Mark Steyn Delineates the Four Stages of Thinking Post-Terrorism

According to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, there are five stages of grief: denial, arguing, bargaining, depression, acceptance--known by the acronym DABDA. Compare that to what Mark Steyn posits as the four stages following an act of terrorism: jump to the conclusion the terrorist's a Nazi; assert he's a "lone wolf"; claim it "has nothing to do with Islam, which is really and absolutely a religion of peace; kick around the idea of a backlash against Muslims that never materializes. You can remember it by the acronym JACK, as in, if you go through any/all of these stages, you don't know JACK about the jihad.

There should be a final stage of acceptance in the terrorism list (as in K-R's, it's the acceptance of reality), but it runs counter to the West's multiculti dogma, and may thus tend to be condemned as "hate speech"/"blasphemy" by those who have swallowed the tutti-frutti "diversity" Kool-Aid and/or sharia:

Most times in today’s Europe, the guys beating, burning and killing Jews will be Muslims. Once in a while, it will be somebody else killing the schoolkids. But is it so hard to acknowledge that rapid, transformative, mass Muslim immigration might not be the most obvious aid to social tranquility? That it might possibly pose challenges that would otherwise not have existed — for uncovered women in Oslo, for gays in Amsterdam, for Jews everywhere? Is it so difficult to wonder if, for these and other groups living in a long-shot social experiment devised by their rulers, the price of putting an Islamic crescent in the diversity quilt might be too high? What’s left of Jewish life in Europe is being extinguished remorselessly, one vandalized cemetery, one subway attack at a time. How many Jewish children will be at that school in Toulouse a decade hence? A society that becomes more Muslim eventually becomes less everything else. What is happening on the Continent is tragic, in part because it was entirely unnecessary. 

We learned from Natasha Fatah's Toronto Life article this week that hundreds--hundreds--of Toronto public schools are "accommodating" Muslim prayers on the premises during the school day. Make no mistake: we here in Canada are facing exactly the same "challenges."

Update: The great Melanie Phillips writes:

Jews throughout the world are all potential targets for attack in a terrifying manifestation of global incitement to murder. Islamists regularly declare their intention to kill Jews wherever they can find them. Hundreds of rockets fired from Gaza at southern Israel over the past couple of weeks bear out daily the frenzied attempt to murder as many Jews as possible. In the Mumbai massacre in 2008, it turned out that the attack on the tiny ultra-orthodox Lubavitch centre was for the Islamic perpetrators of that atrocity the most important target. There have been repeated Islamic terrorist attempts on Jewish targets around the world. Oh — and Islamists have been murdering black people in Libya because they are black.

Yet all this is ignored by the mainstream media. Desperate to sanitise Muslim genocidal terrorism and prove that racism and Jew-hatred is confined to white people and the ‘far right’, the media simply did not entertain the possibility that the perpetrator of the French killings might have been a Muslim.

Also this re the terrorist's claim that he was "avenging" Palestinian children:

But no Palestinian children have ever been targeted by Israel for murder. Quite the reverse: Israel regularly puts its own soldiers in harm’s way in order to any minimise civilian casualties in military operations against Palestinian terrorists and their infrastructure which it undertakes solely to protect its own people from further murderous Palestinian attacks. Any Palestinian child casualties in such operations occur solely as a tragic and inadvertent by-product of war – and as often as not because the Palestinians have put their own children in harm’s way.

Yet this deranged belief that the Israelis deliberately kill Palestinian children is not only pumped out daily by the Arab and Muslim world inciting their people to hate Jews and to murder them as a holy act; not only do western progressives ignore this incitement and pretend instead that Islamic terrorism arises from legitimate ‘grievances’; these same western progressives themselves pump out precisely the same lies and incitement — and then suggest that the deliberate murder of Jewish innocents is the moral equivalent of attempts by Israel to prevent the slaughter of yet more innocents.

Thus the EU foreign affairs chief, the British Baroness Ashton, seemed to equate the murder of the French Jews in Toulouse with the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza in Israeli military operations there. Although the EU now claims she was misunderstood and that she was merely referring to all violence against children, that does not let her off the hook – indeed, by underscoring the fundamental amorality of the remark, it not only attaches Lady Ashton to that hook yet more firmly but also now attaches the EU itself.