Watching the weenies at the U.K.'s Guardian react to the Manchester mass-casualty attack by trotting out the left's usual meme that "we must not overreact" to the latest atrocity, we may have arrived at a great clarifying moment.  Apparently, there is nothing  the Islamic terrorists could do that will provoke the European left into defending the West.  So this will be a very short note.

First, the left, with its reaction to Manchester, has lost all credibility.  Leftists are no longer relevant – and should be treated accordingly.

Second, Great Britain – in the midst of a "snap election" campaign – has been targeted by the same folks who've been launching mass-casualty attacks on the Continent.  From the reporting, it appears that this was not a "lone wolf" like the guy who attacked Parliament.  This was ISIS Central.  An appropriate response is required.

Third, thank God that Barack Obama is not president.

So what should the Brits and the U.S. do?  They should do what the Archangel Barack would not do after the Paris and Brussels attacks.  Invoke Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.  This was done after 9/11.

An attack on one is an attack on all.

Last, Prime Minister May, with President Trump's support, should do what George W. Bush did not do after 9/11 and call for 100,000 British men to leap to the colors and join the U.K.'s military.  France's new president should do the same with his own men and his own army.

Enough is enough.  As Mark Steyn wrote on Tuesday:

All of us have gotten things wrong since 9/11. But few of us have gotten things as disastrously wrong as May and Merkel and Hollande and an entire generation of European political leaders who insist that remorseless incremental Islamization is both unstoppable and manageable. It is neither – and, for the sake of the dead of last night's carnage and for those of the next one, it is necessary to face that honestly. Theresa May's statement in Downing Street is said by my old friends at The Spectator to be "defiant", but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality. So too for all the exhausted accessories of defiance chic: candles, teddy bears, hashtags, the pitiful passive rote gestures that acknowledge atrocity without addressing it – like the Eloi in H G Wells' Time Machine, too evolved to resist the Morlocks.

As I asked around Europe all last year: What's the happy ending here? In a decade it will be worse, and in two decades worse still, and then in three decades people will barely recall how it used to be, when all that warmth and vibrancy of urban life that Owen Jones hymns in today's Guardian is but a memory, and the music has died away, and Manchester is as dull and listless as today's Alexandria. If Mrs May or Frau Merkel has a happier ending, I'd be interested to hear it. If not, it is necessary not to carry on, but to change, and soon – before it's too late.