What Israel, America, and Britain Face

Excellent editorial by Janet Daley

Anybody who saw the unretouched photographs of the Madrid train bombing will know that this is not hyperbole. This is a fight to the death with forces who - quite explicitly - have no regard for the value of human life and who make no demands coherent or consistent enough to be comprehensible.

This is not politics as we know it. It is not war - or even terrorism as an act of war - as we have previously understood it. It is a kind of mystical nihilism. Defeating it is going to take all of the organised energy and commitment that the rich, decadent West can muster. It will also involve quite a few concessions with what we regard as our ancient freedoms. But that's how it is. The right to live is not just the most important entitlement in a free society: it is the one on which all the other rights are predicated. There are no civil liberties in the grave.

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Their goal is not, as the anti-Zionist media lobby believes, the extinction of the Palestinian cause in the interests of US-Israeli imperialism. It is the eradication of an international terror network that uses the fate of Palestinian refugees as a pretext when it suits, but is actually dedicated to a transcendental vision of Arabic conquest of historical territories.

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The closest parallel in modern history to this blood and soil dream of reclaiming ancient lands from the usurper was the Nazi dream of Aryan reclamation of those parts of Europe with Germanic roots. The Wagnerian, German romantic mythology of expulsion from homelands leading to a sacred Teutonic mission of rebirth, has an uncannily similar ring to the new Islamist claims of Muslim displacement and injustice. Europe (and especially Russia, whose behaviour in the current crisis has been ignominious) should have learnt its lesson about dealing with this kind of insanity - and about what happens when you try to pretend that it is somehow capable of rational containment.

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When an enemy tells you in so many words that he is beyond reason, then the rule of law that is itself dependent on reason becomes useless. But force does not.