National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, argues that terminology is important when discussing terrorism in the West. “‘[H]omegrown terrorism’ is surely among the most ill-conceived and thus self-defeating terms in national security,” McCarthy writes. “There is no ‘homegrown’ Islamic terrorism in the West. Being born in a Western country, or being resident in one at the time of ‘radicalization,’ does not mean one’s terrorism is ‘homegrown.’ What grows a terrorist in Paris – or New York, London, Madrid, Hamburg, etc. – is not his environs; it is Islamic supremacist ideology. That ideology is not Western; indeed, it is virulently hostile to the West. That it has been injected here does not make it of here.” Worse, he continues, “Referring to this ideology as ‘homegrown’ is an insidious manifestation of willful blindness. It suggests that it must be something about the Western host country that ‘radicalizes’ Muslims – something, anything, other than Islam. It undergirds the fiction that the resulting radicals are ‘violent extremists’ who, if not out and out nihilists or lunatics, must be motivated by oppressive Western policies and historical Western sins – not by an aggressive ideology of conquest that commands them to make war on non-Muslims. That is, the notion of ‘homegrown terrorism’ obscures the fact that terrorism against the West is inspired by a supremacist interpretation of Islam.” Well said. More…