Being Nice Doesn't Cut It

Jonah Goldberg illustrates once again why being nice to those wishing to kill you will not stay their hand. Instead, it merely shows them how weak you are and how unworthy of the death they will inflict upon you. It's something Canada is learning the hard way.

The presence of a profoundly evil, homegrown terror cell in Canada has understandably provoked a lot of soul-searching to our north. As one Canadian editorial put it: "We are Canada, peacekeepers to the world, everybody's nice guy. Who would want to harm us, and why?" Or as Audrey Macklin, a University of Toronto law professor, confessed to the L.A. Times, Canadians "picture themselves as being thought of as nicer than the United States." Why on earth would terrorists want to hurt a "nice" country? Well, for starters, nice isn't all it's cracked up to be. The frog who carried the scorpion on his back in Aesop's fable was nice. It didn't make the scorpion's sting any less poisonous.

Indeed, there's good reason to believe that niceness is part of the problem, not the solution. Many Canadians (and Americans and Europeans) cling to a deep-seated belief that more multiculturalism, more interfaith dialogue, more "understanding," more Western apologies, more acceptance of Sharia, more "niceness" will fix the problem.

Indeed. In fact this incident in Canada shows how multiculturalism has failed, breeding hatred and violence. Many of the problems that people came to places like Canada, the U.S. and western Europe to get away from have followed them to their new homes. In some cases the problems are even more virulent than from where they fled.

Being nice isn't the answer, as many have found. We shouldn't be tolerant of those wishing nothing more than to subjugate or kill us. We should be as intolerant as hell. If someone is offended by something that is part of our culture, that is guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, then that's just too damn bad. It isn't up to us to adjust our culture to appease the sensitivities of the followers of a brutal ideology. It is up to them to either live with it or to go away. Somehow many of these Islamofascist pinheads have come to believe that they can bomb and burn and kill their way to Paradise. It is a fallacy that has been used again and again to justify brutal, uncivilized acts all throughout history. They are just the latest deluded fools to fall for it, to buy the lie. It isn't until it's too late that they realize that they weren't doing God's work, but the work of His adversary, if they come to realize it at all. And if history can be used as a guide, they won't.