Mugged by reality?

By Mark Steyn - July 25, 2005 - The Australian

WITH hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta's jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier.

Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

Political correctness has morphed into militant demands for multi-cultural empathy. The more they behead us, the more people on the left demand that we must "tolerate" them because of our guilt in the "root causes" of their beheading spree. It isn't that they are evil. It is what we have done to them.

After describing the convoluted reasoning of a British laywer named Kennedy defending the Islamofascists, Steyn explains his rationale as, "Kennedy appears to be arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable."

I could not have said it better if I had a year to think someting up.