The reluctance to call the attackers what they are, or the jump to shift the blame for the attack to their victims, is how right-thinkers insert some cognitive space between themselves and those with unpopular opinions.

And so the right-thinkers let it pass, shrug it off, scroll to the next headline. Privately, perhaps in bed next to their spouses, they wonder: What are we going to do? 

Waking up to that battle—to say nothing of fighting it—will not be so easy. Europe has been in a kind of postwar stupor for nearly eight decades, and even today the people in charge seem to have trouble mustering a great deal of energy when it comes to defending their national interests or, more broadly, those of the West. 

Salwan Momika, an Iraqi refugee in Sweden who was raised as a Christian and has taken to burning Qurans in public, articulated the views of who knows how many when he tweeted Tuesday: “As an atheist, I must be realistic and believe that the West must return to its Christian roots so that it can fight the project of Islamizing the West.”