N&O editors' nonsense and others' good sense.

Following the London bombings, the News and Observer editorialized that "deprivation and suffering ... in Palestine and Africa ... feeds terrorism."

Deprivation and suffering feeds terrorism? Nonsense!

Deprivation and suffering don't feed a desire to kill children sitting beside their grandparents or asleep in their beds.

Deprivation and suffering don't feed a desire to kill homosexuals or Christians or Hindus or Muslims.

Deprivation and suffering don't lead people to time bombs so that one explodes minutes after the other, and just as rescue workers arrive to help victims of the first bomb.

Didn't the N&O's editors ever learn about Osama and Arafat's wealth; or that Atta came from a well-to-do family and had a university degree; or that America's best known terrorist, John Walker Lindh, was raised by an upper-middle class California family proud of its liberal orientation?

What would the editors think of a claim that wealth, formal education, liberalism or some combination of the three feeds terrorism? I hope they'd dismiss it as nonsense.

I could say more but I'll spare you for now, and instead offer links to the kind of great good sense I've never found in N&O editorials.

The first link is to Mark Steyn's 7/12 column in London's Daily Telegraph. Here's part of it:

Terrorism ends when the broader culture refuses to tolerate it. There would be few if any suicide bombers in the Middle East if "martyrdom" were not glorified by imams and politicians, if pictures of local "martyrs" were not proudly displayed in West Bank grocery stores, if Muslim banks did not offer special "martyrdom" accounts to the relicts thereof, if schools did not run essay competitions on "Why I want to grow up to be a martyr."

At this point, many readers will be indignantly protesting that this is all the fault of Israeli "occupation," but how does that explain suicide bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where there's not a Zionist oppressor for hundreds of miles? Islam has become the world's pre-eminent incubator of terrorism at its most depraved. Indeed, so far London has experienced only the lighter items on the bill of fare - random bombing of public transport rather than decapitation, child sacrifice and schoolhouse massacres.

The second link is to a London Times report of post-bombing British public opinion survey results on some security issues. The Times speaks of "variations," but it seems to me that British opinion is overwhelming in a one direction.

Here's a bit of the Times article. I hope you read the whole thing.

Those living the furthest away from London were the strongest supporters of tough action. While 95 per cent of Scots support security checks and baggage inspections at stations, 84 per cent in London and the South East back this measure.

Working-class respondents were stronger supporters than the middle classes of giving the police new powers. While 93 per cent of unskilled workers wanted the police to have new powers to arrest people suspected of planning terrorist acts, 79 per cent of professionals and managers did so.

Yes, there's 93 per cent here and 79 per cent there but it all adds up to the Brits, like most of us, not wanting to be killed. And they want their government to make sure their not.

Now if we could only convince some folks here that Americans feel the same way...