It was widely noted, most passionately by the Iraqi blogger Hammorabi, that when Tony Blair reminded the House of Commons that many countries had been scourged by the terrorists in recent years, he omitted Iraq from the list. His speechwriters had Iraq in a different part of their database; Iraqis weren't victims of terrorism in the same way as Brits, Americans, Kenyans, and Indonesians. One's instinct is to let it go as an oversight, but there was another country missing from the list, and this case was somewhat less widely noted: Israel. And at this point, one is forced to do some thinking. What do these two countries have in common, that they should both be ignored in the British government's response to the London attacks?

Iraq and Israel are arguably the two major victims of Islamic terrorism. Yet they did not come to Blair's mind. Or maybe they did, and maybe there was a reason they were omitted.

In the growing recent literature about Great Britain's appeasement of Islamic terrorists over the past decade and more, we've come to understand that London was, in many ways, the epicenter of the terror network. Terrorists wanted in other countries were given safe haven in the United Kingdom, and the most amazingly hateful language was spewed out, openly and proudly, by various sheikhs and imams, all left to incite the faithful to terrible acts against innocent people the world over. For all this, her majesty's government had its reasons. There was a reluctance to offend "the Arabs," the richest of whom had long used London as a home away from the sand, and as their financial and banking center of choice. Moreover, there was a traditional disdain of the Arabs, born out of long experience and expressed in open doubt that "those people" would ever constitute a serious threat, or indeed anything serious. Further, there was a long tradition of open and boisterous political speech, which reflexively protected even terrorist preachers from official rebuke or punishment. To these traditions, there was the usual deadly overlay of political correctness, what Mark Steyn calls the multiculti view, according to which people with traditions different from ours should be respected and certainly not silenced. To do that would not only be non-multiculti, it would risk the advantages of the special relationship with the Arab world.

Those of us who have had the frustrating experience of speaking with British diplomats (or journalists, especially those elegantly speaking fellows from the BBC) about the Middle East have invariably encountered a dismissive, slightly bemused, and firm conviction that anyone who worries greatly about "the Arabs" is at least ignorant and at worst malignant. And those of us who had the gall to argue — publicly, even — that the terror war is indeed serious and that appeasement of Saudis, Syrians, and Iranians would only lead to more and more terrible actions against us all, were relegated to the category of misguided souls, at best...