The failure of the world to see Hezballah as a threat

Tony Blankley:

Tuesday's front-page New York Times headline on the Hezbollah-Israel fighting — "International Force Is Favored, But No Nation Commits Troops" — was widely received with a giggling "Well, duh." In a way, it was funny. While the Europeans agreed that international troops should be sent in to stop the fighting, the article ended with, "The Germans recommended the French, the French recommended the Egyptians, and so on."
But if one scratches just beneath the surface of the headlines, the great strategic failure of America since September 11 can be detected in the fourth paragraph of the New York Times article:
"There has been strong verbal support for such a force in public, but also private concerns that soldiers would be seen as allied to Israel and would have to fight Hezbollah guerrillas who do not want foreigners, let alone the Lebanese Army, coming between them and the Israelis." Well, of course they don't.
From my extensive conversations with Europeans, high and low, I don't doubt the accuracy of that statement. Most Europeans — and far too many Americans — still see Hezbollah terrorism as just part of that Arab-Israeli mess in the Middle East. (And, of course, Hezbollah doesn't want foreigners to stop it from killing.) But, more importantly, most of the peoples of the world — including U.S. citizens — still don't believe that radical Islamist terrorism is a grave, worldwide challenge to civilization.
And therein lies our greatest strategic failure to date. So long as most people — certainly most Europeans, perhaps most Americans — see Islamist terrorism as merely the more or less disconnected actions of a relatively small number of fanatics, then Europeans will never send their sons to fight and die to defeat it. And, of course, they won't send their sons to risk death for the "Jewish state" of Israel or the "imperialist" United States. And who can ask any parents to risk sacrificing their sons for some foreigners — despised or not?

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Blankley seems to think a public debate will raise the comprehension level of the the rest of the world. I am not that optimistic. These people are like the anti war left in this country. They want to remain willfully ignorant of the threat, because to ascknowledge taht threat undermines their world view in such a profound way that it destroys their self confidence and sense of self. They can occassionally beshaken out of their stupor by events like 9-11, but even them some are in such denial that they come up with weird consipracy theories to avoid reality that is too inconvient. In some what they are like the Muslims who deny that nay Muslims would have been able to conceive and execute the 9-11 attacks.