The London attacks

Less than two weeks after the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, jihadists deliberately plow a car into a crowd of pedestrians on the London Bridge, and then get out and start stabbing people - with twelve-inch knives -  in nearby bars and restaurants.

The back-and-forth in the aftermath has been s predictable that the danger of becoming inured is great. I know I've been tempted to say, "All the same parties making all the same cases . . . lefties calling for tolerance . . . righties calling for an end to multiculturalism . . . libertarians pointing out that it's still more likely that one will get killed by a lightning strike, blah blah blah . . . "

The one result we can count on if that attitude comes to prevail is yet more of an increase in the momentum of this kind of horror.

Beyond creating conditions that will get more of us killed, there are some other real dangers inherent in the "tolerance" argument.

A Disciples of Christ congregation in my city has a sign on its lawn that reads "We stand with local Muslims."

I'm sorry, but what does that have to do with anything? If there is an incident or two that has spurred such a gesture, I submit that the fact that anyone knows about it is because our local school administrations are so eager to find instances of focused-upon demographics being harassed that taunts that ought to be of fleeting significants to individuals with properly resilient senses of self-worth rise to the status of major controversies.

There's more than a little guilt implicit in the message as well: "As members of the ethnically and religiously most prevalent group in our society, we understand that you Muslims might have a reflexive skittishness about maneuvering among us, and so we're compelled to reassure you that you're welcome to be here."

Conversely, this mindset is in denial of a very real pattern. The London attackers shouted "This is for Allah." They always - proudly - make known their Muslim identity. It is the Western-security manifestation of a general leftist denial of reality. On the sexuality front, it manifests itself as the denial of the finality of DNA is determining gender. On the global-climate front, it manifests itself in fudged data at East Anglia and NASA, and television spots featuring polar bears dropping out of the sky.

One of the biggest dangers is that the call for multiculturalism, diversity and tolerance comes at the precise moment when there is an active campaign within Western civilization to get its inhabitants to lose sight of what it means to be a Westerner. You can get an English degree at several major universities without ever taking a class in Shakespeare. Per a 2015 American Council of Trustees and Alumni survey, a mere 18 percent of the nation's colleges and universities require graduates to take even a survey course in American history or government.

You aren't compelled to defend that which you don't give a diddly about.

And this gets us back to a point I discussed in the previous post. If our major institutions - corporations, universities, NGOs, media outlets - are mish-mashes of gender fluidity and various world views, some of which are inimical to the foundations of Western society, peopled by "individuals" who basically live to stare into their phones and take best-practices and service-learning meetings, who will be roused to defend that which is clearly under assault?

Some reports about the London attacks point out with a gasp that those under attack were defending themselves with chairs. Isn't the obvious rejoinder to that, "Where were their guns?"

The British government's "Run. Hide. Tell" campaign pretty much says it all.

And finally, this perennially limp response to the unending stream of jihadist attacks softens us up for the more general danger. Along with jihad, we face a mortal threat in North Korea's nuclear-weapon-missile-and-satellite program, a soon-to-be-mortal threat from the Iranian program of a similar nature, and the deliberate thwarting of Western efforts to bring more stability to the world from an adversarially poised Russia and China.

It's a rough world, and enemies of righteousness abound. When they see a lack of will on the part of those who, it would seem to any reasonable observer, ought to be defending that righteousness, the damage they do to lives and our way of life cannot but increase.