What we're up against

In a column appearing in today's New York Sun, Mark Steyn brings new perspective to the concept of non-state actors.

During the Nineties, we grew used to the idea that "non-state actors" meant a terrorist group, with maybe a few hundred activists, a few thousand supporters. What if entire populations are being transformed into "non-state actors"? Not terrorists, by any means, but at the very minimum entirely indifferent to the state of which they're nominally citizens.

Hence that statistic: seven per cent of British Muslims consider their primary identity to be British, 81 per cent consider it to be Muslim.

And what does it mean?

That's the issue: pan-Islamism is the most profound challenge to conventional ideas of citizenship and nationhood. Of course, if you say that at the average Ivy League college, you'll get a big shrug: Modern multicultural man disdains to be bound by the nation state, too; he prides himself on being un citoyen du monde. The difference is that, for western do-gooders, it's mostly a pose: they may occasionally swing by some Third World basket-case and condescend to the natives, but for the most part the multiculti set have no wish to live anywhere but an advanced western democracy. It's a quintessential piece of leftie humbug. They may think globally, but they don't act on it.

The pan-Islamists do act. When they hold hands and sing "We Are The World," they mean it. And we're being very complacent if we think they only take over the husks of "failed states" like Afghanistan, Somalia and Lebanon.

There are dangers in complacency.  Richard Perle in another New York Sun article that tells about a boy recruited to be a terrorist.

Omar Sheikh was a promising LSE student from a comfortably middle-class Anglo-Pakistani family. On a humanitarian mission to Bosnia in 1992, he was recruited into a life of terror. In July 2002, he was sentenced to death in Pakistan for his role in the beheading of an American journalist, Daniel Pearl.

In his book "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" Bernard-Henri Levy recounts young Omar's reaction to the suggestion that he go to Afghanistan for training. He imagines him thinking "… he has to finish his studies … and his father is still the one who decides everything."

"We'll talk to your father," he is told by the Islamist he meets in Bosnia.

Meanwhile, the mainstream press is ever helpful to the Islamist cause, always siding with an underdog and always seeking to explain underlying motivations that justify barbarism.  Again from Mark Steyn:

Is there a software program at western news agencies that automatically inserts random segues in terrorism stories? The plot to commit mass murder by seizing up to ten UK-US airliners was well advanced long before the first Israeli strike against Hezbollah. Yet it's apparently axiomatic at Reuters, the BBC and many other British media outlets that Tony Blair is the root cause of jihad. He doesn't even have to invade anywhere anymore. He just has to "refuse to call for an immediate ceasefire" when some other fellows invade some other fellows over on the other side of the world.

Nowadays fairness and balance in the liberal press imposes a requirement that some justification of terrorism, or redeeming quality in the terrorists, be included in any story about terrorism.  By the same token, fair and balanced means a case for blame, no matter how slender, must be made against any country seeking to defend itself and its people from terrorists.  In the case of Israel and her people -- they exist.  In the case of America -- George Bush is a Republican.