We are at war with hatred, fanaticism and despair

Mike

Will they "gerrit" at last?Not a chance!

Primum non nocere

Shawcross is right in that Al-Qaeda are murderous thugs who respect none of the imperatives of a fair and decent society. However, all Muslims are not Al-Qaeda. Most Muslims (like most non-Muslims, I guess) just want the chance to practice their religion in peace and to build a safer, more prosperous world for their children. Therefore, it helps if the West (or, more pertinent, the United States) doesn't just go round needlessly stirring up resentment by invading Muslim countries on a whim - especially when the end result is to render their populations even more receptive to the Jihadists' siren call than they were before we first meddled.

Mike

Two Mike's ?? This one quits the Spectator blogs. Would hate my Zionist 'friends' to think they were being misled!

Robert C D Kirkwood

No, I think you are wrong on all three counts. Nature abhors a vacuum, and Newton was right. Extremism leads to Extremism and what goes around comes around. Hence, Al Queda.

JK

Noone's at war with hatred, fanaticism and despair - this is little more than a cheap slogan. These are the qualities inherent in those fighting this war and unfortunately they are suffering paranoid episodes, seeing these qualities in their opponents... The Palestinians did not come and create a Israeli state in Wales or Florida... The Iraqis did not come and bomb the UK or US... The Kashmiris did not come and give Scotland or California to the Russians... The Afghanis did not come and install a puppet regime in Washington or London... If you stop forcing your normative secular values down the throats of the rest of the world, and considered their values, the world may be a more peaceful and stable place for all...

jk

Interesting how you need to slag off those you disagree with - if your enemies are in despair, how would you describe britain, a nation on prozac???

Barry in New York

Who do you think you're going to convince, William? The European left has thrown their lot absolutely and unconditionally in with the Islamofascists. Western civilization has no chance of surviving on the East Bank of the Atlantic. The question for people, then, is whether liberals will agree to live peacefully (dhimmi) in an Islamofascist Europe, or whether they'll all emigrate to the US, Australia or Israel. So far it seems like the latter (walk a street in New York, Canberra, or Netanya these days and you hear the Dutch and French influences).

Reid

When ill you stop this absurd propaganda - noone believes it apart from the totally gullable incompetent. Islamists world over want you to stop interfering in their countries and let them determine their own way of life - all opinion polls across the Muslim world indicate Muslims want sharia, a unified state Caliphate, and removal of colonially imposed borders. When the Muslims want to bring about political change and reform they suddenly become an evil threat that is out to destroy the world - wake up and smell the coffee - your articles remind me of the propaganda of the eleventh century crusades, where Muslims were meant to eat boiled babies!

Clive

I agree with your comments, and am happy to see that you are still at liberty to make them, though I worry that before long you will not. Use of the term, "Islamist terrorist", may be interpreted as fomenting racial hatred, a crime under current EU law. What do you think of these laws, and their potential for suppression of unpopular speech?

JD

Videotaped beheadings I guess fall into the category of anti-colonial "political reform."

JP

These comments have been hijacked by simpleminded, moral relativists. I welcome any of you to travel to a Muslim country and fight for women's rights, gay rights or any other minority rights. Simpletons.

Letalis Maximus, Esq.

Oh for heaven's sake! Go back and read your European history regarding the Battle of Tours. There, an united European army stopped a Muslim miliary expansion into Europe. The Crusades, regardless of how idiotically there were carried out, were a response to still more attempts at Muslim expansion into Europe. The problem with your so-called unified Caliphate and imposition of Sharia Law is that they intend them to cover the world. They do not intend to stop at the historical borders of a combined Umayyad and Ottoman Empire. But don't listen to these voices of warning. Listen to the calls to prayer being blasted out from mosque loudspeakers across Europe. The fact is that those loudspeakers, combined with the fact that Europeans have forgotten how to breed and reproduce, spells the end for you. Pity. You made some good wine, beer, and Scotch there for a while.

Dave in London

"Islamists world over want you to stop interfering in their countries and let them determine their own way of life" - yes, they want sharia law, under which they can persecute every non-muslim, or liberal muslim, or anyone who questions their fascist views. Try being a practising Christian in certain Islam states and contrast the treatment given there to the freedom given to Muslims in the West. They hate the infidel with a ferocity that is reminiscent of the Nazis. You can no more reason with them than a Jew could have made a plea of reason and dialogue at the gates of Auschwitz in 1944.

W.A.S.P.

