The very open society and its enemies

So there are Islamic riots in Nigeria over a remark about the Miss World pagent, an American nurse gets shot dead in Lebanon, El Al saw a hijack attempt, what the hell is the Arab world coming to? Roger Scrouton is now claiming that American Multiculturalism is too open, and I am starting to wonder about that myself.

There is a book that I read about 20 years ago (that inspired me to think about politics) called A Nation of Sheep by William J. Lederer. In that book the author described how the communists in China would take a student from every little town and bring them to Beijing or somewhere, and give them the royal treatment, educate them, and propogandize a lot. By the end of the student's education a sympathizer was born. Then they sent him back to the village he came from to work on the rest of the population.

The point I think was that it might not be a bad idea to allow a lot of foreign students to come to the US (on us) and learn about the wonders of democracy and freedom, so that they can go back and take some of this to their villages and hopefully get the world to be a better place than it is.

Somehow this is not working. I suspect the reason is that when we see a foreigner, we do not tell them what we are, we ask them to spread what they are, so that the US can be more "diverse". What we ended up with is a large taxpayer-funded platform for people to come in and preach militant Islamic fundamentalism and declare a Jihad against the people who finally give them platforms. This is unacceptable. We would look at all these people and patronizingly look at them and smile and declare their way of life so "interesting" and ignore the fact that it was actually quite repugnant to the values that allowed the person to be brought here int he first place.

We did not spend any effort in to assuring that the people who came here were not enemies of democracy, pluralism, and toleration or us. They are. And we are now paying for it.