinitely more difficult to track and contain than Arab terror.

In the nearer term, we could even let this war on terrorism become an occasion to let in even more potential terrorists. Wherever we make war -- Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, the Balkans -- we create refugees, and some of them always end up here. What will happen after we have backed the ethnic-Tajik Northern Alliance in a takeover of Afghanistan, and they are later expelled by non-Taliban Pashtuns? As they always do, our defeated "allies" will come knocking at our door. There are already two million Afghan refugees in Pakistan alone. How many of them will eventually contribute to our sacred "diversity"?

Our rulers do not yet understand what is really at stake when liberal mantras govern race and immigration policy. However, with typical exaggeration, commentators keep telling us Sept. 11 has "changed everything." Let us hope that one of the things that begins to change is the suicidal mentality that refuses to admit the persistence of racial and national loyalty in a world in which only whites have stripped themselves of collective defenses.

About the author

Jared Taylor is the editor of American Renaissance magazine. This article first appeared in the November 2001 issue of that magazine.