@ Reid:

Islamists world over want you to stop interfering in their countries and let them determine their own way of life.

“ ‘Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution has arisen and the Islamic revolution of 1384 [the current Iranian year] will, if God wills, cut off the roots of injustice in the world,’ ” he said. “ ‘The wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world. ’ ”

droo

Fallacious hyperbole, thy name is Reid.

steve bourg

Simply brilliant, in its brilliant simplicity. Without even knowing him, it turns out I've agreed with Shawcross for years, and I'll find out more about him. I'm an amateur, but even to me, the stakes against the Jihadists are high, they're real, and we must continue to treat them as such. The MSM and the Dems have convinced Americans to such an extent, of its unimportance, that the Republicans have to be careful what they say. Such is the tepid and ignorant nature of perhaps 75% of the masses -- even though the real nature of the enemy is easily deduced.

Kate

Reid you are blind, deaf and stupid. This is not surprising. Your ilk were blind, deaf and stupid in the 1930's, too. In fact all you have to do is change a few words and your post reads like it was written in 1938.

Larry Rainer

Get a grip people. Shawcross does NOT define a real war, which has to be against an opponent with a common political leadership. It's a RHETORICAL war, like the War on Drugs or the War on Poverty. Moslem fundementalists represent a security danger, but are NOT a threat to take over Europe, much less the rest of the world. Islam is more diverse and fragmented than Christian Protestantism, and no Moslems do not think out of the same Borg brain. What bugs me is that many of these same posts are also claiming the U.S. is being 'invaded' by Mexicans. If the U.S. people who write these comments are serious about being threatened by "Islamofacists", I don't understand why they don't run to the Rio Grande and hug every Mexican who comes across.

John Casson

Thank you William Shawcross. Now when will the tired liberal baby boomer cold-war Left finally get the message - that the wars in Afghanistan and, yes, Iraq are necessary to contain this menace. Any enemy of Israel is certainly NOT a friend of ours. We, the West, need to remilitarize, but the EU won't. So many arguments to put together for frontline engagement across the West and still it is left to the Anglosphere to do the fighting -and we still struggle against a liberal media which still hasn't got it. Germany, France - shame on you. Read Neil Lochery's book - Why Blame Israel? and start thinking about what really would affect Western Liberalism and its secular tolerance of all faiths. Islamist political ideology of primacy of Islam over all other faiths, non-reciprocity in allowing other faiths in Saudi Arabia, will need to be reformed or defeated - and it starts here in the UK with the fifth column we have imported through blind naivety. As simple as that. But who listens to a perceived right-wing publication?

Kevin

What do you mean by "the good genius of Enlightement"? The right to break one's free contract of marriage? To define someone as a non-person when his or her existence is inconvenient to you, and to arrest anyone who complains about that? To use a person's consent against him (in the manner of caveat emptor) for the purpose of sexual exploitation or homicide? To act as bodyguards and getaway drivers for murderers? Furthermore, did the Enlightenment "genius", as opposed to the jihadists, achieve political control in a non-violent way?

sbourg

Message to Reid: The Jihadists want to destroy democracies in the middle east; and yes, they are the most vulnerable. But replacing them with a caliphate under sharia law would be a huge threat civilizations elsewhere, because of oil money and advanced weaponry (to put it mildly) they'll have. If that doesn't bother you, well then, just keep your head in the sand. And it's a fact that most muslim women do NOT want sharia to rule their lives.

Alan Mackie

An excellent Talking Politics programme this morning on BBC4 pointed out that the focus in Pakistan and Afghanistan has been far too much on hard rather than soft power. The idea that the US could by projecting force create the political environment where they could pick their guy to the run show was doomed. Robert Fox went further to make the eminently sensible point that the local farmer saw an absolute equivalence between the violence of the Taliban and the bombs dropped by US bombers. There are no easy answers to dealing with the very real threat of Islamic extremism, but thrusting Western style democracy down their throats from the barrel of a gun, no matter how well intentioned, is not one of them. Shawcross’s muscular defence of all we value and hold true would be Quixotic if the consequences were not so lethal.

Dr Cyril Laming

I think that Shawcross has made a point that the the earlier post 9/11bally-hoo from an injured super-power's amour propre somehow missed.
Islamist fascism is anti-life, anti-'infidel', and above all anti-Enlightenment.
A war on that ethos, not simply on its means, would make sense. The difficult bit is in getting sane Muslims to join in defence of sanity, and to see that they are not the enemy, but vital allies.

