In case you worry about getting blown up or whatever, the 9/11 Commission says our policies are still terrible, which isn't all that reassuring. People probably don't focus all that much on this, because we haven't been attacked again, raising the question of why. The biggest factor, or so it seems, is that American Muslims simply don't have much interest in becoming radicalized, suicide-bombing jihadis which has a huge security value. But why is that? Spencer Ackerman takes a look, and to oversimply a bit the answer is that Americans are very religious and pretty tolerant. And there are risks:

But the protections of American liberalism and American religiosity are not impenetrable. Obviously, Al Qaeda could once again place operatives in the U.S. homeland. But, more substantially, the greatest danger to the present U.S.-Muslim compact is the increasing suspicion of American Muslims. This suspicion has been fanned by opportunistic politicians like Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney--a 2008 presidential hopeful who, in a September speech, suggested widespread surveillance of U.S. mosques--and by hysterical pop culture offerings like "Sleeper Cell," a Showtime TV thriller premiering this week about a Muslim enemy within. An October 2004 Zogby poll found that a plurality of American Muslims believe "constitutional issues"--a proxy for the Patriot Act and immigration enforcement--are the most important challenge facing their community, with "bias/racism" coming a very close second. (The third, tellingly, was "becoming mainstream.") Post-September 11 suspicion of American Muslims may have been inevitable, but it's also "remarkably insulting and a moral disappointment," says Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at UCLA and a prominent liberal voice among American Muslims. Abou El Fadl is an excellent case in point: He has endured death threats for his supposed Islamic heterodoxies and has helped the FBI create profiles of terrorist cells. But even an unapologetically American and pious Muslim like himself is unable to escape innuendo about his membership in a fifth column: He was termed a "stealth Islamist" by a 2004 Middle East Quarterly article.

So that's more stuff to worry about.