(City Journal) -- Three days after a militant’s bomb shattered a pleasant Chelsea evening, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio joined London mayor Sadiq Kahn and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo in calling for “policies that embrace diversity and promote inclusion.” They dismissed any connection between Muslim refugees and terror. “Militant violence is vanishingly rare,” they wrote. Such a denial of plain facts is rightly called “Orwellian.”
If militant violence is vanishing, then it must have once been more common, and is now almost gone. But the opposite is true. In just the last year, a Muslim couple attacked a Southern California community center, killing and wounding dozens of people; a jihadi stalked and massacred 49 people at a Florida gay nightclub; a Somali immigrant on his way to buy an iPhone stabbed nine people in a Minnesota shopping mall while making references to Allah and asking potential victims if they were Muslim; and an Afghan native planted a number of bombs in the New York City area, apparently with the intention of murdering as many people as possible.
One could make an argument that such attacks don’t happen often, or that people are more likely to be eaten by sharks than attacked by Muslim immigrants, but it’s ridiculous to insist that radical Islamist violence is on a downswing.
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