THEY’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS: Response to Attacks Is Doomed

The recent unity march in the streets of Paris was a rare, inspiring image of camaraderie for the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism. Seeing world leaders (minus our Commander-in-Chief, of course) arm in arm taking a stand against the bloody violence that traumatized the City of Light gave hope that the West might awaken from its slumber and take the fight to the terrorists.

Don’t get your hopes up.

Despite the tough rhetoric from French Prime Minister Francois Hollande and other Western leaders, the reality is that most of those leaders are deeply invested in a politically correct approach to the problem of Islamic radicalism, guaranteeing that any action they take will be more treatment of the symptoms than addressing the core problem.

While the French masses at the unity rally held up oversized pencils as a symbol of the right to express free speech, their representatives in the European Union in 2008 passed religious hate speech laws. The edicts were meant to silence anyone criticizing or satirizing the religion of their Middle Eastern newcomers. Charlie Hebdo was exactly the kind of publication that was targeted by the laws. Are we seriously to believe that these same appeasement-minded lawmakers who pushed for hate speech codes are now going to get tough with those who murder based on what they see as a violation of those same codes?

Furthering the problem in Europe has been the establishment of no-go zones that essentially ceded hundreds of neighborhoods to Muslim immigrants and created areas where sharia law, not the sovereign country’s laws, are applied. This exercise in multiculturalism has been a spectacular failure, creating petri dishes for radicalism and recruitment with no attempt at assimilation from either the government or the immigrants.

There will be no change coming from across the pond, either. President Obama’s absence at the unity rally was appropriate, as he has been much more on the side of hate speech laws than free speech protection. At the same time he was telling the United Nations that “the future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” Obama shamelessly blamed the deaths of the American delegation in Benghazi on an amateurish YouTube video mocking Islam that few even knew about until he made it famous. In his rush to cast scrutiny away from his administration’s role in the deaths, Obama’s actions sent a man to prison and silenced him in fear of his life while many on the ground in Libya said the video did not cause the attack.

Similarly, the massacre at Fort Hood did little to awaken the country to the jihadi menace, perhaps because the Obama administration to this day insists it was not an act of terrorism but rather “workplace violence.” That mindset has apparently seeped into the military itself, as Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said at the time that losing diversity would be a greater tragedy than the murders themselves.

The U.S. government’s willful myopia to the problem is not contained within the walls of the Obama administration. Hillary Clinton, the president-in-waiting to the establishment media, astonished even her harshest critics with comments that we must empathize with our enemies’ perspective and point of view. Does this sound like someone who is going to take a bold stand for freedom and awaken the free world to the forces threatening its liberty and even its existence?

Prior to 9/11 there was a school of thought that, much like Pearl Harbor, it would take a catastrophic attack to awaken the country to the existential threat on its doorstep. We had that attack, and the country seemed focused and determined in the immediate aftermath. But more than a decade later, the scourge of political correctness has either put the free world back into a slumber or scared them against taking a stand. There is little reason to believe that even the ghoulish Paris attacks will cause our governments to change course.

Image: http://themoderatevoice.com/201921/right-wing-outrage-obama-missing-photo-op-paris/