On Wednesday, two young Muslims butchered a serving British soldier in the London district of Woolwich in the early afternoon in front of bystanders. Shouts of “Allahu Akhbar” were heard. One of the murderers was caught on film, holding a weapon, his hands dripping blood. He said to the camera, “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.” In the light of what he had just done, his calmness could only signify ideological certainty that he had committed a good deed and was about to publicize it. Making no attempt to escape, both killers waited until the police arrived and overpowered the murderers with a minimum of force.

The IRA also murdered serving British soldiers. In this very same week, as it happens, an IRA man has been arrested in connection with the murder of four soldiers back in 1982. Recognition of IRA ideology has been the key to dealing with it and in the end defeating it.

People have no difficulty recognizing that these Muslims killers also have an ideology. Interviewed by the media, witnesses of the murder and others who live in Woolwich expressed anxiety about what the repercussions might be. Many Muslims in the country were also anxious, for fear of reprisals. Imams and Muslims prominent in the community repudiated the murder even as congregations were gathering in case mosques were attacked. Sure enough, members of the English Defence League took to the streets – the EDL, about 20,000 strong, openly resents and opposes Muslims.

The authorities evidently dread a future confrontation between the EDL and the Muslims. Their response is to contend that Islam forbids killing and therefore bombings on the subway or murder in Woolwich have nothing at all to do with Islam. Prime Minister David Cameron showed how to obscure reality by declaring that “there is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly terrible act.”  The murder in Woolwich is “solely and purely the responsibility of the individuals involved,” as though they were deranged rather than fulfilling what they think is an Islamic obligation. His advice to “stand up to these people whoever they are” supposes that they might be anybody, and not Muslims at all.

This misrepresentation verges on apologetics. People on the street know otherwise. In the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich barbarity, the EDL has attracted 60,000 new subscribers and could easily develop into a quasi-patriotic, quasi-fascist mass-movement. Refusing to admit that Islam is more ideology than faith, the authorities are unwittingly bringing about the show-down that so greatly scares them.

A decent restaurant usually places on the table a little glass bottle of olive oil — you pour some out and dip bread into it, season the salad or whatever. Aha! Here is the opening for the bureaucrats of the European Union in Brussels to score another magnificent triumph by banning the serving of olive oil in restaurants in an open glass bottle. Well, unemployment in the EU is over 12 percent, that is tens of millions of people, and the repackaging, labeling, and sealing of new little glass bottles of olive oil is the EU’s idea of productive work.

The BBC is a most loyal supporter of the EU, so uncritical that it often seems like a paid mouthpiece, and so far it is silent over the new olive-oil dispensation. Surprisingly, a BBC correspondent in France has had the temerity to uncover anti-Brussels initiatives. He has been to a town in the Lot-et-Garonne in southwest France where people are trading in their own currency, called the “abeille,” or honey-bee. One abeille is worth one euro, but it depreciates after six months without circulation, which is an incentive to buy. Business is thriving. In this one town, 112 companies are in the abeille, and 120,000 of them have been traded to date; another 20 towns issue their currency too, and soon there will be 40.

France has been in recession for two consecutive quarters and things are getting worse. President Hollande thinks that recovery will come by virtue of those bureaucrats in Brussels who are bound to come up with something once the banning of open bottles of olive oil on restaurant tables is statutory. Polls show that he is the most unpopular president ever recorded. Practical people, the French are more and more disillusioned. The plight of the diminishing number of EU fans brings to mind the famous remark of Lord Melbourne, then British prime minister, even though he was speaking in another context in another age: “ What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.”

It is always morbidly fascinating when someone famous makes an idiot of himself, as Professor Stephen Hawking has just done. Seventy-one now, he has had a career at Cambridge University as a theoretical physicist. His book, A Brief History of Time, was a big bestseller written for the general reader, but I must confess that I am too backward at physics to have got beyond a page or two. Hawking suffers from motor neuron disease, and shows great courage in dealing with it, so the public, me included, is on his side. He knows about adversity, then, and as a scientist he also knows about verification. In spite of that, he suddenly announces that he is boycotting Israel. He had accepted an invitation to a big conference there, and now has withdrawn on the grounds that Israel denies rights to Palestinians.

A unanimous wave of criticism has hit him. No doubt he’s been naïve.

Politics is not his line. He happily visited China and Iran without making statements about civil rights. He couldn’t communicate at all without a machine containing a chip designed in Israel — so will he boycott himself? His decision seemed more and more inexplicable until it was revealed that as many as 20 academics had lobbied him to stay away from Israel and one of them was Noam Chomsky.

A Brief History of Chomsky would be as impenetrable a book as Hawking’s. American and Jewish himself, he inhabits a mysterious universe in which everything wrong is the fault of Americans and Jews and everything right is to the credit of enemies of Americans and Jews.

Among other inversions of reality he has defended Holocaust denial and genocide in Cambodia. To read his books and journalism is to find oneself at Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter’s Tea Party where familiar things and meanings dissolve into a web of fantasy that is seamless. Now and again, I receive letters from strangers who in Chomskyesque style interpret events in a single obsessive dimension, alleging for instance that the Queen of England controls drug trafficking or President Bush organized 9/11. On their own demented terms such fictions are often so consistent that even intelligent people can fall for them, as seems likely to be the case in the Chomsky-Hawking interaction.

It’s like old times to come back to France and find how discontented the French are. There hasn’t been a Socialist president since the late François Mitterand, and so the voters decided to give another socialist a go. A mistake, much to be regretted. In the space of a year, François Hollande has become the most unpopular president ever recorded; three quarters of those polled want him out. Recession has led to 3.2 million unemployed, another record number. Taxes have also never been higher; the better-off have fled abroad, and with them 150,000 young people. The French lady I sat next to yesterday in the south of France told me that her two children in their thirties have been laid off and have no chance of finding jobs now.

It’s as though the voters have forgotten that socialism is the tried and tested instrument to impoverish any country unwise enough to adopt it. The Left in France clings to a decayed Marxism, so one alternative to Hollande is the rabid Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who sees himself as Che Guevara. He and his followers are out in the street, and yesterday assembled for theatrics in the Place de la Bastille. Bigger demonstrations are mounted in Paris and other cities against the law to allow gay marriage, which has passed in the Assembly but still has to be ratified. “Manif pour tous,” is currently the national cry, or “A demo for everyone.”

