Corrosive

When Islamic terror occurs, it has a corrosive affect. With the exception of people in the immediate vicinity of an attack, the populace doesn't panic, but feels a pervasive unease. As the frequency of attacks increases (as has happened over the past few years under the feckless leadership of the Obama administration), the public accepts increasing inconvenience and privacy violations foisted on them by a government that is flailing to look like it's doing something.

For example, we stand in long lines at airports that according to the government's own studies fail to find 90+ percent of contraband that might be smuggled on an aircraft. In the name of political correctness, profiling—the most effective form of human screening—is verboten. In its place time and resources are dedicated to body searches of 70-year old grandmothers and 4-year old children. Randomness (in the name of "fairness") is used in place of common sense and effectiveness.

When someone suggests that it might be a good idea to surveil Muslim communities in which there is a strong indication of radicalization, the PC-crowd, along with the trained hamsters in the media that support them, goes into a swoon. They tell us, without a shred of evidence to back up their contention, that such surveillance will further radicalize Muslims and make us less safe.

Let's consider that contention for just a moment and take it a face value. What the PC crowd is really telling us is that the "Muslim community" is so fragile, so close to going over the edge and becoming radicalized, that surveillance of those who might move toward violence or preach hatred would cause "peaceful and moderate Muslims" to become Jihadists. That, of course, is the soft-bigotry of progressive thinking—the PCers imply tht Muslims are just too fragile to recognize that something very bad is happened among their co-religionists, and that maybe, just maybe, surveillance is justified for the protection of their community and the country as a whole.

Those of us who reject the soft bigotry of PC thinking give peaceful and moderate Muslims far more credit, recognizing that if they are peaceful and moderate they will embrace all efforts to rid their religion of the those who spread the cancer of Islamist thought. After all, we embrace long TSA lines without rioting or becoming radicalized, and long TSA lines are overt surveillance, aren't they?

UPDATE - I:
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Jason Riley justiposes the escalating series of recent terror attacks with Barack Obama's insistence that his hands-off approach to terror and tedious lectures on the danger of Islamophobia are working. He writes:

Graeme Wood, a terrorism scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, has noted that Islamic State “rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.”

Read Jeffrey Goldberg’s profile of Mr. Obama in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine, and you might come away thinking that the president’s concern for his own legacy plays a not-so-small role in his antiterror thinking. “The message Obama telegraphed in speeches and interviews was clear,” writes Mr. Goldberg. “He would not end up like the second President Bush—a president who became tragically overextended in the Middle East, whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed with grievously wounded soldiers, who was helpless to stop the obliteration of his reputation, even when he recalibrated his policies in his second term.”

Mr. Bush prioritized national security, not improving his personal popularity or burnishing his image for posterity. Apparently Mr. Obama sees that as a flaw.

When this administration's approach to combating Islamic terror is considered, it's one flaw after another flaw—all the way down.

UPDATE - II:
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Donald Trump has been labeled a racist and a bigot for suggesting that open borders and those who cross them illegally might not be a net positive for America. But if we strip away political correctness, does Trump have a valid point? Victor Davis Hansen doesn't pull any punches when he dissects Europe's current dilemma and draws parallels to the unrelenting call for open borders among progressives in the United States:

In Europe, immigrants are political tools of the Left. The rapid influx of vast numbers of unassimilated, uneducated, poor, and often illegal newcomers may violate every rule of successful immigration policy. Yet the onrush does serve the purposes of the statist, who demagogues for an instantaneous equality of result. Bloc voters, constituents of bigger government, needy recipients of state largesse, and perennial whiners about inequality are all fodder for European multicultural leftists, who always seek arguments for more of themselves.

So unassimilated poor immigrants from the former Third World become easy proof that inequality and unfairness are still here and must be addressed with someone else’s money — as if France has failed because it did not make an immigrant born in Algeria a good French socialist restaurant owner in 20 years.

The same phenomenon is with us in the United States. Without open borders, the Democrats would have had to explain to Americans how and why more taxes, larger government, more subsidies, less personal freedom, racial separatism, ethnic chauvinism, and a smaller military make them more prosperous and secure. Yet importing the poor and the uneducated expands the Democratic constituency. The Democrats logically fear measured, meritocratic, and racially and religiously blind legal immigration of those who want to come to America to seek freedom from statism. If a poor Oaxacan, who crossed into the U.S. three years ago — without education, legality, or knowledge of English — does not have a good car, adequate living space, and federalized health care, then the Koch brothers, Wall Street, Fox News, or the Chamber of Commerce — fill in the blank — is to blame, and legions of progressives are available to be hired out to redress such social injustice.

Europe has run out of options because it waited too long. Those of us who have watched this slow motion train wreck occur over the past decade have warned that European culture will slowly disappear. That's already beginning to happen, and its a clear warning to the United States.