George Orwell

I think you should also worry about the Marxists closer to home on the Labour Government and the EU who want to destroy democracy altogether and create a new Soviet Union.

George Steiner

How silly of me, I didn't realize that Ms. Bhutto was amongst the "all that is best in the world".

Larry Eubank

No, the World Muslim War isn't our fault. It's just "Saracens, Part Deux." They want to Islamicize the world by force, just as the Saracens did. And they've finally got the money to allow them to cause all kinds of Hell.

Robert in Ottawa

Some here still are wearing blinders and have their hands over their ears. Just listen to what the islamo-fascists say. They're not shy about it. They want to submit the world to islam.

Jim

The argument in the US is between the fascists like Bush who want to bring women's rights and democracy to the middle east, and the Democrats who want to surrender all feminist gains and let the Arabs languish in the 15th century. In Israel, Arabs are protesting being turned over to the Hamas government. it seems they like Israel better. If the Arabs like their own culture so much, why are they moving into democratic North America and Europe? But strangest of all are the leftists in Europe and the US who steadfastly argue the moral value of Islam, much like the academics in the 50s and 60s who argued that the Soviet Union was a bastion of freedom and that Mao would show us all how to live. There is a very simple way to figure out which countries are doing it right. Look at which countries have high immigration. Those are the countries which people like. The ones which no one wants to go to are the ones people don't like. And no one wants to move to Arab street. Which Moslem countries restrict immigration by people who are willing to conform to their customs?

Oslo

How I miss the first few days of high quality CoffeeHouse comments... posted, one must assume, by pseudonymous Spectator journalists...

Wrencilier

In reading the comments, I am amazed at the fear and callowness of what has been written by some.

How wonderful it must be for you to blame the US for your problems.

Dag Hammarskjold, who died at the hands of terrorists, said: "The lap dog disguised itself as a sheep and tried to hunt with the wolves."

To the Leftists who frequent this forum to chant their mantra of lies, the mindless repetition of inane and false material should prepare you well for your new roles under Sharia law.

One sees no courage or resolve coming from that quarter -- only self-loathing capitulation. Get ready: accept Islam, dhimmitude or die. Wake up, Britons! Take charge of your country or that is what you are heading toward.

To the absolute ostriches posting here: if you really don't believe there is a war on terror, you deserve to reap what your asininity sows.

Go ahead, sit there, dream your little dreams, watch Celebrity Big Brother, Footballers' Wives, drink your lager, collect your welfare, eat your chips and choke on the stench of your own flatulence.

Throw all of your energy after the phantom of global warming, Live Earth, or whatever fad du jour grabs your minute attention. Meanwhile Islamic-Fascists will remain committed and steady.

Britain is an important country to the Islamic terrorists. They see it as a western base for mounting terrorist acts in Europe and toward the US. Developed minds see the threat.

As in WWII, the Islamic Fascists know that if Britain falls, Europe falls.

The Islamic threat began 450 years before the Crusades entered Jerusalem when the Prophet Muhammed uttered his veiled threat to non-Muslim neighbors "embrace Islam and you will be safe."

Additionally, Muslim forces mounted a sea invasion of India as early as 634.

Muslims seized Christian lands long before the Crusades: two-thirds of what at that time was the Christian world.

They conquered Jerusalem in 638. They swept through Christian North Africa. By 715, they were close to conquering all of Spain and were making a play for France -- from Spain. Charles Martel stopped them at Tours in 732.

They held their portion of Spain for over 700 years.

In 828 another Muslim force invaded France.

In 827 jihadists citing it as religious war began to go for Italy and Sicily. By 846, they reached Rome and forced the then pope to pay the tribute (jizya).

It was not until 1683 that the Muslims stopped waging large-scale jihads only because they had grown too weak. The Seventh Crusade ended in 1250.

What did they/do they seek: "to fight against the people until they testify that none is right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammed is the Messenger of Allah." (Bukhari, vol. 1, book 2, no. 25) The same statement is repeated in vol.1, book 8; vol. 4, book 56; vol. 9, book 88; vol. 9, book 96; and in other hadith collections.

The jihad, begun by Muhammed, continues to this day. It has never been dropped or repudiated by any Muslim leader or sect. It has grown with perceived Muslim strength and ebbed with Muslim weakness. But it has never stopped.

Nor did the invasion of Iraq fire it up again. Nor is it about oil. When it started, oil was not an issue. The addle-headed are welcome to believe it.