Listen to the screams of Figaro, a choice example of mainstream media. Yesterday’s issue chronicles Hollande’s failure to implement any of the promises he made while campaigning for office. No less than four other articles pitch into Hollande, one of them by François Fillon, a former prime minister. The title of his contribution says it all: “Hollande is leading the country to catastrophe” — the last word in immense type.

Most dramatic of all, Hollande is blaming Germany for forcing austerity down the throats of the EU members, on the grounds that this is the way to prolong and deepen an already severe recession. Pierre Moscovici, the finance minister, collaborates with other socialists to accuse German chancellor Angela Merkel of “selfish intransigence.” All she really wants, a memo of theirs says, is reelection in the fall. They are calling for confrontation.

France’s abject surrender to Germany ever since 1940 has left Europe on its knees. This break between the two countries may be a foretaste of the larger break-up of the Europe Union. If Hollande engineers that, even unconsciously, he will have redeemed socialism.

The outcome of the civil war in Syria is bound to test the balance of forces in the Levant, and further afield too. The United States has enemies in Iran and Hezbollah and vulnerable allies in Israel and Jordan. The predicament has evidently been too much for President Obama, and instead of a coherent policy he has so far come up with words alone. Among those words was a warning to Bashar Assad not to resort to poison gas. To do so, the president declared, would be to cross a red line, or in the other thumping cliché of realpolitik, a game-changer. There are precedents. Intervening in the Yemeni civil war, Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser had used poison gas, and Saddam Hussein devastated his Kurdish population that way. Assad is another despot who will stop at nothing.

Well, Assad has crossed the red line and changed the game. Sarin is a nerve gas with unmistakable symptoms, and victims showing those symptoms and dying from them have been named and photographed. British intelligence confirms their death through gas, and so does Israeli military intelligence. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has a response, “We still have some uncertainties about what was used.” An official spokesman has “varying degrees of confidence” that sarin has been correctly identified. Politico reports that the White House has called for a “comprehensive United Nations investigation.”

More words, then, and weasel words at that. Temporarily, this may just pass muster as fact-checking. But if it turns out that when President Obama lays down red lines and games-changers he doesn’t actually mean it but is only prevaricating, then the position of the United States is compromised, its word becomes meaningless, and its enemies are free to do as they please while its allies are left in the lurch. The warfare certain to break out in such an eventuality will be multiple, bloody, and dangerous.

In these grim times, the French are showing a bit of form. Magistrates there are extremely influential, perhaps more so than politicians. They form a union, and have premises in Paris. In a rather sturdy joke, the legal chaps have now turned one of the walls there into “Le Mur des Cons.” This consists of photographs of the people in public life whom they don’t like and want to hound. The rude word here has rather lost its force through repetition, so in English we speak about the Wall of Prats.

The magistrates are tendentious lefties, of course, so former president Sarkozy is prominently up on the wall. So is a former prime minister Edouard Balladur, and intellectuals such as Guy Sorman, Alain Minc and — to balance things out a bit — President Mitterand’s side-kick, Jacques Attali, and sporting figures who have let down the national team. Paris is echoing with the sound and fury of it. Here is also a reminder that in the hearing of General de Gaulle someone once said famously that “cons” ought to be eliminated. “A vast enterprise!” was the general’s response, valid for all times.

In the years since 9/11 there have been lethal acts of Islamist terrorism, notably in Britain and Spain, but many more have been detected in time and thwarted. Security forces are becoming more proficient. Still, Islamist terrorists are certain to search for ways to succeed. No amount of interpretation or argument is going to stop those who are ready to kill and to die for the sake of religious ideology. These acts and their perpetrators have to be seen for what they are.

The moment Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were identified, everyone with a voice started asking what their motivation was. This is the archetypal Western misunderstanding of the archetypal Islamist attack. Surely they must have had some grudge, some insult to be revenged. Or it was “workplace violence,” in the absurd apologia for Major Nidal Hasan, the Islamist killer of Fort Hood. People came forward to say how amazed they were that two such nice boys who knew America and Americans could be big-time criminals. But the two had studied how to turn pressure-cookers into bombs, and they went out wearing suicide vests. Nice boys and religious ideology, alas, can be compatible.

During the crisis, Memri, the invaluable agency translating the Arab media, showed an interview with one of the multitude of intransigent Muslim clerics who are keepers of the religious ideology. Justification for bombings of non-Muslims depends on men like him and he promised more of them. The brothers were mujahideen (jihadists, that is), he said, and Muslims have the duty imposed on them by their faith to go on jihad. That’s all the motivation they need. The elder brother is quoted saying that he didn’t understand Americans. No more did Sayyid Qutb, the philosopher of Islamism who has influenced this generation of Muslims to believe that if only they go on jihad their values must one day rule the world. Men of the kind can’t understand Americans; their ideology precludes it.

It is of course right to make sure not to pin collective guilt onto Muslims. The uncle of the two brothers repudiated in noble language what they had done, saying they had shamed their own Chechen people. From the days of the czars down to Yeltsin and Putin, Chechens have mobilized by means of Islam. Extremists from Saudi Arabia have been radicalizing them further, and many are to be found fighting wherever the clerics are promoting jihad. A freelance fraternity, a sort of New Model International Brigade, are already stretching our physical and intellectual resources. Think what it will be like when Iran hands over to them a nuclear bomb.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. Respect for human life should be an absolute. There are people in Britain rejoicing in the death of Lady Thatcher. Most are marginal, too young to have lived through the Thatcher years and are merely repeating the clichés of their elders. Still, they are dancing in the street, singing and celebrating. The BBC makes sure to give them a better hearing than the stuffy old bores paying their respects to a valued prime minister. And a few of these marginal figures have been in political life as Communists, Marxists, Trotskyites and the rest of it. These are would-be commissars and gauleiters who would have signed death warrants without batting an eye-lid. Disrespect for human life raises the level of hatred to such a pitch. Not that much keeps us safe from those who rejoice in death. At the present time, the perpetrators of the Boston bombings are unknown. Those explosions are also death warrants, and whoever issued them have the mentality of the commissar and the gauleiter. Should those who did the bombing ever be caught, they will be found to have no comprehension at all of my opening sentence.

Let us now praise famous women, and they don’t come much more famous than Mrs. Thatcher. Yes, she was Baroness Thatcher, titled as befits a former British prime minister, but she was one of the people and plain Mrs. fits very well. Her father was a grocer in a small way, and he taught her those qualities for which Britain was once respected the world over, decency, thrift, fair dealing, standing up for what is right. She believed that making choices for yourself is the way to a fulfilled and happy life, and the state can’t do that for you. Under her influence, those time-honored British qualities had one more flourish.

