Steyn Hearts Saudi Arabia

Mark Steyn is after root causes in the war on terror:

Five years after 9/11, some strategists say we can't win this thing "militarily," which is true in the sense that you can't send the Third Infantry Division to Brampton, Ontario. But nor is it something we can win through "law enforcement" -- by letting the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI and MI5 and every gendarmerie on the planet deal with every little plot on the map as a self-contained criminal investigation. We need to throttle the ideology and roll up the networks. These fellows barely qualify as "fifth columnists": Their shingles hang on Main Street. And, even though the number of Ontarians prepared actively to participate in the beheading of the prime minister is undoubtedly minimal, the informal support of the jihad's aims by many Western Muslims and the quiescence of too many of the remainder and the ethnic squeamishness of the modern multicultural state provide a big comfort zone.

This week the jihad lost its top field general, but in Somalia it may have gained a nation -- a new state base after the loss of Afghanistan. And in Toronto and London the picture isn't so clear: The forensic and surveillance successes were almost instantly undercut by the usual multicultural dissembling of the authorities. If you think the idea of some kook beheading prime ministers on video is nutty, maybe you're looking at things back to front. What's nutty is that, half a decade on from Sept. 11, the Saudis are still allowed to bankroll schools and mosques and think tanks and fast-track imam chaplaincy programs in prisons and armed forces around the world. Oil isn't the principal Saudi export, ideology is; petroleum merely bankrolls it. In Britain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and elsewhere, second- and third-generation Muslims recognize the vapidity of the modern multicultural state for what it is -- a nullity, a national non-identity -- and so, for their own identity, they look elsewhere. To carry on letting Islamism fill it is to invite the re-primitivization of the world.