Going Dark

An interesting thing seems to happen immediately after a major terrorist attack is thwarted, or worse, after one occurs. First, the usual suspects on the angry Left blame the victim or potential victim, arguing, as Senator Kennedy did yesterday, that our own corrupt foreign policy inflamed the Islamofacist scum who planned the attack. And then, the voices on the angry Left all go dark. Not forever, but for a few days.

It’s as if they’re reminded that evil lurks in the mist, just outside their view, and that grown-up people with serious intent must find it and kill it. But then after a few days, the image of evil fades and it’s back to the same old same old.

In an interesting post at The Belmont Club, a commenter who calls himself “The Mad Fiddler” comments on the threat and the angry Left’s reaction to it. I’m not sure I agree with his conclusions, but the commentary is thought provoking:

… the threat posed by Islamic Jihadi regimes is pretty much the same as that we face from individual Jihadi nutballs — terrorist acts against soft targets, targets of opportunity, using improvised schemes rather than military weapons systems.

Instead of a cataclysmic saturation attack of nukes [by the Islamists], we can expect a prolonged hemorrhage of puny-prong acts of sabotage, punctuated by an occasional mass casualty incident on a grand scale, which might include a low-efficiency nuclear device in a container, or truck, or small aircraft ….

We have to contemplate harsh options; we have to harden ourselves to a sustained series of painful and ugly lessons, because Islamic Jihadis have shown they are determined to bring their attack to us. We’ve all grown up in a country where we are accustomed to safety, and when that is interrupted, we take it for granted that the government will quickly come along to clear away the bodies. In other parts, when the combat moves along, the locals have to either step around the bodies, or clean up the debris themselves.

What I have predicted in the past I still believe: that a point will be reached where the Left in this country will finally feel personally threatened, realizing that Jihad will slaughter them regardless of how many times they voted against Bush; regardless of how many anti-war vigils they’ve attended; regardless of their disinvestment in Halliburton stock; regardless of their contributions to CAIR and the ACLU. The Jihadis will in time commit one atrocity too many, or one atrocity too enormous, and the former sympathizers and apologists will realize they have been meant for the chop all along, and they will turn.

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This is what I fear more than anything else. Those who are already convinced and enlisted tend toward a conventional, if vehement, military argument, with all the discipline and respect for chain of command that implies. When the Left turns — when those who are obstinately blind to the danger finally awaken in bowel-gushing fear — I believe we will see the reverse side of the Left’s long posturing for patience and indulgence. Their response (I am convinced from the historical excesses of past Leftist regimes) will be a tsunami that crests on far shores beyond anyone’s reckoning, because the convert is ever the most zealous.

It’s hard to say what will convince the angry-Left that the threat is real and that appeasement is not the answer. It’s even harder to predict how they will react when they finally realize that their complete value system -- their art, their letters, their music, their religious (or non religious ) freedoms – all of it – will be the first thing that Islamofascism would destroy.

It’s also hard to conceive of a time when we all stand united against Islamofascism. After 9/11 there was a bumper sticker, still on some cars and trucks today, that read, “United We Stand.”

And divided, we may very well fall.