The arrest of 17 residents of Canada with three tons of ammonium nitrate in a plot to attack targets in Ontario is a reminder of the nature of the enemy that America faces in the war on Islamist terrorists. Contrary to the beliefs of some on the American extreme left and extreme right, the terrorists aren’t simply reacting against the American-led war in Iraq or against America’s support for Israel.

Canada sent no troops to liberate Iraq. Our neighbor to the North so opposed the Iraq War that at least one American deserter fled there for safe harbor, as draft-dodgers did during the Vietnam War. And while Canada is mildly pro-Israel, and more so under its new conservative government, its arms sales to the Jewish state are peanuts compared to America’s, and at the United Nations on key votes it’s likely to abstain rather than join the America, Micronesia, and Palau in voting with Israel.

What the Islamic extremists oppose in Canada is neither its support for Israel nor its behavior in Iraq but the mere fact that it is not a country governed by Islamic law. An Associated Press dispatch on the bomb plot noted that Canada, with the America, Britain, Spain, and Australia, was listed by Osama Bin Laden as a “Christian” nation that should be a target for terrorism. Nothing short of dropping Christianity and converting to Islam will satisfy the Islamist terrorists.

What follows is this truth: the options this leaves Canada and other free nations are, in other words, either defeating their enemy or surrendering to it. Concessions short of surrender won’t satisfy the enemy, as the example of Canada demonstrates. Nor will a crackdown on immigration entirely solve the security problem for the West – it appears that many of those arrested over the weekend were Canadian-born.

More details will emerge as the case against these plotters progresses. The accused are entitled to a presumption of innocence. But this war has been going on for long enough now – dating back not only to September 11, 2001, but to the attacks on the USS Cole in 2000, the Dhahran Barracks in 1996, the World Trade Center in 1993, the United States Marine Barracks in Beirut in 1983, the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979. And, some would argue, to the original Muslim invasion of Europe and the Christian Crusades that followed. Not all Muslims are enemies of Christendom any more than all Christians are enemies of Islam. But one can begin to discern patterns. Those who falsely see the source of Muslim rage solely in American policy can now consider the case of Canada.