One of my moonbat friends, let’s call him Goldfinger, is right now wringing his hands over what he is sure will be worse than any terrorist attack. That thing he fears is the response to the latest Muslim barbarism in the streets of a Western city. The bodies are not even cold, and our domestically produced lunatics are ranting about the bogeymen they imagine are lurking in the bushes waiting for them.

Goldfinger got his nickname because the day after 9/11 he posted a gassy essay about how an irrational fear of Muslim terrorism would lead Americans to suddenly become Islamophobic. The text, which is no longer available so you will have to take my word for it, read like a manifesto from a super villain in a 60’s spy thriller. The only thing missing was a demand for one million dollars. Hence the Goldfinger moniker.

It’s tempting to think that these people are a) sociopaths incapable of empathy, b) so obsessed with their cause everything is warped into supporting it, c) crazy or d) some combination of all three. Read this demented nonsense from Salon and it is hard not to pick the last two options.

In the comments to yesterday’s post, Nedd Ludd points out that the NYTimes is flooded with comments from readers trying to shift the focus from the events in Paris to whatever hobbyhorse they think is more important. At this point, it is hard to think it is anything other than a biological response. An integral part of the Progressive response to the world is to shift the focus away from them and onto something else.

It’s baffling to normal people, for example, when they see liberals stutter and spit at the ideal of calling these things terrorism or Islamic terrorism. How is it possible they cannot see what is manifestly obvious? The answer is they do see it and a lot more, which is why they impulsively try to change the subject, even if they look foolish doing it.

You see, the Progressive religion that has evolved over the last half dozen generations shares much with Islam, including the thirst for blood. Look at the heroes of the American Left. The Weathermen were planting bombs blowing up innocent people. The Black Panthers were a racist murder squad. The SDA existed to start riots on campus so they could burn down buildings and assault their enemies.

Barak Obama was sponsored in politics by two former Weathermen, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Obama has repeatedly said he is the man he is today because of these two people. The only material difference between the Weathermen and the guys who executed yesterday’s attack is that the later was better at it than the sniveling punks from the 70’s.

When Muslim nutters go bonkers and murder a bunch of people, guys like Obama wish they had been able to do it. They grew up hearing the stories from their elders and always wished they had been given the chance to blow up a recruiting center or shoot a security guard in a bank robbery.

What they know that you don’t know is they envy these Muslim terrorists, and they don’t want that revealed so they quickly shift the focus from this topic to something else, like the mythological backlash. That way no one will notice that they are both giddy at the sight of it and envious that they are not part of it.

Of course, the natural response of Progressives under all circumstances is the say, “Let’s talk about what’s wrong with you.” No matter the topic, that’s what they are thinking. If you ask about the weather, they will shift the conversation from that to why you insist on driving an SUV and voting Republican.

In these cases, however, the events strike too close to home so that’s why we see the panicked attempts to shift the focus to hate speech and white privilege.  Even when it is dismissed, the conversation moves from the dangerous – the similarities between Progressivism and Islam – to the general craziness of back bench lunatics writing for Salon.

That Salon piece is what you see on Islamic websites. Right now, there are stories in Arabic claiming this Paris attack is an attempt by the Mossad to get Europe more involved in the Near East in support of Israel against the faithful. It’s completely insane, but it beats talking about reality. You don’t join a cult because you enjoy reality.

If you are a Frenchman, even one wedded to the three pillars of the New Religion, and you are standing on a street corner watching the aftermath of a suicide bomber, you have two choices. You either volunteer to wear the next vest or you volunteer to shoot the guy in the vest.

If you are that same Frenchman sitting in your flat watching this on TV maybe you don’t think those are your choices. Maybe you think there’s some third choice. The reality is that there is no third choice. There’s just the distance between now and when you are forced to choose.

The questions in front of us today, in the general sense, are how much longer we can tolerate being ruled by a deranged religious cult and how much longer we will tolerate it. The mass exodus from Muslim lands is due to the collapse of Islam as a coherent organizing force. The same thing is happening in the West, except that the West has a vast store of wealth on which to live, even though the raison d’être is no longer obvious to anyone.