Bill Carmichael: Shame of the Left in face of terrorism

What is? Well pretty much everything. If you are on the Left the kneejerk reaction to any event – whether it be Muslims slaughtering each other in the Middle East (as they have been doing for the last 1,400 years) or attacks by home-grown jihadis on innocent people – is to blame the West.

It is all because of imperialism, or oil, or Israel, or racism – or something.

According to this theory, the jihadis aren’t raping and murdering their way across half the world because they believe that is what Allah tells them to do, but because it is their peculiar way of critiquing Western foreign policy.

This lunacy reached its height in the work of “ethnic studies” professor Ward Churchill who argued the 9/11 attacks in the US were a “natural and inevitable” response partly to the Crusades of the 13th Century.

The almost 3,000 civilians who died in those attacks, he argued, were not innocent at all, but were “Little Eichmanns” complicit in their own deaths because of their unspoken support of Western imperialism.

In other words – they had it coming.

It would be nice to think idiocy of this sort has gone out of fashion, but it hasn’t.

After the first of the two terror attacks on Canada this week, the former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald penned a piece that basically argued that the Canadians had it coming too.

In an echo of Ward Churchill’s words, he argued that the mowing down of an innocent soldier by an Islamic militant in Quebec wasn’t an act of terror, but an entirely natural response motivated by anger over Western interference in Muslim countries.

Canada, he wrote, is guilty of “wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering and bombing others” and it isn’t surprising when people who identify with those at the other end of Canadian bombings decide to hit back.

He added: “Rather than being baffling or shocking, that reaction is completely natural and predictable. The only surprising thing about any of it is that it doesn’t happen more often.”

Prophetic words: within hours of the piece being published another jihadi had murdered a soldier at the country’s national war memorial in Ottawa.

So, according to Greenwald, Canadians are evil, imperialist, bloodthirsty war mongers who had it coming.

Okay, let us for a moment look at what Canada is actually guilty of. In Iraq and Syria the jihadists have cut a devastating and destructive swathe, murdering children, raping women and selling them into sexual slavery, beheading or crucifying anyone who dares to disagree with them.

The principal victims of this savagery are fellow Muslims, along with Arab Christians and Yazidis, although Isis will also murder any Westerner – even aid workers – it comes across.

Horrified by this barbarism, the Canadians decided to join an international coalition, which includes several Muslim nations, to try to halt the advance of Isis.

There is nothing in this for Canada at all. No oil, no treasure, little prestige. Instead, members of the Canadian armed forces, along with Britons and other members of the coalition, are putting their lives on the line to help save mainly Muslim civilians. In other words this is a humanitarian mission to help the Muslim world and is far from war-mongering as it is possible to get.

But as the proverb goes “no good deed goes unpunished” and now the Left and the Islamists are ganging up to demand Canadian blood – in the latter case quite literally. Don’t fall for it. Canada has been a great friend of Britain’s, not least in two world wars, and deserves thanks and sympathy for its attempts to do good in the world and for the recent terror attacks. God bless Canada!

For Greenwald to try to characterise Canadian altruism as “wallowing in war glory” is nothing short of disgraceful.

To try to use its humanitarian actions as some kind of rationale for terrorist attacks in Canada is utterly despicable.

But that is the modern Left for you – utterly clueless and morally bankrupt.