London goes the way of Kabul

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."

Rudyard Kipling wrote the 1895 poem "The Young British Soldier," giving it a macabre ending. In the poem, a wounded English soldier in Afghanistan shoots himself with his rifle instead of succumbing to mutilation by the locals. Some 2,500 British soldiers were killed between 1878 and 1880 in fighting in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, "only" one British soldier was murdered. His body was mutilated, dismembered and dragged around, and was only left alone after it was beheaded. We are not in Iraq or Afghanistan, nor is this Kipling's century: This is the West in modern times.

The wild West.

Last year it was Mohammed Merah, a young Muslim of Algerian decent who was mesmerized by jihadist ideology and started off deciding to kill "traitorous" Muslims who fought alongside the infidels against his brothers in Afghanistan, before cementing his legacy in the murderous terrorist attack on the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school.

London's Woolwich neighborhood bore witness to a jihadist attack on Wednesday. Unfortunately it was not the first of its kind. Youth, enchanted by the jihad, are implementing the methods displayed in the gory videos currently circulating the Web.

Just as in Toulouse or Boston, we do not need to look for terror in Iraq or Afghanistan -- it's here, now, and it's deadly. Some will try to explain that the harsh reality in southeast London promotes acts of violence. Some will say that living in the slums pushes people to acts of desperation. But that claim avoids confronting the truth: Second- and third-generation immigrants from Muslim countries, whose families moved so that they could live a better life, are enchanted by the reality from which their parents escaped.

To prevent the spread of these events they must first be recognized, so that they can be dealt with as required. It is not a simple war to fight as most Muslims living in the West are not terrorists, obviously, but "Allah" has been involved in nearly all terrorist attacks in the world in the past two decades.

A young British soldier left his base in Woolwich, perhaps thinking to himself how lucky he was to be in Britain and not Afghanistan, safe in the United Kingdom. But apparently there is no need to "import" terrorists from Yemen to slit the throats of victims -- the West has grown its own terrorists.

Kipling is rolling in his grave.

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