There on the front page of JPost hard copy this morning, its lead story was the speech delivered at the 12th annual Herzliya security conference last night by Canada’s foreign minister John Baird. The main and subhead headlines were: “Delegitimization of Israel is the new Anti-Semitism – Visiting Canadian FM John Baird says Israel has no better friend than Ottawa”.

How true. He and Prime Minister Harper and Minister Jason Kenny are hands down Israel’s friendliest government, especially with that villain in the White House. But he said something that was indicative of the power of political correctness, or maybe I am wrong: it is the power of the fear people rightly suffer from when they consider Islam. Herb Keinon reported in an indirect quote, so I hope he got it right, that Mr. Baird “likened terrorism to Fascism and Communism and cautioned against appeasing it.”

Excuse me, but fascism and communism were/are political ideologies. Terrorism is not. This is a bogus comparison. Terrorism is criminal activity likely energized in large part by the evil in some men for whom murderous violence is a way of life, a thrill. If Yasir Arafat had not been an anti-Zionist, some other idea would have served to license him in his own mind to murder people at random. Like individual psychopathic serial killers driven by their evil inner demons, Arafat and Abu Nidal and the rest of the PLO terrorists without Israel would have found other excuses to murder people at random.

John Baird linked Fascism and Communism and terrorism, when what he might really have had in mind was not terrorism but Islam. Fascism, Communism, Islam are all ideologies of dictatorship; all of them enemies of the freedom of the individual to believe and live as he or she chooses.

Baird’s use of the word terrorism was similar to many other politicians including George W. who after 9-11 waged a war against terrorism, when it truth it was a war against predatory, savage, imperialistic Islam.

Terrorism is not an ideology but criminal behavior of the worst possible kind: the murder of innocents at random in terrorist atrocities.

John Baird was right that delegitimizing Israel is the new antisemitism, and I say Islam is the new communism, the new Fascism, even the new Nazism. And the sooner the West allows itself to see that truth, the better…