Like every past British prime minister until her woeful successors, she believed in helping friends and punishing enemies. Up with Ronald Reagan and John Howard, down with General Galtieri and Saddam Hussein. She gave Mikhail Gorbachev a long-running tutorial. Her one mistake was to commit Britain further to the European Union. When she tried to correct this, the French president François Mitterand said she had the mouth of Marilyn Monroe and the eyes of Caligula. Her ministers were unable to deal with this combination of looks and brains. In return she would say that she could do wonders for Britain if only her ministers were not so wet and defeatist and she had half a dozen of them to rely on.

Philip Larkin, the one great poet at the time, was asked on a television program how he could possibly be a capital C Conservative since that meant supporting Mrs. Thatcher. She was so intelligent, he said blinking owlishly, and so sexy. Inviting him to Downing Street, Mrs. Thatcher said she liked his poems. Quote one, he replied, and she came out with his line about being as sharp as a drawer full of knives. I heard her once discussing a dramatization for the stage of a Dostoevsky novel. Her comprehension of issues and her power to summarize them set her apart. A really good argument toned her up for the rest of the day.

Post-1945, socialism was deconstructing Britain and everything it represented. The ruling class kept on making the same misjudgment, that the reason for decline and ruin was that the country did not have enough socialism. More state control, more egalitarian leveling down, more regulation! Mrs. Thatcher did her best to destroy the machinery of socialism. How the intellectuals hated her for it, and still do. Their petulance, the bigotry, the vituperative nastiness, knows no bounds. Oxford, the university where she had studied chemistry, childishly refused to give her the honorary degree that all previous Oxford-educated prime ministers had received. Baroness Warnock, preeminent moral philosopher of the Left, reproached her for wearing blouses bought from Marks and Spenser, the popular chain store. I ask you, which of these two is the snob?

Socialists struggle to regain control of public opinion, and every day do what they can to hand over to the state the responsibility for the kind of lives “ordinary people” are to be allowed. Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy stands in their way.

Muhammad Mehriz, an Egyptian, is a figure of our times. His story has been picked up by Memri, an invaluable service that monitors the entire Arab media, and then translates and broadcasts the findings. Muhammad was 27, with a wife three years younger. He was a lawyer in a private firm in Cairo. He was well-connected, as his brother Yasser was a leading spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood. The photograph that Memri posted shows a serious man holding his little daughter lovingly in his arms.

Sometime at the beginning of the year Muhammad went to consult the sheikhs of Al Azhar, the ancient centre of Sunni learning in Cairo. He wanted to know what sharia or Islamic law had to say about his possible volunteering to fight alongside the rebels in Syria. The sheikhs told him that sharia justifies his departure for Syria. Muhammad drafted a note, stating that jihad for the sake of Allah is an obligation on all Muslims. After a very few days in Syria, he was killed in Aleppo. His brother Yasser eulogized him.

First reflection: This man was a middle-class lawyer with no military training and no possible use to the rebels.

Second reflection: The keepers of the faith in Al Azhar deliberately sent him to his death.

Third reflection: How can an educated and settled family man believe that Allah wants him to kill? Why isn’t he thinking for himself?

Fourth reflection: In previous days Nazis and Communists couldn’t be argued out of their fatalism. The religious compulsion of the man’s belief has to end in death, his own or his victims.

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and will have war,” Winston Churchill said on hearing of the Munich agreement that sold out Czechoslovakia in 1938 and was indeed the prelude to war. How that judgment resonates!  Neville Chamberlain was the man in Churchill’s sights, and one can have some sympathy for him. He wanted to avoid bloodshed and that is not dishonorable. One can have some of the same sympathy for President Obama. He has avoided taking part in military action in Libya, in Mali and most glaringly in Syria. The decision to withdraw from Iraq and in the future Afghanistan reveal Obama to be essentially a pacifist. Which is all very well except for the famous shaft of light Hilaire Belloc throws on the stance:

“Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.”

Obama could just get away with a Chamberlainite policy towards Libya and Mali because he was able to leave the British and French to take action. Kim Jong Un, Ayatollah Khamenei and Bashar Assad may not be exactly Roaring Bills but all have been skillfully profiteering from Obama’s mind-set, manipulating him into the Pale Ebenezer position. A day looks like dawning when Iran will reveal its nuclear weapon, quite probably made and tested in North Korea out of sight of Western intelligence. Tacit permission to Bashar Assad to do his worst is likely to be a mistake Iraqis, Lebanese, many thousand more Syrians, and possibly Israelis and Palestinians will have to pay for with their lives. Refusal to lead first of all allows Assad’s regime and the rebels to fight to the death and the watching world puts the blame on Obama and the United States. Then this pacifist stance hands initiative to the killers. Of course it is displeasing and dangerous to confront killers but more displeasing and dangerous not to confront them. Real enemies of the United States are taking advantage of Obama. He seems to have been formed intellectually by the 1960s conviction that keeping the peace is imperialism, colonialism, and what not. Not so. Failure to intervene in Syria now clearly prolongs Assad’s stop-at-nothing tyranny, alienates potential allies among the rebels and must soon set off widespread sectarian fighting — a guarantee of war and dishonor.

The folly of human beings is on full display in Cyprus. The government there is in the process of seizing compulsorily up to 40 percent of deposits in the banks. Generally, Cypriot lawmakers and officials able to speak English appear on television and mournfully pretend that this robbery is reasonable, or if not reasonable then inevitable. Deposits had been guaranteed. The men and women in the street understand perfectly well that raids on their deposits mean that the Cypriot government is no longer bound by the rule of law. They also understand that this raiding is the price demanded by Germany for bailing them out. Quite simply, the Cypriot government is an accomplice, a tool of those more powerful who are imposing their will.

Quite simply again, this is the updated version of the bargain that the Bolsheviks once struck. They seized everyone’s deposits and in return offered benefits in housing, education and so on. So long as one stayed clear of politics and stifled all opinion, one could most likely accept the bargain. Just as hatred of Bolshevism spread so hatred of Germany is spreading. The loss of your money at the orders of unaccountable foreigners whose names may even be unknown is too unfair to be borne.

