It's a War

In the aftermath of yet another Islamic terror atrocity in Manchester, England, we again experience deja vu. It doesn't much matter whether the Islamists spray a crowd with an semi-automatic weapon, use a suicide bomber to murder dozens at a public event, drive a truck into a crowded street gathering, knife people on a public street or hijack planes to kill thousands, they are at war within our borders, and we are not. The Left will warn us to avoid Islamophobia, worried more about the sensibilities of the broader Muslim community than they are about the deadly threat that always seems to come out of that community.

Roger Simon comments:

It's not just "Manchester England." If you think what happened in Blighty can't happen here -- 19 killed, 59 injured [the numbers are now, 22 and over 100]-- you'll have to excuse me if I say "You're out of your bloomin' mind." Did you already forget 9/11/2001? Or the Boston Marathon? Or San Bernardino? Or the Orlando gay bar attack less than a year ago that killed 49?

Oh, yeah. Seems so long ago, doesn't it, even that last one? The "new normal." We put these things out of our minds the week after to deal with the next trivial Washington scandal or go about our petty lives. Our culture lives in a self-destructive willful blindness, refusing to see the obvious even though it happens again and again across the globe. Radical Islam, Islamism, or whatever you want to call it has been at war with us since the Twin Towers came down and even well before. And they have no intention whatsoever of stopping.

Nevertheless we respond in the most perfunctory manner, nattering on about how Islam is a"religion of peace," criticizing ourselves and others for "Islamophbia," or dismissing it all as a police matter.

Donald Trump took a step in the right direction by addressing the matter directly at the Conference of 50 Arab states in Saudi Arabia. He called upon Islam to develop it's own chemotherapy to address the cancer that has metastacized within it. But what about the West? Reacting after a terror attack, no matter how quickly and how effectively, does little to bring back the dead, salve the broken hearts of families, and calm a public that forgets quickly (part of the problem) but nonetheless, has a deeply buried and unconscious feeling of unease. That's what the Muslim terrorists want to achieve.

The Leftist mantra "What if they held a war and no one showed up" is an epic in moral preening. Too bad the Islamists show up, every time. Too bad too many of us refuse to recognize it's a war.


UPDATE-1:
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Richard Fernandez always seems to be able to get at the core of an issue. He writes:

The Independent offers predictable advice to the British public after a terror bombing attack on a concert for teenage girls in Manchester that left more than 20 killed and 3 score mutilated and crippled for life. The writers confidently assert that "there's only one way Britain should respond to attacks such as Manchester. That is by carrying on exactly as before."

They themselves may do so if they wish but there may be a scarcity of followers. The latest in a line of phrases like "we can't let hatred change us; this is not who we are etc" sound like the pleadings of a cult leader to the faithful after the Mothership failed to arrive. The faithful are heading for the door. In fact the pixels were hardly dry on the computer monitors when the Independent itself reported panic as hundreds ran from real or imagined peril inside a Manchester shopping mall.

Terror has already changed us in ways ranging from the gradual collapse of the Schengen area [EU open border policies], intrusive inflight security including a ban on electronic devices in flight to the inevitable tightening of security at all future concerts and exhibitions. If there's one thing Ariana Grande will have at future concerts it's security grande ...

Fernandez argues that trust is being shaken. He writes:

You can't operate without trust.

If we are to prevent a new medievalism [tribe killing tribe] finding the right balance between an open society and maintaining loyalty and allegiance is necessary. It is a difficult task under any circumstances. But rarely has anyone failed more dismally at it than the leaders of our multi-culti world. By stigmatizing calls for reasonable loyalty as bigotry they have climbed out on a limb and sawed themselves off; by their dogmatic insistence on mindless inclusion they've foreclosed all attempts to bring things back to even keel. They have reduced themselves to the level of hapless bystanders, unable to either prevent or explain an onslaught they themselves -- were they honest enough to admit it -- should have foreseen.

When you're in a war—and we are in a slow motion war within our own borders—political correctness is the enemy's most potent weapon. It stifles what needs to be said and what needs to be done. It cripples efforts at finding and eliminating the threats we face before they become actual events, labeling such efforts with a stigma that precludes their use. It has already and will again get people killed.

UPDATE-2:
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Brendan O'Neill comments on what Richard Fernandez calls "the leaders of our multi-culti world" want from its citizens:

After the terror, the platitudes. And the hashtags. And the candlelit vigils. And they always have the same message: ‘Be unified. Feel love. Don’t give in to hate.’ The banalities roll off the national tongue. Vapidity abounds. A shallow fetishisation of ‘togetherness’ takes the place of any articulation of what we should be together for – and against. And so it has been after the barbarism in Manchester. In response to the deaths of more than 20 people at an Ariana Grande gig, in response to the massacre of children enjoying pop music, people effectively say: ‘All you need is love.’ The disparity between these horrors and our response to them, between what happened and what we say, is vast. This has to change.

It is becoming clear that the top-down promotion of a hollow ‘togetherness’ in response to terrorism is about cultivating passivity. It is about suppressing strong public feeling. It’s about reducing us to a line of mourners whose only job is to weep for our fellow citizens, not ask why they died, or rage against their dying. The great fear of both officialdom and the media class in the wake of terror attacks is that the volatile masses will turn wild and hateful. This is why every attack is followed by warnings of an ‘Islamophobic backlash’ and heightened policing of speech on Twitter and gatherings in public: because what they fundamentally fear is public passion, our passion. They want us passive, empathetic, upset, not angry, active, questioning. They prefer us as a lonely crowd of dutiful, disconnected mourners rather than a real collective of citizens demanding to know why our fellow citizens died and how we might prevent others from dying. We should stop playing the role they’ve allotted us.

The irony of all of this is that by cultivating public "passivity" today, the elites are planting the seeds for a "medieval" reaction down the road.

At some point, the Islamists will conduct a mass casualty attack that crosses a line that should never be crossed. When that happens, and it will happen given our current trajectory, all the PC gibberish in the world will do nothing to stop a reaction that will be ferocious, and possibly, violent. Civil rights will go out the window, every Muslim will become suspect, and no Muslim will be granted entry to the West. Tribes will emerge and trust will be defined by the tribe one belongs to.

No one wants this, but the seeds that will yield that toxic fruit are being planted after every heinous Islamic terror event with every condescending warning for us not to be Islamophobic, for us to accept this new reality and be ever vigilant, but never angry. In the main body of this post, I noted that PC "has already and will again get people killed." Down the road, I fear that many of those people will be Muslims.

UPDATE-3
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Rod Liddle provides an angry summary of the PC drivel that has become standard in the immediate aftermath of yet another islamic terror incident. This from the British media post-Manchester:

"We must all come together. Hope, not hate. Nothing to do with Islam. Nothing to do with Muslims. Just a rogue individual, possibly in the employ of some mysterious foreign agency. Just terrorism, bad people. Unaligned wickedness. Nothing to do with religion. We must all come together. And show love. And solidarity. Hope not hate."

It occurs to me that the same Western leaders who tell us we must guard against Islamophobia, that the authorities cannot profile, that they cannot under any circumstances violate the civil rights of known Islamists on a terror watchlist are really telling us that they value the rights of known enemies of the West more than they value the lives of their own innocent men, woman, and children who die when the known Islamist kills.