Robert Spencer writes at Frontpagemag.com:

The details are still sketchy, but this is what is apparently confirmed as of this writing (8PM EST Sunday night): As many as 50 people have been taken hostage in the Lindt Chocolat Café in Sydney, Australia’s central pedestrian mall, Martin Place. Some of the hostages have been forced at gunpoint to hold up the black flag of Islamic jihad against a window of the café. . . .

This is an unprecedented event in the West. There have been jihad attacks, and hostage situations, but this is the first jihadist hostage event in a Western country since the Islamic State issued this threat in a September video: "We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah, the Exalted. This is His promise to us; He is glorified and He does not fail in His promise. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market."

Spencer concludes: "As Australians, and in due course Americans and Britons and Canadians, grow accustomed to the new possibility that a stop for a cup of coffee could result in one’s head being separated from one’s body, the time for this politically correct unreality about the jihad threat is over. Realism about the nature and magnitude of the threat is long overdue. The patrons inside the Lindt Chocolat Café, now hostages, deserve nothing less, as do the rest of the citizens of the embattled and besieged West.