The matter cannot possibly stop there. Who now will ever invest in Cyprus? Who could be rash enough to start a business there? Think of the future level of unemployment. And now that Germany has revealed that it can protect its interests so harshly, who will keep deposits in Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, even French banks? Fear is driving money out of the Mediterranean countries. Think of the runs on the banks and the currency controls to come. Big depositors are Russian and Arabs. Unfortunate Syrians have found a refuge that isn’t a refuge at all, only more distraint. What is the fitting word for politicians who think that it is quite all right to dispense with law and to make enemies certain to take them on by whatever legal means or subterfuges they can? What if Russia freezes or extorts foreign deposits?The worst outcome would be that people in these Mediterranean countries accept the descent into neo-Bolshevism, poverty, and control. The best outcome is liberation from the European Union that generates its steady features of blind injustice and cruelty.

It’s Germany versus Russia again. The fate of Cyprus might seem a small matter but it is bringing on another round in that age-old struggle between the giants of the continent of Europe that has brought so much death and destruction. Cyprus is bankrupt in all but name, with debts it can never repay. The local banks have shut their doors and some may never open again. A member of the euro zone, the island scrapped its native currency, the Cyprus pound. Now it turns to Germany to bail it out. Germany could do so without much strain. Even back in Soviet days, Russians could enter Cyprus freely, without the visas other countries demanded. So first Communists and then Yeltsin oligarchs used Cyprus to launder their stolen billions. Suitcases of dollars came in. So Russians are the main depositors in Cypriot banks, and if Germany were to bail out such people Mrs. Merkel, the Chancellor, would almost certainly lose the next election.

In a difficult position, Mrs. Merkel agreed to a bail-out on condition the Cypriots also pay. She imposed the confiscation of up to 10 percent of all deposits, on small accounts and on Russian accounts too.

Simple robbery by government is not good policy. Desperate to have their money, Cypriots are rioting. That’s only the half of it. A Cyprus delegation is negotiating in Moscow a possible bail-out by Russia, and suddenly a geo-political crisis emerges. Russia could pay the missing billions in return for rights to gas deposits in Cyprus waters that are ready to be exploited. These gas fields are next to Israeli fields about to be exploited. The first Russian fleet in the Mediterranean was in the 1770s and the Russians have been trying to establish naval bases there ever since. It didn’t work out in Egypt, nor in Algeria, and they are almost certainly about to be forced out of their base at Tartus in Syria. Cyprus would be a splendid alternative.

The British garrisons could be made to leave, Russia could extend its powers of domination through control of energy, and at last secure a permanent presence in warm waters.

The European Union was designed to prevent national rivalries. Critics have always warned that it would in fact regenerate them by putting the strong in a position to bully the weak. So it proves. Mrs. Merkel no doubt meant well, but victimized and enraged Cypriots compare her to Hitler. She obliges them either to submit to robbery by government or to rebel, much as Hitler forced similar pre-war predicaments on Poles and Czechs. What a precedent!

The Great Men and Geniuses in charge of the European Union have sprung one of their astonishing surprises. This involves stealing money officially, to call it by its proper name, what’s more stealing from people in Cyprus who are mostly not well off. Cyprus is the latest EU member to be bankrupt and in urgent need of a bail-out. Depositors in Cypriot banks had been assured that the money in their accounts was safe, guaranteed. That turns out to have been a lie. Depositors will have from 6.75 percent up to 9.99 percent confiscated from their accounts. The measure does not spare anyone, not even pensioners. The big holdings belong to Russian oligarchs, and they know how to take care of themselves, treating Cyprus as an outdoor safety deposit box.

Tacitly acknowledging the injustice, the British government has stepped forward to reimburse British soldiers and support staff garrisoned there.

This is not the first official stealing of the kind. Italy did not meet the requirements to join the euro, and covered its fudging by taking without warning a percentage from deposit accounts. There may well be little money left in countries already bankrupt, but now there is the risk of a run on the banks in Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and even France, all of whom are as dodgy economically as Cyprus. Any thoughtful person with a bank deposit in those countries will do whatever can be done to empty it.

Germany is the driving force behind this measure, partly to avoid having itself to pay for Cypriot profligacy but also in the belief that it’s salutary for people to go through some collective suffering for the debts accumulated in their name. To lie to the people and to rob them is to break the trust on which the democratic social contract rests. If such arrogance and folly do not end in throwing out the Great Men and Geniuses who have assumed power over them, then Europeans will show that they have been well and truly broken.

One of Benito Mussolini’s better quips was that anyone could govern Italy but it is pointless to do so. And that’s where Italy is today. At the outcome of the general election, the Left and the Right, respectively under an old Communist Pier Luigi Bersani and an old corner-cutter Silvio Berlusconi, are about equal in numbers and equally unable to form a government. Into this political vacuum comes Beppe Grillo. The Five Star Movement is his flash-in-the pan party, and it looks like having some 160 members in the parliament, one of them a 25-year-old postgraduate student who may become the speaker. Swearing not to join a coalition, Grillo is instead institutionalizing instability.

In his sixties, Grillo is a stand-up comedian by profession, and he has disordered white locks, Arafat stubble on his cheeks, and dark glasses, type-casting himself as an ageing hippy. Some of his quips are funny, as were Mussolini’s, but the outlook is too desperate to leave it at that. Italy has a debt of two trillion euros, the highest in the euro zone after Greece. This year alone, Italy has to borrow 420 billion euros to service this debt. The common currency has made the country uncompetitive. In the last decade the economy has shrunk 10 percent and is still shrinking. Youth unemployment is 37 percent. For the politicians who created this horrible mess, Grillo proposes “Tutti a casa,” or send them home. The next recommended step is for Italy to break with the euro and return to its own currency.

“Combinazioni” is the brilliant Italian term for finding all-purpose ways through dead-ends, and maybe in the end Grillo will do deals like the others. And maybe his mind-set will prevent him. A comic, he’s also a nutter who has taken anti-Semitism on board and spews full-time hatred of Jews. Israelis, he believes, are using a translation service called Memri to conspire against Arabs. To him, Iran is a lovely pacifist country, traduced by Zionists. Hitler, he has said, was eliminating Jewish financial dictatorship.

Between the world wars, democracy failed throughout continental Europe, to be replaced by elementary fascism. It’s often quoted that history repeats itself as farce, so it’s quite perfect that Grillo should be a professional comedian. Inept, limited but too vain to acknowledge their limitations, the politicians of Europe have created the political space for the new digital-age fascism. We can’t guess how great the collapse is going to be, but the folly of those responsible for leaving us in this position is hallucinating.

