In the film “Casablanca,” American cafe owner Humphrey Bogart, with the shadow of Naziism falling over Europe, subtly says of the time of night, “I bet they’re asleep in New York. I bet they’re asleep all over America.”
He didn’t mean in their beds. It was a message to wake up to what was happening in the world.
Today let us pray that these latest attacks in Paris awaken the civilized world once and for all to the nihilistic, existential threat of radical Islam enveloping us.
The Western world has moved on blithely from centuries of battle with Islam. Sadly, Islamic leaders have not.
When will we wake up to that rather apparent fact? Now? After France’s own 9-11?
How many fatal assaults on innocents, how many Kalashnikov rifles, how many bombs, how many theaters-turned-slaughtering pens must we watch before we wake up — across America, across Europe, across the world?
And how many Syrian refugees, intermingled with the savages of ISIS, will be allowed to fan out across Europe and into America?
If just a few of the thousands and thousands of Syrian refugees President Obama wants to bring here are terrorists, people will die. Perhaps many people.
And as we noted in a September editorial about the mass Muslim migration, “If you had to choose 10,000 strangers from another land to be your neighbors, what are the chances that you’d make one dangerously wrong decision among those 10,000?”
When we cautioned then against willy-nilly importation of Syrian refugees, knowing full well that ISIS had promised to infiltrate them, we were called xenophobic. Still think so? It appears the Paris assaults may have been carried out in part by “refugees” from Syria.
As one report put it, “A second Paris gunman has been confirmed as having entered Europe via Greece by posing as a refugee.”
Look at the carnage left in Paris, in part by just two alleged refugees. Yet, President Obama recommitted this weekend to opening America’s burgs to thousands. Talk about doubling down on reckless!
In the larger picture, Mr. Obama talked after the Paris attacks of their violating “universal values.” Sorry Mr. President, but that’s feel-good claptrap. There are no universal values — as was proven by Paris, and every attack before it.
There are, certainly, moral absolutes — though, oddly enough, American liberals don’t seem to buy into that.
But until such moral absolutes as the right to life, peaceful coexistence, respect for individuality, deference to differing belief systems and more are, indeed, universal — and are more common in the Muslim world than they seem to be today — there will be no “universal” values. And we will continue to need borders and heightened, enlightened wariness. That’s not xenophobia. It’s wisdom, born of horrific experience. It’s realism vs. idealism.
Another famous line in “Casablanca” is, “We’ll always have Paris.”
Will we? Unless we put up our guard, and take the battle to the terrorists — mercilessly, as the French president has now promised — can we be so sure of having Paris or any of the Western-style freedoms and delights it represents?
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