Whistling past the graveyard

Lately there have been an inordinate number of media reports focusing on acts of terrorism, as well as attempted or contemplated terrorism. The FBI reported arresting two men of Pakistani descent in Chicago in a plot to bomb the newspaper Jylands-Posten of Danish cartoon fame. The so-called “Toronto 18”, a group of young men accused of planning terrorist attacks in Toronto and Ottawa, are beginning to fall like dominoes, as those charged are pleading guilty in efforts to minimize their punishment. Terrorist plots are being uncovered in places as diverse as Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Iraq, Pakistan and Indonesia.

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So what do all these terrorist plotters have in common? Well, it appears that many share the name Mohammad, most appear to be “disaffected” youth; and oh, yes, all happen to be followers of a fundamentalist Islamist movement. Yet Western intellectual elites persists in the conceit that there is no danger, that the terrorist episodes of recent years were all one-off, unrelated events and no one could possibly hate us because we are such lovable liberals and progressives whose inclusivity, acceptance and willingness to accommodate those of different ethno-cultural background ensure that the recipients of this social largesse will forever be loving and grateful to us. The responsibility for raising the alarm about these disturbing events lies mainly with us knuckle-dragging, bigoted members of the vast right-wing conspiracy. Yet even voicing concerns about these possibly imminent dangers marginalizes us and exposes us to the possible censure, persecution and prosecution by the various human-rights apparatchiks and anti-hate cabals that appear to be siding with those who would enjoy our destruction. There is a conspiracy of blindness among the West’s liberal elites that’s akin to whistling while walking past the graveyard on a dark and gloomy night. If they ignore the danger posed by Islamist extremism, maybe it will go away. But unlike walking past a graveyard at night, which poses very little real danger, the Islamist extremists are getting bolder and more aggressive. A recent column by Tarek Fatah in Canada’s National Post has drawn attention to the hatred and violence many Islamic clerics are preaching to their congregation. Statements such as the ones made at a Toronto mosque by Said Rageah, a Somali cleric trained in Saudi Arabia, that beseeched Allah destroy Christians and Jews “from within” are commonplace in many North American mosques. But given that a favored aggrieved group makes these statements, they may incite hatred with impunity, because the liberal elite does not have the moral conviction to oppose such poisonous rhetoric. In fact, they have gotten so wrapped up in being inclusive and accepting that they’ll accept any behavior from migrants as being a part of that quaint multicultural quilt. If we were to look at this another way, say a Christian minister condemning Jews or gays, his or her church would be closed, the minister would be disgraced and quite possibly in jail, while the church wherein the transgression occurred would be sold off at auction to pay for the fine levied against the congregation for hate speech. Individuals like Mark Steyn, Bruce Bawer and Melanie Phillips have written extensively about the impending rise of an Islamic Caliphate set on world domination and the annihilation of the Jews. Hmmm; where have we heard that before? The West’s squeamishness about Islamic radicalism is in some ways quite humorous, as that 800-pound gorilla is being studiously ignored with the pretense that all that tough talk about killing “infidels” is yet another charming manifestation of multiculturalism. But as so many people who have sex with an 800-pound gorilla belatedly find out, one doesn’t stop when one is satisfied. One stops when the gorilla is satisfied. So all the pretense that we in the West see life through the same paradigm as people everywhere else is just a form of whistling while walking past the graveyard. Those who think nothing about sending a little girl with a bomb strapped to her body into a grocery store aren’t going to be dissuaded from their quest to Islamify our homeland. It’s time that we stopped whistling and started facing the threat head on.