Hat tip to my friend Knighthawk at Polipundit, this from USA Today:

“I am shocked,” said Jürgen Lesch, 56, a Dresden software developer. “Now it looks like terrorism has reached us, as well.”

Germany’s refusal to take part in the U.S.-led war in Iraq once had Germans thinking Islamic terrorists would focus elsewhere, said Lesch’s wife, Marita, 52, a teacher. “We didn’t fight in Iraq, and until now we assumed that if we behaved well in the world, nothing would happen to us,” she said.

Michael Lüders, a Middle East expert and government policy consultant, said, “Germany is reorienting its (foreign) policy. It did not call for an immediate cease-fire (during Israeli attacks) in Lebanon, and that was disappointing in the Arab world. Some radical forces now think Germany should be punished,” he said.

I have always found that I can talk to liberals because at least you know where each other stands.  Most often I cannot persuade the liberal to see things my way, but at least there is a clash of world views, and eventually one will be proven correct.

The most difficult times I have when conversing with people who do not yet understand the war that radical Islam has declared against the U.S. is the “conservative” thinker, the isolationist who, like Pat Buchanan, believes that it is U.S. presence and intervention in the affairs of other nations and the existence of our troops in other parts of the world that has “caused” the radical Islamicists to hate us so.  If it had not been for our hegemony and colonialism, they say, none of this would have happened.

I find it so difficult to talk to these people because there is almost nothing to say to them.  The fact that history denies this view is irrelevant.  In other words, it is fairly well known that the so-called Crusades were primarily defensive struggles against Islam as it came north into Europe (or at least we can say that it began that way).  At the time that Islam began to assert itself militarily, there was no colonial presence of Europe into Africa or the Middle East.

And yet the Islamicists still attacked, didn’t they?

Folks, we could fold our tents in Iraq, remove all U.S. troops from everywhere in the world, and declare that we will never again have U.S. troops on foreign soil for any reason under the sun.  And the Islamicist response?

To cheer their victory and then begin planning their all out attack on the U.S. homeland.

So here are a couple of questions for you: Do you want to fight the terrorists on foreign soil or U.S. soil?  Do you want to have IEDs blowing up in the streets of Ramadi, or the street on which you live?

As my friend Knighthawk says of the Islamicist approach: “Conform or die.  Get it?”  And as I say, fight them there or fight them here.  Get it?