Radicalization and the Travel Ban

In the wake of Donald Trump’s executive order banning refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries, one of the loudest outcries against it was that it could serve as a de facto rallying cry for the Islamic State. In a recent article, Simon Cottee, curiously, rejected that notion, brushing it off as “conventional liberal wisdom.” In doing so, he politicizes the issue of terrorism.

To make his case, he cherry-picks several quotes from counterterrorism scholars and practitioners—including Paul Pillar, Jessica Stern, and Nada Bakos, an author of this piece—suggesting we share a racist,He portrays us as worrying that the ban could lead to the kind of “polarization” between Muslims and everyone else that ISIS explicitly embraces as a goal. But reading our original words in their full context clearly shows that we do not believe in any sort of polarization between Muslims and everyone else.That is the terrorists’ view.