One of the unexpected bonuses of having to do with print is the books that arrive unsolicited.  An advance copy of Distant Intimacy from the Yale University Press has just taken me by surprise.  Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein have been exchanging e-mails over the course of a year, the former in London, the latter in Chicago.  I can’t think of a better snapshot of the cultural landscape of today’s English-speaking world.  The mix of humor, regret, praise, and sniping is to be found nowhere else that I know of.

Both have a lifetime’s experience of this landscape on which to draw.  Epstein was editor of The American Scholar for 23 years, he’s published a great deal in every sort of outlet.  Raphael is the author of many novels, film scripts, a huge range of journalism, with classical studies including a book out a few weeks ago about Flavius Josephus, the Jewish soldier who threw his lot in with the Romans and turned historian.  They belong to the old school but are well able to navigate today’s shallows.   Gossip is one benefit that comes with experience like theirs, offering comic insight into Harold Pinter, George Steiner, Vladimir Nabokov, and a hundred others of their likes and dislikes. “I’m not a passionate admirer of Isaiah Berlin,” Raphael opens up , to go on, “Had he been a washbasin, Isaiah would have only one tap and it would’ve been tepid.” One of his best cracks is about Jean-Paul Sartre: “Maoism was his Viagra.”  Epstein commemorates the great Ed Shils and his falling-out with Saul Bellow.  If Bellow was to spend two hours on the lap of the Queen of England, Shils boiled it down, he’d have two observations, that the Queen had no understanding of the condition of the modern artist, and that she was an anti-Semite. Shils it was who improved on goyim, the Yiddish word for non-Jews, by calling another minority gayim.

You enjoy the book, I can hear the accusation, because these two are your friends and under the panache of with-it prose they’re a couple of old-style conservatives.  Raphael is indeed a friend and I hope one day to meet Epstein.  The poet Dom Moraes was a prodigy, India’s answer to Arthur Rimbaud, and I once said to him that I never wrote about books by friends.  Oh, he said, I only write about books by friends.  Literary reputations on both sides of the Atlantic are bringing me round to that point of view.

Gerald Scarfe is the main cartoonist of the Sunday Times of London, and that newspaper sells over a million copies and is addressed to educated people. The latest cartoon is a caricature of Benjamin Netanyahu, looking murderous, holding a bloody trowel with which he is building a wall. The body parts and tortured faces of Palestinian men and women are depicted in this wall. The caption reads, “Israeli elections. Will Cementing Peace Continue?”

A Liberal Democrat member of parliament by the name of David Ward coincidentally issues a statement accusing Jews “within a few years of liberation from the death camps” of “inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new state of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.”

The Sunday Times and the Liberal Democrat party aren’t sets of mindless street brawlers like the pre-war British fascists but defining components of the Establishment. For years, the media have been misrepresenting the Palestinians as blameless underdogs who want nothing but peace and never do anything that might drive Jews to defend themselves. Scarfe and Ward evidently believe that their demonization of Jews is neither shocking nor repulsive but a rightful and heart-felt expression of public opinion. So liberals and leftists easily finish up as storm-troopers after all.

Nadia Eweida and Shirley Chaplin are Christians who have had their lives made miserable for their faith. Nadia Eweida wore a silver cross on a chain round her neck, until her employers, British Airways, suspended her for it. Shirley Chaplin, a nurse, for 30 years had a crucifix on a necklace over her uniform, and the management of the Royal Devon National Health Hospital ordered her to remove it, on the absurd grounds of health and safety. A patient, they said, might have an accident pulling it. At the same moment, Gary McFarlane, a marriage counselor, and Lillian Ladele, a registrar, have also given offence on account of their Christian conscience. Neither had any objection to homosexuality as such, but Mr. McFarlane asked to be excused from counseling same-sex couples, and Miss Ladele from marrying them. Both were fired.

Legal proceedings finished in front of seven judges, none of them British, in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. This court found in favor only of Miss Eweida; BA had interfered with her right to express her religion. Rejecting the claims of the three other defendants, the court is giving priority to political correctness over freedom of religious conscience.

Many sad aspects come together. The childish conformity of those taking these decisions to ban religious symbolism on behalf of BA and that Royal Devon hospital is unimaginable. One prejudice is being utilized to suppress another prejudice. Freedom of worship is compromised. Christianity is further marginalized. Not a single churchman has come forward to defend these Christians, or if there is one, then he is doing it so discreetly that the mainstream media do not report him. Saddest of all, foreign judges now decide the behavior and beliefs of British people. Those same British people once used to sing that they never never never would be slaves.

Failed states are common these days, and the latest of them is Mali. Most of it is the Sahara desert, awesome and beautiful in its way but not productive. When I was there, the British taxpayer had just made a gift to the Malians of 250 Land Rovers. Vandalized as soon as they were unloaded, 250 unusable carcasses filled a derelict lot. After the desert came miles and miles of sandy scrub, with here and there villages too remote to be in touch with each other. The villagers had open sores due to diet deficiencies which should have been easy and cheap to remedy.

Nomads, the Tuaregs are different from the villagers. They have their own language, too recently codified to have a literature yet. The men are tall, turbaned and often veiled, and nobody is allowed to see Tuareg women. There’s not much to be done locally except camel-herding, so Tuaregs enrolled as mercenaries in Libya. Some seem to have been with Qaddhafi to the end. Returning embittered to Mali, they staged a coup, drove out the president and declared the Tuareg state of Azawad.

It’s none too clear how al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, AQIM for short, got into the act, but they did. So did affiliates and rival groups, all of whom are now struggling for power in a free-for-all of Islamists and war-lords. Reports describe public executions and floggings, and the destruction, Taliban-style, of historic mosques and mausoleums built of hardened mud bricks for Sufis, that is to say the wrong kind of Muslims. On my journey towards Gao and Timbuktoo in old days, I stopped in the desert to search for the battlefield where the Moroccan sultan had conquered the Songhrai emperor in the fifteenth century. Out of nowhere, the police arrived and stuck a parking ticket on our Land Rover, with a penalty larger than the one current in London. Three days of negotiation followed with the police chief, the chef de gendarmerie.

Mali now is like Somalia, Afghanistan, or Yemen, a mess that nobody has any practical ideas for cleaning up. The African neighbors know the danger. Nigeria is already bedeviled by the Islamist fanatics of a movement called Boko Haram. The United Nations, France, the Obama administration, occasionally chatter in a way that proves their lack of resolve and inability to get to grips. Another part of the landscape is disappearing, as it looks as though nobody yet is likely to give even a parking ticket to AQIM and the Islamists.

