Our oldest daughter, who has worked in emergency medicine for almost 20 years, has several rules of the ER; one of those is "At a cardiac arrest, the first thing to do is to take your own pulse." In other words, back off, think for a moment, take a few deep breaths, and approach the situation calmly.
Sometimes it's worth taking a moment to back off a step to think. The New Year's Day terror attack in New Orleans is presenting us with just such an opportunity. When something like this happens, all of us in the news and commentary business find ourselves drinking from the fire hose at first, but now we need to take a moment to look at the bigger picture. In case you aren't caught up, my friends and colleagues here at RedState have sacrificed their New Year's Day plans to bring you all the latest:
There's a lot more where that came from. But back to that bigger picture:
About a year ago, I bought myself a copy of my Townhall colleague Kurt Schlichter's book "The Attack." If you haven't read it yet, I suggest you do so forthwith. In a nutshell: Kurt's book describes a fictional attack on the United States by hordes of Islamic jihadis. The attack was carefully planned and was carried out over three days with each day's target list carefully selected. It's a chilling read. Picture the October 7th attacks on Israel, only scaled up to the level of the United States.
A few weeks after I read the book the second time, I happened to bump into Kurt at CPAC 2024 and mentioned that I had read the book. "You scared the kapok out of me," I told him.
Kurt's reply was typically forthright: "Good. I intended to." And that raised the question, "Might this really happen?" Kurt and I agreed that, yes, it will. The only real question is, when?
The New Year's Day attack in New Orleans, along with other recent, similar events, is leading me to the conclusion that it already is.
Kurt's book describes a mass attack by thousands of barely trained, illiterate jihadis led by a small cadre who, of course, are never exposed to fire themselves. But that's not happening; not yet, at any rate. What we are seeing is an apparent drive to subject us to death by a thousand cuts. That doesn't require a great deal of planning or coordination. It doesn't require charismatic leaders pointing to one and saying "Come," then to another, saying "Go." All it requires is a binding ideology, something that these disaffected losers can grasp onto, something that radicalizes them, that makes them see that murder and destruction are to be rewarded in the afterlife. This prods them to move; blow up spectators at a marathon race, shoot up a mall, or drive a truck through a crowd of New Year's revelers. That's the elephant in the room, and for too many of these people, the elephant is Islam.
I've mentioned this before: In my jacket-and-tie days, I spent a lot of time teaching people in major corporations how to do cause analysis. Most companies, sadly, aren't very good at this, but one of the most important steps in problem-solving is to identify the root cause of the problem. One factor, one investigatory tactic, is to look for commonalities in every place the problem has arisen. In recent days, we have seen the New Orleans attack, and we have seen a similar attack on a traditional Christmas market in Germany, similar to one that happened in 2016. Not every such attack is motivated by Islam, but the majority of them sure are.
That's pointing a dripping, red finger right at a root cause: A vicious, Bronze-age ideology masquerading as a major religion. People will be quick to point out that not all Muslims are jihadis, and that's true; I've known a few Muslims who were perfectly reasonable people. But only a few years back people who knew the New Orleans attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who was born in the United States and served in the United States Army, as one of those perfectly reasonable people - until he wasn't, and now he has driven a truck through a crowd of people while flying an ISIS flag. There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with an ideology that provokes this behavior. Some will point at these words and cry "racist," but I've had enough; it's time to call a spade a friggin' shovel. It is what it is.
So, when we ask, "Can it happen here?" The answer is "It already is." We are embroiled in a clash of civilizations - no, scratch that; we are in a clash of civilization vs. the uncivilized. It's a global conflict, and it's going to get nastier, because wars of attrition and religious wars always do, and this one is both.
We are engaged in a global game of "chicken." Whoever flinches first, loses. The Western world cannot afford to flinch. Civilization is at stake. We have to stand strong, no matter what it takes - even if Colonel Schlichter's scenario becomes reality.
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