The aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre has confirmed something widely suspected: this country’s elites have no interest in defeating terrorism.

Out of the 17 people murdered by Jihadi thugs in Paris, four were cops and four were innocent passersby who happened to be in a kosher shop at the wrong moment. But the other nine were perfect examples of 21^st-century postmodern secular elites. Sophisticated, skeptical, well-educated, and well-to-do bohos working in media whose response to anything at all was a combination of aloofness, impudence, and irony. In this they were representative of their generation -- essentially French versions of Jon Stewart and Tina Fey. They would have been at home in any capital city -- London, Amsterdam, New York -- or any university town in the Western world.

This was reflected in Charlie Hebdo itself. The magazine attacked Islam not only because it was a perfect target in its vulgarity, stupidity, and aggressiveness (when it comes down to it, Islam is the bully of belief systems), but because it was a religion. CH also attacked Christianity, Judaism, and every other creed that came into its sights with the same brio and nastiness. In this, CH reflected widely-held postmodern elitist attitudes.

And yet -- the massacre has had no impact on Western elites. It should have. This class, secular, worldly, and atheistic, constitutes a prime target for Jihadi terror. Muslims loathe the Godless far more than they do followers of other creeds. According to the Koran, Christians and Jews are to be allowed to live -- albeit in misery -- as dhimmis in a universal Islamic caliphate. But the godless folk will be exterminated out of hand.

Shortly after the Hebdo massacre, Rupert Murdoch Tweeted the obvious:  “Maybe most Moslems peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.”  He was answered with the same tone that would have been used if he’d dropped his pants at a cocktail party: “I was wondering what an outdated, bigoted, sociopath might make of it all.” “You are Catholic, why are you not hunting pedophiles?” “You're already a vaguely evil media conglomerate guy and THEN you're ALSO racist?”

The attacks were relentless, with scarcely a single effort to defend Murdoch. Nor has anyone offered support since.

At the end of the same week, five Yemeni terrorists -- associated with the Al Qaeda offshoot that sponsored the CH murders -- were freed from Guantanamo, evidently on Obama’s orders. Not only does this defy widely-discussed findings that from 10 to 20% of all released detainees return to terrorism, it also gives the back of the hand to the French and the victims. With this action, the administration’s long-suspected reluctance to engage with terrorism has been formalized.  

Within hours, Nancy Pelosi reinforced this interpretation by nominating Andre Carson (D -- Ind.) a convinced Muslim, to the House Intelligence Committee, which deals largely in classified material.  Carson has long been notorious for connections with suspect Muslim organizations, many of them tied to the Muslin Brotherhood. This move would be questionable at any time, but in the week following an Islamist massacre, it’s no less than atrocious.

Events since the beginning of this conflict on 9/11/2001 have demonstrated that the American elite’s enthusiasm was less than overwhelming. Recall the remarks from assorted politicians and urban sophisticates in the days immediately following the attack, before it sunk in how enraged the country truly was.

Before long, we got Fahrenheit 911, Ward Churchill’s “Little Eichmanns” slur, the Pacino/Buscemi revival of Brecht’s Arturo Ui, the Abu Ghraib uproar, accusations of Nazi-like behavior by American troops from Dick Durbin and John Murtha, and almost open cooperation between the Western media and Al Qaeda units in Iraq (characterized by the use of Palestinian “journalists” as stringers). Throw in a parade of failed antiwar films and you have a clear picture of elite attitudes: they really, really did not like the war on terror. All of this culminated, of course, in the election of Barack Obama, a politician who promised to make it all go away with a single flick of his fly whisk.

The reasons are not hard to discern. They are largely ideological. The reigning ideology of the leftist segment of the elite class -- which sets the tone for the moderates (whoever the hell they may be) and the wet conservatives, is multiculturalism. This can be stated as the contention that all whites are guilty of oppressing all nonwhites and must constantly be prepared to atone for it. (This school of thought has always puzzled whites from oppressed third-world areas such as Ireland, Sicily, and Poland, but no matter.)

Muslims are “nonwhite” (at least in the ideological sense -- Arabs, Kabyles, Turks, Kurds, Druze, Pashtun, etc. are actually Caucasian, but that’s overlooked for the Cause), and so ipso facto, come under the protection of multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is a necessary element of 21^st-century leftism because nothing else remains. Leftism’s economics, derived from Marxism, have always been nonsense. Social and racial injustices were solved, mirabile dictu, by internal reforms in which the left played little or no part. All that remains is will-o’-the-wisps such as “income inequality” and the all-encompassing creed of multiculturalism.

To the harder left, Jihadis serve as a revolutionary proletariat, in the sense laid down by Franz Fanon, serving socialism by disconcerting and overwhelming the reactionary establishment. Jihadi terrorism embodies a revolutionary insurrection against white oppression demanding support from compassionate, worldly Western elites. (“…they are the Minutemen…. And they will win.”)

The reaction to the Charlie Hebdo slaughter is a direct outgrowth of this. Herd instinct soon overwhelmed healthy shock and revulsion, with multicultural goodthink clamping down like an iron mask. (The sole exception is Bill Maher, who had better get himself both bodyguards and a carry permit.)

With all this in play, is it any surprise that efforts against the Jihadis have been faltering? ISIS rampages throughout Syria and northern Iraq, Iran inches ever closer to nuclear hegemony, Boko Haram slaughters its way across Nigeria, Libya is in turmoil, and now Paris.

It follows that we have two enemies in the war on terror -- the Jihadis on one hand, and our own multicultural elites on the other. We cannot “lose” this war in any meaningful sense, but lack of will on the part of Western leadership guarantees that we can’t win either. It’s easy to imagine a stalemate lasting a century or more, with all the suffering and destruction that would entail

As warfare, the conflict is pretty straightforward. It’s a management problem, involving identifying targets and then lining up enough munitions to take them out. The process is so simple that even an incompetent like Barack Obama has been able to stumble through a semi-convincing simulation of meaningful activity.

But the multiculturalist conflict is something else -- it’s a battle for the Western soul, one that’s been proceeding since the French Revolution. The left has lost every major confrontation, one after another. The triumph of Reaganism and the collapse of the USSR reduced it to little more than an irritant. But it continued slithering along like a sci-fi amoeba.

With the entry of militant Islam, the battle has become critical. The left has leveraged public impatience, fear, and revulsion involving terror and the necessary acts to combat it to gain a ghastly kind of postmortem life for itself by making promises that cannot be kept and lying about the nature of the enemy. The Hebdo massacre has underlined how far they are willing to go.

We cannot win while dragging this ideological chain behind us. But how do we overcome it? The Muslims may well do that for us. More Hebdo slaughters will occur with the certainty of the sun coming up. It will become more and more difficult for the elites to excuse them as actions of poor, oppressed minorities. Today these crimes are occurring in Europe, but as Fort Hood, Tulsa, and Boston have demonstrated, the U.S. in not immune. Eventually, the Jihadis -- Allah be praised! -- will begin to target American equivalents of the CH staff, the godless, in their own milieus. (Is Bill M. ready to sacrifice himself for the greater good, I wonder?) Then the elite left will start screaming for protection. Then it will cease being an ideological game.

It’s a shame that it has to come to that, but our elite class is impervious in its smugness and mortal stupidity. So come to that it will.

The Western elites may be content with cultural suicide. The Western people are not.