President Barack Obama’s essentially European world outlook has no better illustration than his comment to Bob Woodward during a July, 2010 interview that “we can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever…we absorbed it and we are stronger.”

The essence of the differences between the European and American view of terrorism is the deeply felt, but often unstated opinion on the Continent that terrorism is normal and that it would be a mistake to over-react to it. In the United States, terrorism cuts very, very deeply into our national psyche. But in Europe, it’s often just one of those things.

After all, Europe has seen a lot worse than the relatively naive American public has ever had to witness. The last serious bloodshed on American soil came in the Civil War. The Pearl Harbor and 9-11 attacks stand out as landmarks in our history precisely because we have shed so little American blood with the boundaries of the United States. Britain lost 50,000 people in the blitz during World War II. France lost about one-quarter of its military age men in World War I. Germany saw seven million die in World War II (not counting the German Jews the Nazis killed). Next to these horrific casualties, 2400 dead at Pearl Harbor and 3,000 lost on 9-11 pale by comparison.

Basically, Europeans say to America “get over it. Grow up. Welcome to reality.” But Americans refuse to accept the idea that random death and massive violence are inevitable concomitants of the modern world. We demand that government emphatically reject this as a norm and move heaven and earth to stop it from happening.
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