Salman Rushdie versus Islamism: The world became accustomed to this contest, and even bored by it. Besides, Rushdie wasn’t very nice, was he? He’d brought his troubles on himself, hadn’t he? The Satanic Verses was bound to give offense, and there’s never any need to do that. A memoir just published with the title Joseph Anton is Rushdie’s detailed account of the ordeal he went through, and it serves as a major document of these uncertain times.

Issuing the fatwa that condemned Rushdie to death for blackguarding the Prophet Muhammad, Ayatollah Khomeini was not concerned with theology or literature, and anyhow couldn’t read a book written in English. He had found the pretext he wanted to declare that he would be imposing his version of Islam on the world and was ready to kill to do so. To call for the murder of someone not within the jurisdiction is an enormity, nothing less than the staged opening to a war, the equivalent of the SS storming the Polish radio station of Gleiwitz to launch the Second World War.

Faced with the fatwa, the British Foreign Office reactivated the Chamberlain policy of appeasement. Instead of opposing the Iranians with uncompromising statements that freedom of speech is not negotiable, the officials concerned were always seeking a deal. In other countries, presidents, heads of government, men who ought to have known better, ducked their responsibilities, usually promising help which petered out to nothing. Shameful Western surrender only aroused more Iranian contempt. In a moment of weakness, Rushdie falsely declared that he was a good Muslim. This surrender to intimidation was a Mistake, the word duly capitalized by him.

Representative Leftists like Edward Said or Michel Foucault had greeted the new Islamist Iran with delight as a valuable new source of anti-Americanism. Rushdie’s friends, much praised in this book, are all Leftists of the sort, such as Günter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, Susan Sontag, Harold Pinter and others. The fatwa caused a split between Iran and its potential allies on the Left. The Mistake of the Iranians was to put Rushdie and his supporters in the position of arguing principle while themselves arguing politics, bigoted politics at that.

Full disclosure: I have met Rushdie very occasionally and briefly. Until I read this memoir, however, I had not properly grasped how much we owe him. Armed only with his pen and his wits, this unlikely immigrant from India won the first big campaign in a war most of us don’t even realize we are engaged in.

The Australian/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, otherwise AIJAC, had invited me to Australia, but perhaps I ought to be kept away as outbreaks of Middle East violence seem to coincide with my visits. The first time I went there Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and the First Gulf war erupted. Next time Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Now Hamas has waged its latest campaign, in the knowledge that its attack on Israel was certain to bring retaliation down on its own subjects, the Palestinians in Gaza. For Hamas, in short, massive self-destruction is worthwhile if it wreaks even a little destruction on the enemy. Irrational calculation of the kind is a measure of the ideology motivating the leaders. Unfortunately, it is rational to conclude that the cease-fire will last only until Hamas leaders again think the ideology has the chance to advance the cause and they start attacking once more.

Hamas is in a peculiar position, midway between its natural backers, the Muslim Brothers under President Morsi in Egypt, and its sponsors and armament suppliers in Iran. These two regimes, the one Sunni and the other Shiite, are testing out their mutual relationship. Egypt gives medical supplies to Hamas; Iran ships missiles. In another peculiar triangle, Hamas is in the midst of a silent coup to swallow Fatah, the Palestinian rival on the West Bank. Israel is ensuring the survival of Fatah at the very moment when its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, has won a vote in the United Nations General Assembly for Palestine to be accepted there with the status of observer rather than member. A Hamas takeover of the West Bank would bring Tel Aviv within close range of those Iranian-supplied missiles. At AIJAC functions where I spoke, I didn’t like to rub in that the two-state solution is dead for the time being and maybe the next two or three centuries.

On the final evening of my visit, AIJAC held a dinner to honor John Howard, statesman and nonpareil parliamentarian who won three consecutive elections before retiring. His lengthy speech of thanks was a brilliant blend of reminiscence, anecdote, and political generalization, all spoken without notes. “I can see that’s not the first speech you’ve ever made,” I said on being introduced afterwards. Next morning I spent an hour with him, and then flew home wishing someone of that caliber were my prime minister.

Alexander Perepilichny had been a Russian exile in Britain for the past three years. Aged 44, and in good health, he was rich enough to be paying a huge five-figure monthly rent for a house in Weybridge, a spot in Surrey where nouveau-riche people cluster. A couple of weeks ago, he went out jogging, and was found dead by the side of the road. Tests have failed to reveal the cause of death. Toxology tests are due in case he was poisoned by radiation like Alexander Litvinenko in an earlier and somewhat similar case. There may be an innocent explanation, but more probably here is another of the crimes that give frightening insight into today’s Russia.

According to press reports, Perepilichny was an associate of the Klyuev Group, who were tax officials in Russia skimming off public funds. They framed Hermitage Capital, an investment company whose chief executive officer was, and is, William Browder. (He is the grandson of Earl Browder, once general secretary of the American Communist party. “The smiling moustaches of Earl Browder,” runs a line in a poem by Roy Fuller that exemplifies the fellow-travelling absurdity of the Thirties.)

When I met Bill Browder, he told me how these tax officials had set him up and run him out of Russia. He engaged Sergei Magnitsky, a well-known young human-rights lawyer, to defend him. The day after Magnitsky named names, he was arrested. Then he was found dead in the Lubyianka, the old Soviet hell-hole in Moscow. But there was a paper trail of hundreds of millions of stolen dollars leading through banks to Switzerland and the purchase of property abroad. Perepilichny apparently could document the whole vast scam, and he handed the information to the Swiss authorities. One can only guess at his motives, but the reports describe him as a “supergrass,” an activity that may have cost him his life. In Soviet times, the top officials took steps to kill whoever gave secrets away, and this case might prove they haven’t changed.

For the past eight days I have been in Australia on a speaking tour, hence out of the blogosphere. Right now I am overlooking the boats and yachts criss-crossing Sydney bay. What a relief it is to be in a country with the free and easy spirit that once characterized England. A visitor like me has no stake in an ongoing public row here with accusations and rebuttals about misappropriation of trade-union money, a slush fund, a mortgage, all of which dates from long ago and may or may not involve the young Julia Gillard, now prime minister. Those on the right say she cannot survive, those on the left say there’s nothing to it. Happy the nation with that sort of worry.

