Ms. Gabriel is one who would know. Her autobiography is entitled Because They Hate, and chronicles not just her early life in a “Christian” Lebanon, but the ultimate downfall of that country to militant Islam. One fascinating vignette captures the heart of the issue. At one point her mother was injured in a Muslim attack and the only hospital was across the border in Israel. There, as she attended to her mother in the hospital, she describes this experience:

I also learned about hatred, intolerance, and bigotry. The Muslim woman who was in the room with my mother had stayed in the hospital for about twelve days. And even after ten days, when the doctors left the room after changing her bandages and checking on her in their morning tour, she said, with an evil, hate-fill look on her face, “I hate you all. I wish you were all dead.” And for the first time in my life I saw evil. I realized that this Muslim couldn’t love the Jews even after they had saved her life. And when you are unable to be grateful to the people who saved your life, you have no soul. When humans become devoid of compassion, a sense of forgiveness, and open-mindedness, when they surrender their humanity to hate, they become an evil force of darkness that is irreconcilable with hope, love, and peace. (page 80)

Here in the West with our Judeo-Christian heritage, such deep vitriolic animosity is hard to understand, and frequently the liberal mindset denies it altogether as unfathomable and impossible even as the evidence of its existence piles up around it in an every increasing body count.

This is the primary moral of Mumbai…the absolute implacability of the enemy.

Hand in hand with the implacability of this external enemy is the fecklessness of the response of Western government and media with its pervading, reality-denying multicultural philosophy. In the post cited above, Michael Medved provides some valuable history regarding the precursors of this Mumbai attack:

In May, 2004, India's left-leaning Congress Party took control of the government from the BJP ("Hindu Nationalists"), with overwhelming support from the nation's substantial Muslim minority (some 150 million strong). Congress pledged to cut money from counter-terror efforts and security forces, while doing more to address the concerns and to win cooperation from angry, dissatisfied Muslims who complained of their own persecution. The result of this new policy has been an unmitigated disaster --- with more than 4,000 deaths from terrorist attacks in the last four years, which amounts to more casualties than any other nation on earth other than Iraq. The Indian experience should send a powerful message to Americans who believe that we will somehow be safer from closing Guantanamo, cutting back on intelligence gathering, doing more to protect Islamist rights and generally employing a kinder, gentler approach to the war on terror. Comparing India's experience in the last four years to the situation in the United States shows the necessity of treating terrorism as a world-wide war, not just a problem of law enforcement.

Winston Churchill was once quoted as saying, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” The crocodile just came to India for his feast.

In harmony with the strategy of the Indian government, the media is also sticking its collective head in the sand. Tom Gross, over at the Wall Street Journal, a former Middle East correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, had the following questions for various MSM representatives:

So why are so many prominent Western media reluctant to call the perpetrators terrorists? Why did Jon Snow, one of Britain's most respected TV journalists, use the word "practitioners" when referring to the Mumbai terrorists? Was he perhaps confusing them with doctors?

Why did Britain's highly regarded Channel 4 News state that the "militants" showed a "wanton disregard for race or creed" when exactly the opposite was true: Targets and victims were very carefully selected. Why did the "experts" invited to discuss the Mumbai attacks in one show on the state-funded Radio France Internationale, the voice of France around the world, harp on about Baruch Goldstein (who carried out the Hebron shootings in 1994), virtually the sole case of a Jewish terrorist in living memory?

Why indeed? Again, as Michael Medved points out:

The total Jewish population of Mumbai was less than 4,000, before these attacks--- barely .0002% of an overall population of 19,000,000. The targeting of this miniscule, quiet and obscure community shows the importance of describing the extremists as Islamo-Nazis, not Islamo-Fascists. Like the Nazis, and unlike other Fascist organizations in Italy and Spain, the Islamists embrace Jew-hatred as an essential, inseparable element of their very identity. Authorities in Mumbai say many of the bodies of hostages show signs of grotesque and indescribable torture, but the Jewish victims – particularly the women – apparently suffered even worse than the others. There's obviously no substance at all to the notion that the kindly, selfless and deeply religious personnel at Chabad House (who concerned themselves with providing kosher food, visiting the sick, performing weddings, and studying religious texts) somehow connected with Islamist complaints over Kashmir. The West needs to understand that Islamo-Nazis feel motivated by implacable hatred for all Jews (and all Christians) rather than objections to particular elements European or American or Indian culture or policy.

These facts are not hard to find out. As Mr. Gross adds in his essay:

Then on Friday morning, TV pictures of Indian commandos storming the besieged Jewish center were broadcast by networks around the world. Heavily armed commandos, their faces covered by balaclavas, rappelled from helicopters onto the roof while Indian sharpshooters in buildings opposite opened fire and a helicopter circled overhead. Huge crowds of onlookers could be seen looking aghast as they watched from nearby streets. While Sky News and other channels were gripped by these dramatic pictures, BBC World was not, almost pretending there was no siege at the Jewish center -- even though by then it was one of only two sites that remained under attack in Mumbai. Had the terrorists chosen to besiege a church or mosque instead, can you imagine the BBC ignoring it this way?

Meanwhile -- perhaps even more disgracefully -- a New York Times report on the last day of the siege stated: "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."

I’m sorry, but if the NYT couldn’t figure out this one, they must employ morons on this beat:

Dozens of eyewitness accounts by local Indians said the gunmen shouted "Allah Akbar" from the Jewish center. It is housed in a nondescript block and is not obviously marked from the outside as a Jewish center. It is the one Jewish building in a densely crowded city of millions. And the Times, the selfproclaimed paper of record, wants to let readers think it might have been an accidental target?

So where does this leave us? We have an implacable external enemy and a feckless media and government that can easily be called an internal enemy, and while we have the finest military in the world, they are all too frequently prevented from doing their job on the external enemy by the internal. And returning to Mark Steyn, he notes that:

What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component.

The first part of the battle, however, seems to be to recognize who the enemy is and what we are dealing with:

This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault — and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else.