Sanity?

It is far too early to say that some sanity may finally be breaking out in the West. But there are, I think, some signs that maybe, just maybe, some people are saying, "Enough". Enough whining about being a victim. Enough moral equivalence. Enough excuses.

Muslims have a problem. It is the Islamists. Not the majority of people who want to be left in peace to try to better themselves. The people who believe they have an absolute right to force their beliefs onto everyone else are the problem. The people who think it is their destiny to rule the world are the problem. The people who would kill their own children to further their agenda are the problem. It has to stop, or the world will go through a cataclysm.

This was hardly a Western war against Islam. Britain and America spent much of the Nineties trying to prevent conflicts or to resolve them. At worst, as shamefully in Rwanda, they simply ignored them. They were transparently not running a conspiracy to trample the Muslim faithful underfoot. The people who depicted it that way were a tiny minority telling lies to justify murder.

But things have changed. The argument that terrorism is, in fact, a response to Western actions overseas has gained currency. It was voiced most recently on Saturday in an open letter by a number of influential British Muslim leaders to Tony Blair. The Prime Minister's policy in the Middle East, they said, puts British lives at risk. The implication is that the young Britons who last week were accused of plotting to blow up passenger planes in mid-air would have been less susceptible to al-Qaeda recruitment had Britain not fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Policy should be changed, they said, to avoid giving ideological 'ammunition to extremists'.

There is indeed a plausible argument that military action in recent years has made Britain less, not more, secure. In particular, the conduct of the war in Iraq, regardless of the virtues of removing Saddam Hussein from office, has been riddled with error. The absence of weapons of mass destruction, removal of which was the premise for war, has undermined trust in the Prime Minister. Meanwhile, engagement in Iraq has made it harder to secure victory in Afghanistan, where the anti-terror justification for war was rock solid.

But even within the bleakest possible analysis of Mr Blair's foreign policy, it is still simply not true that the West is waging war on Islam. Just as it is not true that the CIA was really behind the 11 September attacks or any other arrant conspiratorial nonsense that enjoys widespread credence in the Middle East and beyond. It is also a logical and moral absurdity to imply, as some critics of British policy have done, that mass murder is somehow less atrocious when it is motivated by an elaborate narrative of political grievance.

More Muslims have been saved from death in the past decade by the Western governments than by the Muslim governments. More Muslims have been killed by the Islamists than by the Western governments in the past decade. The Islamists are a sick, sick group of people. Muslims have to stand against this threat or be brought to their level.

Have Western governments made hideous mistakes in their dealings with Muslims through the centuries? Of course. Is that a reason to keep on doing the same things over and over? Of course not. The past is the past. But the future may not be quite what the Islamists think it will be.

If the West realizes that appeasing Islamists is a very, very bad idea, indeed, then the outcome will not be at all what the Islamists expect. That will be a tragedy for those who do not believe as the Islamists do. It is past time for some sanity to break out.