And unhappy the nation like Egypt, where President Mohamed Morsi has thrown off the mask of democracy and declared that his word is final in matters of law and the constitution. He is resorting to a Vatican-like claim of infallibility in order to install the Islamist state the Muslim Brothers dream of. The judiciary would be an obstacle, but he has sacked the chief prosecutor and judges appointed by the previous regime. Resisting for the sake of judicial independence, the judges can call upon enough popular support to divide the country. Morsi is following precedents in Pakistan where the judges and the government fought for power, and in Turkey where President Tayyip Recep Erdogan sacked two or three thousand judges in the process of converting a secular state to Islamism.

Not the least surprising feature of this coup is the White House’s approval. No doubt Washington is grateful to Morsi for his help in dealing with Hamas in the latest crisis with Israel. All Muslim Brothers together, he could have thrown his weight behind Hamas but instead brokered the cease-fire. Washington used to describe the Muslim Brotherhood and its activities as “state-sponsored terrorism,” but now Mrs. Clinton speaks of Morsi’s “leadership and responsibility.” It stretches credulity to find Egypt suddenly praised for the peace and stability it brings to the region.

In 1984, George Orwell’s masterpiece of insight into the immorality of power politics, perpetual violence is punctuated by Two-Minute Hates, whereby former enemies unexpectedly become allies, and vice versa. The Hamas-Israeli clash has been a Two-Minute Hate, and at its culmination we have experienced an Orwellian inversion of alliances.

The late Ahmed Jaabari was the leader of the military wing of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood movement that took power after a coup in Gaza. The several thousand men under his command served as a kind of secret police force, far more powerful than the other Islamist or tribal armed groups in Gaza. More powerful too than political leaders like Ismail Haniya or Khalid Mashaal, who in effect are civilians.

Over the last few days the Hamas military wing has fired 115 missiles and rockets out of Gaza into Israel. A number like that reflects the state of politics. In the usual run of things only a few rockets are fired, not enough to do more than prove that Hamas is active, and certainly not enough to warrant an armed Israeli response. 115 in a few days is a very different matter. Hamas leaders can only have wanted to test out the balance of power after the American election.  They may well have concluded that Israel would not dare respond for fear of President Obama’s condemnation. In which case, they could fire off another 115. They have a fail-safe option as well. They are confident of the support of the parent Muslim Brotherhood group now in power in Egypt. The Egyptian leadership is bound to condemn Israel in public, for otherwise it will be exposed as hypocritical — talking enmity with Israel but in practice inactive.

Taking out Jaabari, Israel has drawn a line. Token rockets, yes perhaps, a barrage, no. Jaabari lived underground out of precaution. To have identified his whereabouts accurately and to have struck the car he was in is a feat requiring the highest levels of intelligence and technical skills.  The pity of it is that previous Hamas leaders have deceived themselves that this strategy of violence will eliminate Israel, only to pay for such folly with their lives. Each time a master terrorist like Jaabari is killed, they swear they will open the gates of hell on Israel, only to find that they are herding themselves through those very gates.

The Hungarian revolution of 1956 started on October 23. Here was a nation refusing to be Sovietized. A crowd gathered at the monstrous bronze statue of Stalin and pulled it down, to leave only vast empty boots sticking out of the pedestal. Stalin’s hollow head, the size of a car, was rolled away to block off a road. The symbolic drama was re-enacted when Iraqis and American marines toppled the bronze statue of Saddam Hussein.

In the period when Communism was then suspended, political prisoners were released from the Hungarian version of Gulag. One of them was Cardinal Mindszenty who sought asylum in the American embassy. Prince Esterhazy had the honor of being imprisoned for the crime of being a large landowner by the Nazis and then the Communists, and he now escaped to Switzerland. Pal Ignotus, a prisoner in the labor camp of Vac and author of a beautiful memoir, crossed by night into Austria on foot. His wife then lost the baby she had been carrying.

By the time I reached Budapest, the Russians had tricked Imre Nagy and his government including General Pal Maleter, leader of the armed resistance, into surrendering. Offered safe passage, these men were arrested and later put to death in secret. An atmosphere of murder and treachery hung over everything. Russian tanks were in the street. People hardly dared speak. I interviewed Gyorgy Lukacs, the author of the kind of Marxist literary studies we were supposed to read and admire in universities like Oxford. He was gloom itself. I seem to recall that he was made to suffer for being a wrong kind of Communist.

Today the Hungarian embassy threw a party to celebrate the anniversary. The speaker was a chap called Lord Boswell whom I had to look up in the reference books where I found that his recreations are snooker, shooting, and poetry. Gerbeaud’s is a famous café in the main square of Budapest, and lots of its special chocolate-covered cake had been flown in for the occasion. But for some reason, the memory of those empty bronze boots doesn’t let go.

I have just returned from a pretty grand party in France. And there I was, fork in hand, when I am introduced to a French ambassador. Pronounced with a French accent, my name is a mouthful and I do not think the ambassador identified me. But I identified him. I had attacked him in Betrayal, a book I published recently to spell out the damage France has done in the Middle East. The French foreign ministry, known as the Quai d’Orsay, has a long record of trying to obtain Arab favors. In this view, first the Zionists and then the Israelis have made the great mistake of wanting to stay alive, and that will never do. Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat were only the latest in the list of murderers whom the Quai d’Orsay befriended and protected.

The ambassador couldn’t have been more charming. We got on the Middle East as though by accident. It so happens that he thought President Chirac had been right to oppose George W. Bush over the invasion of Iraq. The then–foreign minister Villepin had made a brilliant speech for the same purpose. We moved on to the subject of the French Orientalist Louis Massignon (1883–1963) who in his day convinced the Quai d’Orsay that France and the world of Islam share a common destiny. “Ignominy” is the word Massignon reserved for Zionists. The passage of time has made no difference: The ambassador has the highest esteem for Massignon.

Perhaps it was mischievous of me, but I suggested that we should sing the old French colonial song “Partons pour la Syrie,” and France should save Syria from its terrible fate by reoccupying the country, and dividing it as before with an enclave reserved for the Alawites. The ambassador was strongly of the opinion that intervention by any outside power would be disastrous. Look at Afghanistan, he said, where the people we had come to save now kill us. It’s too demoralizing. We have to get out as soon as possible. But, I said, there will then be massacres on a large scale. “It will be atrocious,” the ambassador agreed.

Nobody could have put the case for defeatism and surrender more convincingly than this eloquent and civilized man. The world that he foresees will have no room in it for someone with his qualities. That’s what we are up against.

