A couple of ISIS wannabes tried to shoot up an exhibition of cartoons in Garland, Texas, and the police put them down before the civilians could get to them: a triumph for duty and marksmanship.
What didn’t happen next?
There is a mosque in Garland, Texas. It was there yesterday, it’s there today, and it will be there tomorrow. After two radical Muslims attempted to massacre some infidels down the road a bit, there was no angry mob of Texans storming the place with F-350s and rifles. If any vehicle full of armed men rushed to the Muslims’ place of worship, you can be sure that it was the local police exercising an abundance of caution and nothing more.
It’s easy to be snarky–”Oh, yay for us! No massacre, give Texas a cookie!” But only those parochial minds with the narrowest of experience could fail to appreciate how unusual that is in the world.
Instead of retaliation, we have open-handed toleration that verges on the destructive. Pamela Geller seems to me like she might be a very nasty piece of business indeed, but you know who I don’t want to hear about it from? CAIR and the rest of the Muslim Brotherhood fan club.
“Oh, but she was trying to inflame the Muslims!” protest the usual assortment of bed-wetters. Yeah? So, what? Time to put on your big-boy First Amendment pants and buck up, little campers.
Did I miss the suicide bombings at The Book of Mormon, or did they just not happen?
I understand some Quakers really, really resent being used to sell high-fiber breakfast products, too, what with the cartoonish depiction of a ruddy-faced man with an awesome hat and all. And we’ve been inflaming the heck out of the charismatic Christians for a good long while now, but the only terror associated with Joel Osteen is the result of his weaponized dentition.
So, yeah: Texans 2, Jihadists 0. But the unappreciated player here is our uniquely liberal civil society—that, and not the police, is why there is peace on the streets of Garland.