The London bombings: one year on

A year of thinking lazily

Thursday, 29th June 2006

The bloodshed should not stop at Islam’s current borders. Not just because those nations which are unIslamic constitute Dar-al Harb, the House of War, which constantly threatens the security of the Muslim world. But also because Islamists are driven by a divine mission to ensure the whole earth, in due course, learns to submit to Islamist rule.

But there is still, after the shattering events of 9/11 and 7/7, Madrid and Bali, a widespread reluctance to acknowledge the real scale and nature of the challenge we face.

There is a reason why so many of the influential voices shaping our society’s response to Islamist terror are urging us down the wrong path. There is a culture of relativism, a failure to display moral clarity, a corruption of thought on both Left and Right as well as a strain of Western self-hatred which combine to weaken, compromise and confuse our national response to a direct totalitarian challenge.

Changing our laws, vital as it is, can only be part of our response. We need to rediscover and reproclaim faith in our common values. We need an ideological effort to move away from moral relativism, as well as a commitment to build a truly inclusive model of British citizenship in which divisive separatist identities are challenged, and rejected.

In following this path sensitivities will be offended, special interests upset and powerful voices raised in opposition. But unless we show that we are serious about defeating the forces which have encouraged Islamist terrorism, Islamist terrorists will have many opportunities in the future to demonstrate just how serious they are about using force to defeat us.

This is an edited extract from Celsius 7/7 published this week by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The author is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath and a Times columnist.