Better in their words…

Review & Outlook: David Cameron’s Warning – WSJ.com.

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David Cameron gave a bracing speech about multiculturalism on Saturday, notable as much for the venue as his argument. The annual Munich Security Conference typically devotes itself to foreign policy and defense. By denouncing multiculturalism at the conference, Mr. Cameron put the subject at the center of the West’s security agenda.

Past time, too. The U.S., Canada and the EU are waking up to the realization that terrorism isn’t simply a phenomenon that arrives from abroad. The four young men who perpetrated the July 7, 2005 bombings in London were all U.K. born. So was Rashid Rauf, the alleged mastermind of the plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners in the summer of 2006. The American terrorist imam Anwar al-Awlaki was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and got a bachelor’s degree from Colorado State.

The usual explanation for why young Muslims turn to terrorism varies: anger at Western policies, the absence of democracy in the Middle East, or the effects of poverty. But as Mr. Cameron noted, terrorists are often middle class or better and usually well-educated. While undemocratic regimes may explain extremism in Egypt, they don’t explain why there are “so many extremists in free and open societies” like the U.K.

Mr. Cameron’s argument is that the core problem is a matter of identity. In the U.K., young Muslim men, children of immigrants, “find it hard to identify with the traditional Islam practices at home by their parents.” But at the same time they find it hard to identify with Britain. “Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism,” Mr. Cameron notes, “we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.”

The result is a set of double standards—what George W. Bush might call the soft bigotry of low expectations—in which social behavior that Western societies would never tolerate from most citizens is met with official indifference when it comes to immigrant communities. In Mr. Cameron’s list, that includes forced marriage, hate speech and terrorist incitement. Even worse, “some organizations that seek to present themselves as a gateway to the Muslim community are showered with public money despite doing little to combat extremism.”

Much of the blame lies with the Muslim communities themselves. But Mr. Cameron is right that attitudes of “hands-off tolerance” toward extremism are equally a problem. If a society lacks the confidence of its own values, it’s no wonder so many young Muslims reject them. From there, the road from Islamist belief to violent action can be short.

Mr. Cameron’s remedy is what he calls “muscular liberalism.” “A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. . . . It says to its citizens, this is what defines us as a society: To belong here is to believe in these things.”

In today’s Britain, throughout Europe and increasingly in America, the police and security services must now track thousands of potential terrorists among its own citizens. To attack the problem at a deeper source, we should heed Mr. Cameron’s call to be “unambiguous and hard-nosed about this defense of our liberty.”