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partnerships, but again they tend focus on linking to local elites, mosques, schools, and similar organizations in order to channel information about suspicious activities.46 The relationships tend to be one-way conduits of information rather than mutually respectful exchanges. Few practices of the authorities, if any, are about inclusiveness per se—enabling, for example, the Arab American and Muslim communities’ concerns about the wars in Muslim countries or the “war on terrorism” that has clearly targeted Muslims as “legitimate” American viewpoints . In fact, the news media act to preclude that for the most part.47 The drift of American policy and practice, then, remains rather steadfast in its stereotyping of Muslims, its discrimination against Muslims, and its association of terrorism and terrorist threats with Muslims; even if these views are not majoritarian or severe, they are prevalent, and they are felt by Muslims and other Arab Americans. The efforts at integration, by contrast, appear thin as an intentional policy, nationally or locally. So we have a fraction of the Muslim population in the United States that feels hostility from the majority population, expresses strong views about the moral acceptability of political violence, and sees the U.S. government as unjustifiably attacking Muslims. And we have a significant segment of native-born non–Muslim Americans regarding those disaffected views of Muslims as profound threats that must be dealt with forcefully. This could very well be regarded as a recipe for a violent confrontation. But would greater efforts at integration defuse this potential clash? It is far more likely, given the relatively prosperous economic status of Muslims, that further efforts at integration as such do not have as much conflict-prevention potential as other measures. The United States’ vastness has dissipated many social frictions, as historians like Frederick Jackson Turner have held, and the economy is dynamic, with considerable opportunity for upward mobility. Ethnic neighborhoods of long standing are customary. Social integration in terms of greater tolerance would be welcome, but it does not logically follow that the small minority of apparently disaffected Muslims will be placated by what is likely to be a gradual and diffused process. The experience of blacks in America is instructive here. No group could have been more marginalized and isolated than African Americans, and their legacy of slavery, discriminatory laws and practice, and hostile white racism in America is a source of division and bitterness. But the level of political violence in riots in some major cities in the 1960s, while very troubling at the time, was relatively minor given the hundreds of years of injustice and insult, and in part was provoked. Efforts at “affirmative action” and fair housing likely had beneficial, if limited, results. Many informed observers, however, regard integration policies to have been partial or incomplete, and significantly retarded or reversed over time; in some cases, as in education and housing, integration produced a backlash against blacks, chronic and sometimes violent in nature.48 What one can conclude from the African American experience is too complex to argue here, but two defensible assertions are that integration and social peace are not unambiguously linked; neither are alienation and persistent political violence. SECURITY AND ANTITERROR POLICIES 73 (Violent crime is another matter.) In short, integration policies, while imperfectly administered, cannot be said to have quelled the black unrest of the late 1960s or the persistent alienation of young black men since, even as the black middle and professional classes have grown markedly. American political leadership on racial integration was inconsistent and frequently disingenuous, but there can be little doubt that the lack of a firm commitment to fairness and equality is one cause of ongoing alienation. The same could be said of the antiterror policies of today that have dominated the nation’s airwaves, elections, and attitudes since September 2001. Alienation and its ill effects derive more from this uniformly inhospitable political climate than from an absence of integration. The foiled attacks in the United States are very few in number, and have apparently been related most directly to the war in Iraq, as have most of those in Europe. And the two major cases in North America—the Fort Dix would-be attackers and the Toronto 14—do not show signs of segregation being a cause. Those arrested in the Toronto case were described by a Canadian police commissioner as coming from a broad stratum of society.49 If segregation is not a cause (though of course...

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