Paranoid? No, just a pragmatic realist as opposed to maintaining a parochially trendy and myopically strabismic view of the world.

As I iterate, Dag Hammarskjold, himself murdered at the hand of terrorists, wrote: "The lapdogs disguised themselves as sheep and tried to hunt with the wolves." The world has always had its share of lapdogs. The Clinton years perfected the breed in the US. It includes to a large degree journalists, idealists, religious zealots, opportunists, the avaricious, the desultory and the gormless. It would appear you have your own genus in Britain.

To those who ask: "Can you supply any evidence of Sharia law pertaining in the west?"

Prominent American Muslim spokesman Siraj Wahaj: "if only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its consitutional government with a caliphate." -- (Kashmir Telegraph, May 2002)

I reply, not yet. But it has been called for in Britain and the US and in France and Sweden.

While I believe the Secular progressives, Leftists and liberals are sanctimoniously inept and wantonly caustic, I honor his right to be so. You r Islamic masters will just remove your heads.

The wolves are indeed howling; they are howling for you. And I assure you, they make no distinction between us.

Seany

umm.... Al Queda didn't murder Benazir!

Chris

"when the horror comes" is a phrase I just picked up in Bruce Bawer's book 'While Europe Slept'. Shawcross has his finger on the pulse - the horror is coming to Europe; and it surprises me that there are so many dopes are still out there trying to wish it all away. Time to wake up and learn how to defend yourselves and your culture.

Martin

The position is very simple, and moral relativists, pacifists and media liberals refuse to acknowledge it.
They are are after our land. They have tried to conquer Europe since before the battle of Tours.
They have been rebuffed on countless occassions, but now they have oil money,OUR money. They also have the Welfare State encouraging them to breed vigorously, once their fifth columnists get into Europe.
The indiginous working classes have been humiliated in their own country, and called racists when they complain. Soon the middle classes will know the sense of humiliation as their communities become Islamicised

Paul Serfaty

Fantastic fear-driven fantasy! How sweepingly condemnatory of all the Muslim peoples, too. When the IRA was at war with England, did we declare the Irish were all Papist moles? Ian Paisley did, but he was over the top.
The Caliphate! How, my slightly paranoiac friend? Aims are one thing, but what of the means to make England into a Sharia state? I doubt the Queen will agree, and she has more spine than Shawcross.
Even Iran, and I have been there, has no shortage of intelligent women able freely to express themseles, whose headscarves may be compulsory, but which they use as 1950s Parisiennes to beautiful effect. They are not veiled, as in or ally Kuwait, nor constrained in their civil rights as in our ally in Saudi Arabia.
Another commentator lists of attacks by Muslims on the West, but many hundred years ago. He seems to forget the Germans have attacked Western Europe more recently and often, and that the "Muslim" capacity is no longer there (Pakistan's bomb -another ally - aside).
England's heritage is law, individual freedom, tolerance and a high threshold of ear. Shawcross and those who run scared are not English. They belive we are under threat as a society, when that is demonstrably untrue. They would have us fearful instead of proud, twitching nervously instead of disdainful, concerned for a few lives thta may be lost to terror, rather than for the preservation of our historic freedoms, which a terror bomber has far less power to take away than Hitler.
Get into your bunker if you wish, William, but leave me a free man in the free air.

samir s. halevi

some Israelis have even been arrested for demonstrating against israels action in gaza. Have you ever seen any palestinians demonstrate against the firing of rockets into israel. Israel is sad when any palestinian civilians are killed, however palestinians always rejoice and give out sweets when israeli soldiers, civilian men women, children, and babies are killed. Palestinians call Israel an appartheid state although over 50% of the population of Israel are comprised of Jews whom were kicked out of the arab lands from 1948, They the arab terrorists sometimes even disguise themselves as religious jews (ie. the jews who had origins in europe) so much for the myth that the jews are white colonialists. Could a black person in south africa at the time of appartheid attempt to disguise himself as a white person and blow him self up? The palestinians have been used as pawns by their arab bretherens as a tool against the state of Israel for the past 60 years. I f Israel would be ten times larger or ten times smaller they still wouldn't want it to be there. Remember there was almost 1,000,000 jews in the arab world till 1948, today maybe around 8,000 left, what about that for ethnic cleansing. I am also one of the forgotten jewish refugees of the middle east, however my family never begged, nor wanted, nor received any handouts from the UN. as we were not recognized by the UN, because they are one sided.