I guess we should be used to it by now. The bodies of London's mangled murder victims were barely cold when the usual apologists for terror weighed in. Of course the attacks were horrible and despicable, they said. But what did we expect? It's payback time.
"Mr. Blair has finally reaped the bitter harvest of the war on terrorism," wrote Alan Cowell in The New York Times. "Now, as long predicted and feared, his support of the war appears to have cost British lives at home."
In Britain, rogue MP George Galloway declared that this was the payback for Britain's participation in Iraq, and demanded an immediate withdrawal of British troops. Not to be outdone, our own inimitable columnist Rick Salutin blamed the United States, which armed the mujahedeen way back when and also, according to him, is the greatest terror state in the entire world. "Too late Tony," he sneered. "Your civilized nations are up to their necks in this muck."
Fortunately, hardly any of the survivors -- who no doubt include a few of Britain's two million Muslims -- are likely to buy this guff. Unlike many of our finer Western intellectuals, they know who the real bad guys are.
So does Hirsi Ali. She is a Somali-born, Muslim-raised member of the Dutch parliament. Since last fall, she has lived in hiding because of Dutch Muslims who want to kill her. Her crime was to collaborate with a filmmaker named Theo van Gogh in the making of a film called Submission, which harshly criticizes Islam's treatment of women. Mr. van Gogh was butchered by a Muslim fanatic, who thrust a knife into his chest, pinning him with a five-page letter threatening a similar fate for her. Mr. van Gogh tried to bargain for his life, but his assassin (a Dutch-born man of Moroccan descent) wasn't interested in negotiating. He wanted to kill him.
The same is true of the people who bombed the London subways. Their aim is not political. Their aim is to create havoc. Perhaps, like their hero, Osama bin Laden, they hope to expel the infidel from the lands of the believers and convert the world to a 14th-century version of the true faith, and if you don't like it, you deserve to die.
"The idea that al-Qaeda was no threat until we created it does not stand the slightest scrutiny," writes Amir Taheri, a leading expert on the problems of Islam. Nor does the idea that none of this would have happened if only we'd minded our own business and left them alone. Al-Qaeda (which, as one expert says, is now more of mindset than an organization) is the toxic product of failed states and societies coming into conflict with successful ones. Its fuel is oil money, which, in a perverse twist of history, delivered unimaginable wealth and power to a bunch of nomadic desert tribes. Its new fuel is an inexhaustible supply of angry young men, who come not from the Middle East but from the heart of Europe itself. Don't be surprised if some of London's 7/7 bombers turn out to be British citizens.
The bitter truth is that it's not Tony Blair's support for the war that's come back to haunt him, so much as Britain's lenient asylum laws and its tolerance of a wide assortment of militant Muslim groups. It's not for nothing that London's nickname is Londonistan. "Under our rule this country would be known as the Islamic Republic of Great Britain," declared the leader of one group that was frequented by shoe bomber Richard Reid. "O.B.L. pulled me like a shining star! Like the way we destroyed them two towers, ha-ha!" went one recent rap video. It's sobering to remember that among the first people killed in the war against Afghanistan were British citizens -- fighting for the Taliban.
London's cultural diversity is mostly a success story. But across Europe, unassimilated Muslims are a growing problem. Millions of Muslim women live in segregated "parallel societies" from which it's hard to escape. In the Netherlands, 5.5 per cent of the population is Muslim, but Muslim women make up more than half the population of battered women's shelters. Demographics alone ensure that Muslims (with their higher birth rates) will become a bigger and bigger minority, and a bigger and bigger challenge to European ideas of tolerance and pluralism. It's safe to say that European leaders, so far, have no idea what to do about this.
And yet, the glory days of al-Qaeda are probably over. I think what we are seeing now is the Israelization of Europe, where innocent civilians in cafes and busses will be wiped out now and then in low-level attacks carried out by people who've been inflamed by emotive Internet propaganda videos. Europe's future doesn't look like 9/11. It looks more like 7/7.
The good news is that only a tiny handful of Muslims turn to radical violence. The bad news is that it doesn't take many to terrorize us. The good news is that they probably can't inflict all that much damage. The bad news is that they will inflict some, despite the best intelligence and security that human beings can devise. That's the price of an open society.
As in Israel, there will probably be a hardening of attitudes and a certain cost to civil liberties, accompanied by a raging debate over how to make the carnage stop. Plenty of people will keep on arguing (as many Israelis used to do) that if only justice were done, terror would cease. Plenty of Israelis too used to think they could find a negotiated peace. Few think that now. They found out that terrorists aren't interested in negotiating. That's why they built the wall.
As for those who think the British brought the terror on themselves, maybe they should ask Hirsi Ali what she thinks. They can't ask Theo van Gogh, of course. He's dead.