How Nations Die

Mark Steyn wrote about the Toronto terror plot in Maclean's this week, and - as always - he is dead on the money. He discusses the "Islamoschmoozing" that followed the arrests of the Muslim extremists in Toronto, such as the oh-so-politically-correct statement from a Canadian Security Intelligence Service official who said "it is important to know that this operation in no way reflects negatively on any specific community, or ethnocultural group in Canada." Such is the mindset of multiculturalists:

The multicultural society posits that each of its citizens can hold a complementary portfolio of identities: one can simultaneously be Canadian and Jamaican and gay and Anglican and all these identities can exist within your corporeal form in perfect harmony. But, for most Western Muslims, Islam is their primary identity, and for a significant number thereof, it's a primary identity that exists in opposition to all others. That's merely stating the obvious. But, of course, to state the obvious is unacceptable these days, so our leaders prefer to state the absurd. I believe the old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between a New York traffic light changing to green and the first honk of a driver behind you. Today, the definition of a nanosecond is the gap between a Western terrorist incident and the press release of a Muslim lobby group warning of an impending outbreak of Islamophobia.

This Islamoschmoozing is not just idiotic, it is downright dangerous in the context of confronting an enemy who will not - cannot - be placated (emphasis mine):

The best summation is a line I first quoted in 2002, when a French oil tanker was attacked off the coast of Yemen. Back then, you'll recall, the French foreign minister was deploring American "simplisme" on a daily basis, and M. Chirac was the principal obstructionist of the neo-con-Zionist-Halliburton plan to remake the Middle East. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, France would surely be it.

But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, "We would have preferred to hit a U.S. frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels."

Such is the Islamofacist mindset. Feckless appeasement will not work with this enemy - they have plainly and repeatedly stated their goals, and will not stop until they have achieved them - or until democratic nations forcefully confront their ideology and smash their organizations. But if the leaders of those nations are willfully blind to the threat? That, Steyn says, is "how nations die -- not by war or conquest, but by a thousand trivial concessions".