A rather delicious story is surfacing in the British press, and as is so often the case with delicious stories there’s no means of knowing if it is true. At its core is one Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, a very typical Islamist fanatic, the usual figure in robe and sporting a big beard. It’s impossible to tell if he’s a real menace or a clown. In the past he’s been expelled from his native Syria, left Saudi Arabia in murky circumstances, and settled in London. There he founded the usual sort of gang, called Al Muhajiroun, threatening to kill us all and to plant the flag of Islam over the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street. He seems to have been in touch with Osama bin Laden, but this may have been boasting. His activities were financed naturally by the benefits he could claim from the welfare state, so he lived and flourished at British expense. Lately, in a hurry and seemingly with the law after him, he left London, to move to Beirut, where he has been threatening to kill Beatle Paul McCartney for giving a concert in Tel Aviv.

His daughter Yasmin remains in London, however. She’s 26, a single mother, and in the words of the Daily Mail, “The busty blonde has been revealed as a topless, tattooed pole dancer….  Hundreds of youngsters go wild over the daughter of the preacher of hate who rants against Western depravity.” She is quoted saying, “I’m willing to go topless if the venue is right,” and a photograph reveals what this would look like. Sheikh Bakri at first reacted with horror, saying, “If this is true I am deeply shocked.” As far as he knew, she has a husband, and he should control her. Later he apparently had the better idea that all his children are practicing Muslims, and his daughter has told him the story is all lies.

Perhaps some bright spark did indeed invent the pole dancing to discredit the ineffable Sheikh Bakri. It’s long been clear that one very successful line of defense against Islamism is to laugh at it. But Muslims are always being asked to assimilate, and maybe that’s what Yasmin has done.

“Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that.” This sentence appears in an article criticizing capitalism in the current issue of the Spectator, the British weekly magazine, and several readers have rung me up to ask if we all have the same words before our eyes.

Because who is coming to the defense of Marxism like this so long after every aspect of it has been tested to destruction?  Some professor on the West Coast perhaps? Not a bit of it. It is nobody else but the Archbishop of Canterbury, a fellow by the name of Rowan Williams. When appointed, he thought to ingratiate himself by confiding to the public that he was a “hairy leftie.”  His prose style certainly suits his self-presentation. Take that sentence quoted above. What is a kind of mythology? How is mythology something other than itself? What are these things said to have no life in themselves but nonetheless with power and agency? Agency is too vague a term to carry meaning here, and how do unspecified things have a life? In any case Marx observed nothing of the kind, and Williams is only giving his own reduction of what he thinks that other hairy leftie was trying to say.

Once an Archbishop of Canterbury was prepared to go to the stake for his Christian belief. Subsequent Archbishops have tried to live up to the position as head of the Anglican community world-wide. In living memory, great Christian churchmen like Cardinal Wyszynski in Poland, Cardinal Josif Slipyi in Ukraine, the saintly Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek in Czechoslovakia, criticised Marxist doctrine and practice, and went to prison for it. And rather than calling Marx in aid, might an Archbishop today not have a duty rather to confront Marx’s famous jibe that religion is the opium of the people?

Just recently, and incredibly, Rowan Williams was advocating the introduction of sharia law into England as “unavoidable” and “desirable.”  In the Spectator he takes a different swipe at society, seeming to think that the market is idolatry, though his critique of capitalism is actually so poorly and opaquely expressed that it is close to burble. But it is surely a novelty, indeed unique to this age, that an Archbishop of Canterbury can assault and diminish the institutions without which he would have no function at all.

The writings of art and architectural critics, indeed pretty well anyone connected with aesthetics, are almost always such a laboratory of pretence and bogusness that sensible people will never read the stuff. A friend has just given me a master example. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has been trying for some years to abandon any claims to seriousness in order to be politically correct, and it is currently mounting an exhibition about design in the Cold War. The purpose is to show that everything manufactured in the West, no matter how domestic or trivial, was designed to prove the superiority of capitalism to Communism.

