So Has the Murder of 'Toonists and Jews in Paris Last Week Woken People Up to the Islam Inherent in the Carnage?

Not so much, really, writes Bruce Thornton:

In the absence of clear thinking and recognition of fact, responses to this latest example of Muslim violence reflect ideological fever dreams. “Nothing to do with the Muslim religion,” as French president François Holland said of the attacks, is a perennial favorite. Such apologists invoke shopworn Marxist bromides like colonialism, or postmodern magical thinking like “Orientalism,” the two-bit Foucauldian invention of Egyptian-American literary critic and fabulist Edward Said. This was the tack taken by an American historian of Egypt who told a New York Times reporter that Islam was “’just a veneer’” for [jihadist] anger at the dysfunctional Arab states left behind by colonial powers and the ‘Orientalist’ condescension many Arabs still feel from the West.” 

For many apologists, though, it’s just easier to call the jihadists “crazy.” Here’s Vox’s Ezra Klein, long-time purveyor of progressive orthodoxy, opining on the Paris murders. He fingers “the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn’t need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong.”

Progressives are crazy. And the jihad is evil.

That's my clear thinking on the subject.