Who's willing to stand up?

Yesterday Instapundit had a small but worrying roundup of recent developments in the increase in anti-Semitic attacks. In that context he repeats something he has pointed out before:

If they [the Jews] had the habit of blowing things up, they wouldn't face this problem.

The point is that Islamist terrorism wouldn't be so widespread if us Westerners didn't make it so effective by our limp and subdued response. Which is underscored by the Mark Steyn column he quotes today:

Consider, for example, the bizarre behavior of Reuters, the once globally respected news agency now reduced to putting out laughably inept terrorist propaganda. A few days ago, it made a big hoo-ha about the Israelis intentionally firing a missile at its press vehicle and wounding its cameraman Fadel Shana. Shana was posed in an artful sprawl in a blood-spattered shirt. But it had ridden up and underneath his undershirt was spotlessly white, like a summer-stock Julius Caesar revealing the boxers under his toga. What's stunning is not that almost all Western media organizations reporting from the Middle East are reliant on local staff overwhelmingly sympathetic to one side in the conflict -- that's been known for some time -- but the amateurish level of fakery that head office is willing to go along with.

See here and here for more details on the specific case. Mark Steyn concludes:

It doesn't matter how "understandable" Centanni and Wiig's actions are to us, what the target audience understands is quite different: that there is nothing we're willing to die for. And, to the Islamist mind, a society with nothing to die for is already dead.

As Niall Ferguson predicts (via Harry's Place), they will probably be proven wrong, but that happy outcome would certainly not be the merit of the Al-Reuters and multiculti crowd.