A scholar who dares to look terror in the face

Stephen Fox

'...Germany’s frontiers are now on the Hindu Kush'. Shame her soldiers aren't there too, instead of being tucked away in northern Afghanistan.

C Powell

Michael Burleigh is one of the best historians I've read in a while: clear-sighted, fair and makes you look at matters with a fresh eye.

Riaz Ahmad

Every one with even an ounce of sanity knows terrorism is henious,and terrorists the devils. But people like Douglas are not interested in truth or reality, rendered blind and brain dead by vested interest. Perhaps Douglas may care to read history a bit more. He takes the moral high ground with with usual hipocricy. Of course, citizens have to be protected from the jehadi devils, but it will help the cause of decent peace loving people, if writer like Douglas start telling the truth, the evils of hipocricy, the double standards, the racket called the security council, half a century of persicution of Palistinian people. Bin Ladin is devil incarnate, but no one has a good word either for the warlords ruling USA, ready to obliterate anyone for a barrel or two of oil.

Sempronius

"Bin Ladin is devil incarnate, but no one has a good word either for the warlords ruling USA, ready to obliterate anyone for a barrel or two of oil." Dismal attempt at moral equivalence. The Americans removed a mass-murderering maniac and his despicable regime in Iraq. Look in the mirror (and a dictionary) before you accuse others of double standards and hypocrisy.

Chris Ashton

This article has lightened my heart this morning. All is not lost then. Small lights of intelligence and honesty still shine in the pc smog of contemporary Britain. I'm going staight to Amazon.com to order this book.

Ian

It suits Burleigh, like so many others, to elevate the small group of inadequates, psychopaths, sociopaths and utopians that inhabit every society known to history into an "-ism". But that's all these are - misguided and dysfunctional individuals. Sometimes, if they combine, they can cause a little damage. But we create far more by elevating them into an "-ism". To treat them thus is to surrender to an insidious "inevitability of gradualness" that just doen't exist, except in our febrile imaginations. We seek patterns where none really exist.

M Clyde

I think that what Burleigh seeks to highlight is not the dangers posed by Islamist extremism but the craven attitude of western liberals who seek to establish some kind of moral equivalence between radical Islam and western liberalism and democratic values. It really is not so different from those in 1930s Germany who were fooled into thinking that Adolf Hitler was a bit OK, perhaps justifiable. Rough, a bully, but he had his reasons, real issues, and these needed addressing. It is the old philosophical conundrum of whether ends can ever justify means. No true liberal can do other than oppose jihadi theology and confront its Islamic roots just as no true defender of liberalism could ever be so craven as to consider Hitler a bit OK.

That there is a quietist spiritual side to Islam with a rich literature and tradition cannot be doubted, but this is not mainstream; it exists in spite of the Quran, not because of it.

The Islamists are therefore right when they say the Quran is their constitution. Read it yourself and see how often the word 'kill' is mentioned. One third of the Quran (according to Tantawi, the leading intellectual of Al Azhar university in Cairo) deals exclusively with the Jews - always in a hostile manner.

The roots of the Palestinian problem are therefore in Quranic anti-semtism.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al Husseini was a Nazi collaborator; his grandson was Yasser Arafat. Until Muslims look critically at Muslim anti-semitism as endorsed by the Quran there will never be a peaceful or rational solution to the Palestinian problem. The problem is hate-filled ideology.