When is it War?

A week and a half off from politics and social issues has been refreshing. I'd recommend it to anyone.

It seems that the west is becoming accustomed to Islamic terror. Many smaller attacks aren't even being picked up by the mainstream media these days. But perhaps there is a more general trend. A Republican Congressman was shot at a baseball game and the media quickly moved on from the story. This is in stark contrast to the coverage for Gabrielle Giffords which continued for weeks after she was shot. Are we becoming less sensitized to violence overall, or is this just the standard narrative spinning by the MSM? There was recently a "counter-terror attack" in the UK, where a Brit drove a van into a crowd of Muslims. After an initial media blitz and a chorus of false equivalency claims, it too quickly fell off the MSM radar.

In either case, it seems that terror attacks in Europe are becoming routine. Islamic terror is rampant, and there may be counter-terror forming up. The evidence is limited, but there have been anti-Muslim attacks in Britain and Canada in the last year. Muslims are moving into Western countries and just don't have the patience to hold off on violent activities even while a small minority. The locals are starting to respond in kind. The question is: at what point does all this become a civil war? Would we call it a civil war if attacks were daily? Or does civil war imply direct, violent interaction between armed belligerents? How long can attacks on soft civilian targets continue until each side starts forming up into militant units for self-protection?

It seems that as bad as things appear to be, this is really low-grade violence compared to what might erupt in a few years if Muslims are allowed to continue streaming into Europe and grow strong enough to feel competent to engage in open hostility against their hosts. The Europeans are so soft and their morale so low (suicidal, basically) that the Muslims really only need some as yet undetermined fraction of the native population to reach that level. Until then we'll see terror attacks gaining less and less attention by the public as they grow increasingly frequent.