Wise words in The London Times

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In the July 24 London Times (registration may be necessary), Janet Daly responds to events in London, providing clarity and wisdom you rarely see in newspapers such as the NY Times. Here’s part of what she says (For ease of reading, I’ve broken her op-ed into shorter paragraphs).

It was probably bound to happen — if not now, then eventually. There is an all-out war on the streets and almost inevitably somebody was going to be killed by the authorities who was believed to be implicated but then turned out not to be.

Given the peculiarly ruthless tactic of suicide bombing, who could take the risk of allowing someone who seemed to be a plausible suspect to ignite himself in a public place?

Given that we are up against an enemy who states categorically that he “loves death” as opposed to the weak and decadent West which so pathetically clings to life, how could anyone dare to assume that the likely man who chooses to run to the London Underground rather than stop on order is blameless?

The Metropolitan police say this shooting of an apparently innocent man in Stockwell is a “tragedy”, as indeed it is.

But what would the scale of the tragedy have been if they had given him the benefit of the doubt and got it wrong? How many nanoseconds do you have in which to make the choice? And what, as a law enforcement officer, is the inescapable priority?

The Muslim extremists have produced something of a genuine martyr: a victim of what — if he proves to have been Muslim — may be described as the West’s Islamophobia, when he was a victim of the terrorist campaign itself.

We must not equivocate about this. The outrage of the Muslim community will be genuine. The protests of the civil liberties lobby have so far been commendably muted, but the anti-war brigade, who will find yet more grounds for condemning our foreign policy, will be more vociferous than ever.

But we are not to blame — that is, we as a society, we as a democracy, we as a population. We must not lose our grip on the truth: that Britain is a free, tolerant and generous country that has bent over backwards to accommodate its culturally diverse migrants.

So “We must not equivocate?” And “Britain is a free, tolerant and generous country that has bent over backwards to accommodate its culturally diverse migrants?”

Can we ever convince most of the PCs, Democrats and Leftists on both sides of the pond of that?

I hope, so but it’ll be a tall order.

Daly closes with this:

The terrorists have provided the irreducible axiom for this confrontation: “We love death; you love life.” What happened at Stockwell Tube station was a hideous mistake but one that was made in the name of protecting life. There can be no moral equivalence between that killing and the deliberate murder of innocents that was the object of the successful terrorist attack of July 7 and the mercifully unsuccessful one of July 21. Life — and the preciousness of it — is what this is all about. Somehow, we have to hold on to that.

Yes, we do. It'a an important part of why we fight no matter what Sens. Clinton, Durbin, and Kennedy, and NPR, the BBC, the NY and LA Times et al tell us.

There’s probably no chance the NY or LA Times or any of the other major liberal dailies here will publish Daly’s op-ed. That’s truly sad and needs to change.

Hat Tip: Realclearpolitics.com