The deportation of Abu Hamza from Britain to the United States brings to a close a long-running scandal. The man has made a mockery of Britain and its law in general, exposing how feeble and incompetent procedures are when it comes to protection against individuals like him. Britain, he famously jeered, is “a paradise where you can do what you like.”

Born in Egypt, Abu Hamza came to Britain nominally as a student. He lost both hands and one of his eyes fighting in Afghanistan, though this may be his romancing of an accident with explosives in his home. Strong-arm methods gave him control of the well-known Finsbury Park mosque in London. Young Muslims attended and every Friday he whipped them up to hate non-Muslims. He regularly praised the September 11 terrorists and jihad. When forbidden to preach in the mosque, he simply continued to do so in the street. The police stood around doing nothing, evidently out of fear of what might happen if these potential jihadis couldn’t do what they liked. Had an Englishman been inciting compatriots to acts of terror in Muslim countries, the lot would have been arrested on the spot. When the police at last raided the mosque, they found weapons, equipment against chemical warfare and more than a hundred stolen or forged passports.

British courts sentenced him to prison in 2004 while United States authorities requested his extradition. A federal grand jury in New York had then indicted him on eleven counts of terror-related crimes, including trying to set up an al-Qaeda training camp in Oregon. Lawyers on his behalf used every conceivable device to spare him from being brought to justice. Proceedings in the British courts and then the European Court of Human Rights dragged on for eight years and cost a million pounds. Deported with him were four other Muslims involved in terror or its funding, and one of them spun out facing justice for no less than fourteen years. Senior British judges and the Home Secretary as well have spoken out strongly against the way the process of law is itself an injustice, but it is quite clear that nothing much will happen for years, or at least until the wish to appease the unappeasable stops.

Turkey has just held show trials that bear comparison to the judicial monstrosities staged in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Three hundred senior military officers, some serving and some retired, have been handed long prison sentences. They have been accused of belonging to a terrorist organization called Ergenekon that back in 2003 was plotting the overthrow of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The trials began in 2007. They are a disgrace. The plotters are alleged to have been intending to bomb mosques, shoot down a Turkish military aircraft and other improbabilities of the sort. The “evidence” offered by the prosecution is full of anachronisms, forgeries and other evident fabrications. The defense was not permitted to call witnesses in a position to expose the nonsense.

It is true that the military have staged coups in the recent Turkish past, not in their own interest but to preserve the secular modernizing state that replaced the old Ottoman Empire. Erdogan can now be seen to have taken the major strategic decision to re-align the country as an Islamist state. To that end, he had to neutralize the army. He could never have obtained 20-year prison sentences for innocent officers unless he had already purged the judiciary and installed Islamist yes-men. Similarly the media. Turkey is the country with the highest number of journalists in prison.

The balance of power is shifting again against the West. Turkey has renounced its status as a democracy. Suspecting that membership of the European Union was more and more probable, Turkey is instead choosing to become the leader of Sunni Islamism. Opposition to Shiite Iran and its Syrian protectorate follows, although just a short while ago Erdogan was supporting them whole-heartedly and claiming to have zero problems with neighbors. The new Islamism demands rupture with Israel and identification with Hamas.

President Obama is happy to tell everyone that he is in the habit of telephoning Erdogan frequently. He does not denounce the show trials and seems unaware that his chat-line friend in Ankara has changed.

In Islam, believers are superior to infidels, masters to slaves, and men to women. All these relationships are so fixed by the faith and the customs of Muslims that reform to bring in equality is the tallest of orders. The very idea that women are the equal of men touches masculine vanity, sexuality, opportunity for conquest, financial exploitation, the shape of the family – all issues that have the utmost social resonance. Muslim men are never going voluntarily to let go of their advantaged position. When it comes to gaining  equality in the Middle East women are on their own, and they are taking the law into their hands.

A video is circulating showing a scene in a supermarket in Saudi Arabia. A lady who seems both young and elegant is surrounded by several members of the Saudi morality police known as the Mutawwa who go around enforcing the observance of prayer time and more particularly insisting that women are behaving and dressing as they are ordered to do – the fantasy of sexual domination is unmistakable, and I wish Dr Freud was here to spell it out. The mutawwa have just told this woman that her head-scarf is tied to show too much of her hair. Furious, she starts screaming at them, making such a scene that they beat a retreat.

Last week in Iran, Hojatoleslam (meaning he’s a rank below an ayatollah) accosted two women in a street in Shahmirzad and ordered them to cover up. “Cover your eyes,” they said, and set about beating him up. They pushed him to the ground, and kicked him so hard that he had to go to hospital. Like the Saudi mutawwa, the Basij is a fascist militia that does much of the regime’s dirty work and the London Times further relates how in Tehran two of its members reprimanded a woman for listening to music in her car. Bystanders then beat up this miserable pair of sneaks. One of them revealed that the women had found blows to be good, but humiliation better: “while I was unconscious they even removed my underwear.” 

The murderers of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three of his colleagues in Benghazi were Salafis, that is to say Muslims who believe in returning to the violence and conquest of the early years of Islam. A few weeks ago they narrowly missed killing the British ambassador, but they did succeed in vandalizing the British Second World War cemetery, particularly smashing graves with a Star of David on them. These same Salafis have destroyed Libya’s ancient monuments of Sufism, or popular Islam.

Salafis won about a quarter of the vote in the recent Egyptian elections. Not long ago they almost stormed the Israeli embassy in Cairo, which could have ended in a fire-fight. Now they had picked up a rumor that some American had made a video disrespectful of the Prophet Mohammad, and so they mobilized to storm the American embassy. Lives were lost when their Taliban counterparts stormed the American embassy in Kabul with the same belief that Islam demanded that they go killing in its name. In Benghazi, then, the Salafis hadn’t seen the video; they were acting on the rumor of a rumor.

Yet the best President Obama can find to say is that he strongly condemns the outrageous attack on the diplomatic facility — cliché and euphemism of that sort deaden the anger and sorrow that ought to be natural. As for Mrs. Clinton, she asked how this could have happened, and immediately answered her own question by exonerating the Libyan ruling council. Actually it happened because these ignorant barbarians think that killing Americans is a religious obligation, therefore right in itself, and wonderful to say, completely cost free. Obama’s “strong condemnation” and Clinton’s pitiful self-examination serve to confirm to them that they are proving the supremacy of Salafi Islam. This administration’s on-going policy of appeasement encourages a host of brutes to do their worst.