‘Rise of Domestic Terrorism’ is What Happens When We ‘Weaken National Identity’
Ellis Island. (AP photo)
(CNSNews.com) -- Weakening national identity by emphasizing ethnic groups leads to an increase in domestic terrorism, Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez stated at an event in Washington last week.
“I believe national identity is the number one issue throughout the West. It is related to terrorists here in the homeland,” he said. "But the question of national identity is much greater.
“The rise in domestic terrorism is but one of the problems that we get into when we weaken national identity and emphasize group rights,” Gonzalez said during a discussion panel hosted by the Heritage Foundation on Thursday entitled “Defeating Islamism in Britain: Assessing David Cameron’s Approach.”
"Elites on both sides of the Atlantic have for the past 30 years carried out a sustained attack on all our institutions, all our traditions. They have deemphasized loyalty to the nation-state and have emphasized loyalty to the ethnic group.
"And they have all too often followed the radical strategy and the dangerous strategy of using immigrants to change demography,” Gonzalez pointed out.
Gonzalez referenced two domestic terrorists: Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who has been sentenced to death for the crime, and San Bernardino mass murderer Syed Farook, who was killed along with his wife in a shootout with police.
Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen, was born in Russia and emigrated to the U.S. with his parents and older brother and terror co-conspirator, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, when the two were still children.
Farook was born in Chicago to Pakistani immigrant parents. All three homegrown terrorists were raised in the Islamic faith.
“Neither one of these two [Dzokhar Tsarnaev and Farook] were taught to love America,” Gonzalez asserted. “They were not taught the things that were taught back when we had the Ellis Islanders, back when we had the immigration surge of the mid-19th century,” Gonzalez said.
Bystanders provide first aid to victim of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. (AP photo)
“We knew how to do this. We used to do this really well. We had a model and we abandoned the model.”
Gonzalez told CNSNews.com that “there was always an assimilationist push that came out from authorities. In the 19th century, we had the common schools that not only taught writing and arithmetic, but also taught American values.”
He said that during the 1890s and into the early 1900s, both Democratic and Republican politicians openly advocated for the assimilation of Ellis Island immigrants, stressing how important it was for these new Americans to embrace their adopted country and learn American civic values.
“I think we’ve always had that, and sadly we have deemphasized that in the last few decades,” Gonzalez said.
In teaching immigrant children and the children of immigrants, “we need to find a right balance,” he continued. “How to honor the land of their ancestors and how to love their new country and have a patriotic love of their new country.”
Gonzalez, who writes commentary for the Daily Signal and has also authored A Race for the Future: How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans, laid blame for the current lack of assimilation on the heads of government officials in both the United States and Europe.
The United States government “systematically divided the country into ethnic groups back in the `80s when the bureaucracy and the academics created out of whole cloth in some way five officially recognized groups: African Americans, Hispanics, whites, Native Americans and Asians.
“Membership in these groups are a factor considered in the most important issues of our lives, actually — university admissions, who gets hired, who receives a contract, who gets promoted,” Gonzalez pointed out.
“We can stop the Census Bureau from forcing us to [check] boxes and dividing us into groups. Obviously, affirmative action is a way that induces people to divide into groups because you get benefits if you divide into groups,” he told CNSNews.com.
Citing the writings of Martin Jay, a history professor at University of California, Berkeley, Gonzalez argued that “the Left created these groups to amass power.”
He said Jay has written about how proponents of traditional Marxism in the 1960s realized that most working class voters in America rejected the narrative required for the success of their Marxist agenda. So they shifted their focus to groups with perceived grievances, such as “students, blacks and other minority groups.”
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/jose-r-gonzalez/heritage-senior-fellow-rise-domestic-terrorism-what-happens-when-we
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