The late great Andrew Breitbart used to have a great way to befuddle moralizing liberals in TV. The liberal would go on a rant about something, which meant repeating the liberal pieties about the subject, then sitting back, full of righteous indignation expecting Andrew to cower. Instead, he would respond with “So?” and a rye smile. He had the perfect look to pull it off and the confidence to deliver it on target. The liberal would be poleaxed, unsure why they did not get the expected reaction.

I thought of then when looking at this:

THE brutal murder of 12 people at the offices of a satirical magazine in Paris today appears to have been carried out by militant Islamists. If so, many will again question the compatability of Islam with secular-minded, liberal European values. Mistrust of religion is not confined to Islam, but Europeans regard it as more threatening to their national cultures than other faiths (or indeed atheism), according to a 2013 poll by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a non-profit organisation in Germany. The threat of Islamic terrorism is rising, to judge not just by today’s slaughter but also by other attacks and a recent upward trend in arrests for religiously-inspired terrorism reported by Europol, the European Union’s law-enforcement arm. Perceptions can easily run ahead of reality, however. There were still more arrests for other types of terrorism (motivated by separatism, for example) in Europe in 2013, the last year for which pan-European data are available. And European publics wildly overestimate the proportion of their populations that is Muslim: an Ipsos-Mori poll in 2014 found that on average French respondents thought 31% of their compatriots were Muslim, against an actual figure closer to 8%.

So what? People are notoriously poor at this sort of thing. They simply pick a number that feels big or small or about right, depending upon the subject. Americans wildly overestimate the number of queers in the population. The reason is we are bombarded with the subject by the Cult of Modern Liberalism. It feels like there are many more than there are, which is what should be the point. Europeans are suffering from a similar phenomenon. Culturally, Islam is punching way above its weight in Europe so it feels like Muslims are swarming in big numbers.

This sort of passive-aggressive tactic is popular with the CML. Instead of making an argument and supplying facts to support it, they put things “out there” to shift the focus. You can be sure that the chattering skulls in Europe will prefer focusing on this rather than the lunacy of importing millions of Muslims. That’s what made Brietbart’s retort so much fun. It turned the focus back on the other guy, forcing him to explain himself.