On Carnage, COBRA and Crappy Pop Concert Coping Mechanisms

Yet another terrorist attack unleashed on a Western city (timed for the holy month of Ramadan?) elicits this reaction from Mark Steyn:

As I write, six members of the public are dead, and three attackers. I'm wary of weighing in as the situation is unfolding, but, though the details are always different, in the end the story is always the same. And, as I said only the other day, the reality of what is happening in Britain and Europe is that this problem was imported and that, until you stop importing it, you're going to have more of it. 

No one likely to end up as Prime Minister or Home Secretary after this Thursday's election seems minded to say that, never mind act on it. Instead, we have the usual post-terrorist theatre: Congratulations for the speed of the emergency services, and sober anchormen announcing that Theresa May will be chairing a meeting of COBRA - as though a bunch of bureaucrats with a butch-sounding acronym has any clue about how to stop the corpse count from mounting. The cynical strategy of British and Continental leaders is to get their citizens used to this. 

For that to work, it's not helpful for new attacks to follow so swiftly on the last attacks. After Manchester, Mrs May raised the official "Threat Level" from Mildly Perturbed to Somewhat Disturbed or whatever it was, and in order further to reassure the public put soldiers on London's streets. Soldiers aren't really much use at stopping homicidal car drivers or random stabbers. To do that, you'd have to ban motor vehicles and sharp knives, which, given the fecklessness and decadence of Europe's political class, I wouldn't entirely rule out. Absent that, it's unfortunate that the London carnage occurred before Katy Perry, Justin Bieber & Co had had a chance to hold their stupid, useless, poor-taste all-you-need-is-sentimentalist-delusional-crap pop concert for the victims of the Manchester carnage. Maybe they'll cancel it, or maybe they'll make it a twofer. 

Meanwhile, even as the politicians trot out the rote response that these attacks "won't change us", everything changes: more armed police, more soldiers, more bollards, more security checks - and smaller lives, fewer liberties, less free speech. London Bridge still stands, but everything else is falling down, in Britain and Europe.

A COBRA with no fangs; a coping mechanism that remains blind to the jihad (and that always--always--includes talk of a backlash against Muslims that somehow never materializes, the better to deflect attention away from Islam's eternal holy war and those waging it globally, including, it must be said, in and around Israel); and not a single Winston Churchill in sight. All in all, it doesn't exactly bode well for the future of Western civ.

Update: In the wake of last night's terrorism, Theresa May is vowing to battle "Islamic extremism," like for reals.

The prime minister sounds positively Churchillian, until you realize that this is the same Ms. May who, in her previous incarnation as Home Secretary, embraced sharia councils in the UK (which are currently being investigated for treating women unfairly, as per the dictates of, well, every school of Islamic jurisprudence).

Poking around on the 'net for stuff on state sanctioned UK sharia, I came across an opinion piece from a couple of years ago which included these sagacious words:

One of the strangest phenomena in British society in the past half-century is how the traditional churches have declined in power and influence in the face of a freer, more permissive society, yet at the same time religious observance by fundamentalist, strict, scripture-led and priest-dominated groups of many types has grown so markedly. The unrelenting power of commercialism and the faithless temptations of individual freedom among the majority have not made inroads in closed communities where children attend religious schools and women are treated as second-class citizens.  

Successive governments have shied away from tackling such realities, in the hope that multiculturalism would generate its own momentum of tolerance. In a minority of neighbourhoods the opposite has happened, and we may as well face the fact.

Face the fact? If only. And, really, how can you face it when you've allowed sharia (which, in and of itself is "extremist" and completely antithetical to Western standards of freedom and human rights) to set up shop in the midst of your democracy?

As for the expectation that multiculturalism will generate a momentum of tolerance amongst Islamic supremacists: that's like expecting to spin gold out of dross--and is a recipe for the all but certain extinction of the country hosting the multiculti experiment.

Update: Man pictured fleeing London terror with pint in his hand

That about says it all re jihad in the West, don't you think?

Update: The jihadis wore "fake" suicide vests?

Well, yes. Because if you want to strike terror into the hearts of fleeing infidels, you don't really need to wear the real McCoy.

Update: Liberals react to jihad in London in their typically clueless fashion.

Update: Following a week that included both a renunciation of the Paris climate change agreement and a jihadi terrorist attack in London, Roger L. Simon writes:

Yes, there's a threat to civilization and it's not global warming, manmade or otherwise.  And anyone who isn't comatose should know what it is. 

Islam, like cancer, needs a cure. And we all  have to participate in the search for one before it's too late. 

Yes, this is about Islam, not "radical" Islam or some other off-shoot, real or imagined, because the tenets that have inspired the non-stop spate of terrorism across the world in recent years are spelled out clearly in sections of the Koran and the Hadith and other holy works of Islam. They provide justification for ISIS and a hundred other groups that may or may not replace them, now and in the future. This cannot continue -- unless we really do want to destroy ourselves.

Update: Police have arrested 12 people in a section of east London called Barking.

That's right, Barking.

As in, "The Brits are barking mad if they think the jihad being waged against them is fundamentally different than the one being waged against Israel."

Update: Something else that is all but inevitable post-jihadi attack--questions about what could have possibly motivated it. Re the pathological bafflement--and following the Manchester terrorism--Douglas Murray had this to say:

Only last month this now traditional national rite was led by no less a figure than the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall. At the beginning of April, Westminster Abbey was the venue for a national act of mourning for the victims of the previous month’s terrorist attack. The Dean used his sermon — at what was billed as ‘a service of hope’ — to announce that Britain was ‘bewildered’ by the actions of Khalid Masood. 

‘What could possibly motivate a man,’ asked the Dean, ‘to hire a car and take it from Birmingham to Brighton to London, and then to drive it fast at people he had never met, couldn’t possibly know, against whom he had no personal grudge, no reason to hate them, and then run at the gates of the Palace of Westminster to cause another death? It seems likely we shall never know.’ 

Actually, most people could likely make a guess. And had the Dean waited just a few days, he could have joined them. Masood’s final WhatsApp messages, sent to a friend just before he ploughed his car along Westminster Bridge, revealed this Muslim convert was ‘waging jihad’ for Allah. The Dean was hardly going to get back up into his pulpit and say: ‘Apologies. Turns out we do know. It was jihad for Allah.’ The impossibility of that scenario speaks to the deeper disaster — beneath the bodies and the blood — of the state we’ve got into. 

For their part, the Islamists are amazingly clear about what they want and the reasons why they act accordingly. You never have to read between the lines. Listen to Jawad Akbar, recorded in the UK in 2004 as he discussed the soft targets he and his al Qaeda-linked cell were planning to hit. The targets included the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London. What was the appeal? As Akbar said to his colleague, Omar Khyam, no one could ‘turn round and say “Oh they are innocent”, those slags dancing around.’

Ah, yes, those slags dancing around. It's no surprise that exactly the same thing got under the skin of Muslim Brotherhood co-founder Sayyid Qutb when, back in 1948, he witnessed a brazen display in Greeley, Colorado.