Barcelona—"Tolerance and Freedom"

After every vicious Islamic terror attack that kills many and injures more, it's always instructive to read the commentary provided by the left-wing editors of The New York Times. The editors ask  questions like:

Why a promenade in Barcelona and the seaside town of Cambrils? Why now? Were the terrorists compelled to act hastily after a more insidious plot collapsed when a house believed to be their bomb factory in a nearby town exploded prematurely on Wednesday?

These empty questions allow the editors to give the impression that they are thinking deeply about the situation. In reality, it's a way of distracting the reader from uncomfortable, but far more meaningful questions:

• Has unrestrained Muslim immigration into Europe created a critical mass of young Muslim men (and women) who are prime candidates for Islamists to recruit?
• Are mosques in Europe breeding grounds for this new generation of 'lone wolf' terrorists and/or small terror cells?
• Should an Imam who preaches violence or hatred against non-Muslims be charged with a hate crime and imprisioned or deported?
• Do authorities need to be more aggressive in rounding up and deporting foreign nationals who have been placed on terror watchlists? Do laws have to be changed to enable this to happen?
• Is it time to put the onus of the local Muslim community and demand that they provide explicit and continuing help in identifying and eradicating the Islamist extremists in their midst?

But those questions (and many others) make the NYT editors uneasy, so they ring their hands and write:

The real questions that remain are about ourselves — how we who live in societies that celebrate tolerance and freedom, and that guarantee civil rights and the rights of minorities, should react to acts whose very purpose is to make us turn against these rights and freedoms.

This is at the heart of the fierce debates over security in Europe and the United States: Should we seek to fortify the places where people gather, losing the very casualness and openness that make promenades like Las Ramblas so popular? Should we arm governments with extraordinary powers to surveil, investigate and block immigrants? Should we accept an element of threat as the price for our freedoms?

Comments like these give the appearance of deep introspection, but they, like the earlier questions, are a feint. The left always suggests that by taking a stronger stand against those who reject our "tolerance and freedom" and act violently to disrupt the "very casualness and openness" of our society, we somehow become like the Islamic terrorists.*

That is abject nonsense. When a vicious Islamic supremacist ideology (it is NOT a religion and deserves no such protections) threatens our very way of life, it must be crushed. If that requires hard decisions and even harder actions, those decisions and actions need to be made—and made quickly.

Instead, most feckless Western leaders take their lead from the NYT. They are frightened that they will be accused of "racism" or "bigotry" or "Islamophobia," so they avoid the hard decisions and actions that are required. As a consequence, they prefer a safe, politically correct approach as their people are murdered during an afternoon strol, or at a rock concert, or celebrating a national holiday at the seashore, or in a subway, or on a bus, or in a shopping mall.

The means and location may vary, but the Muslim perpetrators are always the same. The only thing that's changing is the frequency. The Islamic terrors attacks are occurring more and more often, but Western leaders and the editors of NYT don't seem to care.

FOOTNOTE:
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*  In recent days the left has expressed its justifiable outrage at the hateful words and actions of the tiny percentage of white supremacists in our midst. They have taken a "strong stand." They have condemned violence and hate. In Boston, 15,000 - 40,000 people marched against the KKK and Neo-Nazis (even though few could be found). The marches were coordinated and organized by leftist groups—most peaceful. Good for them!

It's interesting to note that radical Islam has orders of magnitude more adherents that all white supremacist groups combined. In recent years Islamic supremacists have perpetrated orders of magnitude more violence and murder, have preached hate from religious pulpits, have recruited youth by the thousands, have a significantly more robust web presence, and have advocated the overthrow of almost every politically correct idea held by the left, including "tolerance and freedom." For that matter, is an intolerant and violent Islamic supremacist ideology really any different that a white supremacist ideology? And yet we see no marches sponsored by the Left against radical Islam. Why is that?