The frog and the scorpion
Jonah Goldberg on why "making nice" is no defense in today's world:
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 Los Angels 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.
As the American Enterprise Institute’s Reuel Marc Gerecht and the French intellectual Olivier Roy have suggested, multiculturalism in many ways breeds Islamic radicalism among deracinated “born-again” Muslims in the West. It foments the climate of grievance and honors the quest for radical authenticity. Indeed, jihadism imports any number of Marxist and anti-colonial bugaboos into its worldview and then spits them back out at the West. “This militant evolution is happening, in situ, on our territory. It partakes henceforth of the internal history of the West,” Roy observed. The 9/11 hijackers were Westernized, educated, and cosmopolitan. Nearly all of the alleged Canadian plotters were raised in Canada and attended Canadian public schools. They were indeed homegrown.
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 Los Angels 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.
