Mark Steyn visited with Brian Lilley on SunTV to discuss the year in jihad in Canada and beyond. Interestingly, one common theme of the year was how western governments and media insisted upon ignoring the ideology of Islam as being causal, even as the bodies piled up. Even when jihadists declared that following Islam was their motivation, the politically correct voices of the west insisted the perp was mentally ill or disaffected from society — anything except acting according to jihadist principles.

Canada was stunned by the attack in Ottawa on October 22, where Corporal Nathan Cirillo, a guard at the National War Monument on Parliament Hill, was shot down by a Muslim bent on jihad.

MARK STEYN: Corporal Nathan Cirillo did not need to die, and I think that is the appalling tragedy that whatever you say to his family in the end if we had a different approach to these things, if we took the ideological threat more seriously and if we didn’t just simply maintain a legalistic law enforcement approach to it, then I think these things would go very differently.

We choose not to get the message that the guy wanted to put a bullet through not only Corporal Cirillo but through the heart of the Canadian state, and that’s why he chose that target, and we should take these guys at their word when it comes to this stuff, that the fellow in Sydney, he got more furious as the siege went on because he was watching the sappy multiculturalist TV station across the street denying anything, he said he was doing it in the name of the Islamic State and they were saying ‘Oh no, it’s not an Islamic State flag, it’s just any old common Muslim flag, this is nothing to do with terrorism.’

At a certain point, we should respect our enemies enough to take them at their word.”

BRIAN LILLEY: “. . .We have apologists still saying, ‘No, it was mental illness.’ I don’t know how you diagnose someone who’s dead all of a sudden turn around and say, ‘No they have mental illness and that’s why they did this.”

STEYN: “You don’t need a vast intelligence operation, as you say, these guys are on social media, they’re doing it out in the open and the reason we don’t take it seriously is because we’re trained to look the other way, exactly the way that the check-in desk clerk did at Portland Airport in Maine on September 11th thought that Mohammed Atta was creepy and suspicious and then, ooh, a politically incorrect thought, better not do anything about it or I’ll be tied up in sensitivity training for six months and so Mohammed Atta got on the plane and 3000 people died, because we have been trained to look the other way.”

For more on the failure to stop Atta, see here and here.