Facing the Islamist challenge

One might think that saving the world from a nuclear holocaust would be more than enough to justify the decision by the governments of the US and Israel to attack Iran, which – according to the Director-General of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, the Argentine diplomat Rafael Grossi – already has enough enriched uranium for “10 or 11” bombs like the one that devastated Hiroshima, but as far as most commentators are concerned, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu will have to come up with something far more convincing than that. Both are being criticised for their alleged inability to explain in detail what exactly they hope to achieve by bombarding a country whose rulers have never made a secret of their determination to crush Israel and then go on to do much the same to Europe and the US.

Will Trump and Netanyahu be satisfied with something less than “regime change”? Or are they dead set on continuing the war until the ayatollahs and their brutal enforcers have been replaced by a pro-Western government that would have the support of the millions of Iranians who risked their lives, and in tens of thousands of cases died, protesting against the clerical dictatorship in the weeks that preceded the war that is now raging?

These are important questions, but they should not be allowed to overshadow the evident need to prevent a band of religious fanatics from getting their hands on the means to wipe Israel – and the Palestinian territories – off the map and then threaten their Arab neighbours with a similar fate unless they joined them in a holy war against the satanic West. Though it is tempting to assume that the ayatollahs and their minions do not take their fiery rhetoric literally and would never dream of doing anything really unpleasant that would invite retaliation on a massive scale, it would be most unwise to assume that all they want is peace, security and a modicum of prosperity. The Shiite fundamentalists still ruling Iran piously swear that they really do believe that an apocalyptic war, Armageddon, would benefit mankind by bringing about the return of the Mahdi, the 12th Imam who went into hiding in the year 941.

In the fairly recent past, a refusal to take seriously what Nazis, Communists and Japanese imperialists said about their intentions had quite appalling consequences for much of the world’s population. Downplaying the threat posed by Islamic militancy, as ruling circles in most Western countries continue to do, suggests that the lessons previous generations learned the hard way have since been well and truly forgotten.

Of course, it can be pointed out that, in the run-up to World War II, Germany, Japan and, to a certain extent, the Soviet Union were advanced industrial societies with huge battle-hardened conventional armies that were able to conquer smaller countries, while so far the Islamists only dispose of a middle-ranking power, Iran, and a range of terrorist organisations plus an assortment of “lone wolves” that, using the electronic media developed by the West, they can rally to their cause.

This makes it easy to underestimate them, but in addition to including many bright and energetic people who elsewhere would do very well for themselves, they possess something that their enemies lack: a corpus of ideas that those attracted by them think are well worth dying for. Throughout history, disciplined and ruthless minorities, such as Lenin’s Bolsheviks, have often managed to take advantage of the majority’s willingness to overlook what they are up to until it becomes too late for them to be stopped in their tracks.

Somewhat ironically, governments in the Middle East, especially the Gulf monarchies, have taken to warning their European counterparts about the dangers they face from Islamist extremism. Organisations that are banned in many staunchly Muslim countries have their headquarters in London and branch offices in Brussels, Paris or Geneva, where they have acquired many highly desirable properties. It is reported that Mojtaba Khamenei, the recently appointed “supreme leader” of Iran – whose father and predecessor, Ali Khamenei, was killed on the first day of the war – is the multibillionaire owner of several luxurious residences in London which include apartments that look down on the Israeli Embassy.

Arab governments are also worried by what is happening in the British and North American universities to which, before having second thoughts, they used to send students on scholarships. To the despair of their parents, young Muslims get “radicalised” by experts in places like Oxford; after returning home, some join local Jihadist outfits.

While in infidel lands, such students were taught to despise everything about them not only by religious extremists but also by leftwing academics and their disciples who loathe everything about the West and do their considerable best to discredit the civilisation in which they were raised. Even young Muslims who have no interest in getting involved in the Jihadist enterprise must be impressed by the demoralised state of rich and powerful societies whose intellectual luminaries are applauded for trashing their own culture.     

Throughout Europe and, to a lesser extent, the US, people attached to the established order fear that the day could be fast approaching in which widespread hostility towards the large Muslim communities that have entrenched themselves in their midst leads to violent clashes. In the United Kingdom, the Labour government seems to take it for granted that at any moment ordinary folk could go on a sectarian rampage, which is why the police spend much of their time patrolling social media on the lookout for whatever can be interpreted as an expression of “Islamophobia” or what officialdom now calls “anti-Muslim hostility.”

They are doing this in part because they are convinced that unenlightened Brits who in their view are too fond of the country they see slipping away from them are liable to fly off the handle, but mainly because they know that Muslim extremists are prone to react with lethal violence to even minor perceived slights such as an accidental mishandling of the Koran. Labour strategists also understand that if they lose the Muslim vote they once thought was theirs for keeps, candidates for seats in major cities could be slaughtered in the next elections.