And here is how the Times critic (by the way someone hitherto unknown to me) raved about what he saw and heard:

Wisps of spooky music emanate from the back of the room in the kind of pre-Kraftwerk analogue electronica that would accompany sci-fi B movies or TV documentaries in those days to denote the future. It comes from a recreation of the Poème Electronique, a son-et-lumière and architectural “immersive experience” created for the electronic company Philips at the Brussels World Expo in 1958 by Le Corbusier, the Greek architect Iannis Xenakis and the French composer Edgard Varèse, which bombarded  visitors with a visual essay….

Etc etc etc.

Could anything be worse? Well, yes, it could. The Times critic concludes with a reflection on the Cold War. “And who won? Neither side, of course. Both were morally bankrupt. But, by God, we had the prettier table lamps.”  Now there’s real moral bankruptcy for you.

A few months ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury, nominal head of the Anglican Church, astonished the faithful and the unfaithful alike by announcing that in Britain the introduction of Islamic law, or sharia, was not only “unavoidable” but “desirable.”  In his wake the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Philips, titular representative of British law and legal procedure, also recommended sharia law. Instead of exclaiming at the strangeness of these pronouncements, we should have smelled a rat. They were actually preparing us in advance for what those on the inner circle must have been aware of, namely that sharia law is already operating. The deed has been done in secret, carried out quite typically by an establishment that does not bother with tiresome things that might get in the way, like public debate or consultation. Never mind the general good, they act by the divine right of their positions.

As so often, everything turns on a clause that those with a mind for it have been able to exploit. The Arbitration Act of 1996 classified sharia courts as arbitration tribunals, whose ruling is binding by law if both parties agree to it. Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi controls a body called the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, and according to a report in the Sunday Times, he said that he had taken advantage of the Arbitration Act to classify sharia courts as arbitration tribunals. Sharp man to spot the opening! Courts have been set up already in the major cities, and apparently have been operating this past year and have dealt with more than 100 cases.

Most Muslim countries have long since found sharia law to be retrograde, and have abandoned it. Believe it or not, it doesn’t even apply in Iran, so Amir Taheri informs me. In British instances so far, husbands committing domestic violence have only been sentenced to classes in management of anger. Abused women in each case have withdrawn their complaints. In cases of inheritance, women have also been discriminated against because sharia law favours men.

The only protests seem to have come from Muslims themselves, one or two of whom say that they came to Britain to escape sharia and all that goes with it. Not a peep from the feminists or the civil rights gang or the socialists (if there are any left). Equality for all citizens under the law was once a proud boast in Britain. No longer. Sharia law sets Muslims apart, sanctioning judgements that would never be upheld in British courts, and its introduction is a significant step in the Islamization of Britain.

Corporal Tomas Stringer is a Welshman (hence the spelling of his Christian name). A paratrooper, he’s serving in Afghanistan, and he has one arm in plaster because he’d broken his wrist jumping from a truck when a roadside bomb went off. Back in Britain to recuperate, he was helping organize the funeral of a friend killed in action. He’s made a reservation at the Metro Hotel in Woking, a quiet and somewhat suburban town in Surrey, where incidentally in the nineteenth century the first mosque in Britain was built. Corporal Stringer arrived at the Metro in civilian clothes, but when he checked in the reception desk turned him away because company policy did not allow Armed Forces personnel to stay at the hotel. It was already late and Stringer therefore spent the night in his car. The hotel is owned by American Amusements Limited, a company based in Woking but, it seems, under British management.

Obituaries in the newspapers still reveal almost every day what sort of men fought in the last world war. Here is Ian Fraser, awarded the Victoria Cross for piloting a two-man submarine and attaching a limpet bomb under a Japanese cruiser, to sink it. Here is Lieutenant Colonel Mike Tomkin, wounded at the battle of El Alamein but nevertheless continuing in action and destroying six German tanks. Here is Colonel Charlie McHardy of the Seaforth Highlanders, first decorated in the field in Tunisia, and then severely wounded after D-Day. Before today, would any hotel in Britain ever have had a policy of refusing a room to such men? It’s inconceivable. The treatment meted out to Corporal Stringer – and the failure of the media to raise the roof about it – reveals a very profound shift in public attitudes, and it is an ominous portent for the future that in the heart of England people can be so contemptuously dismissive of those defending them. I wish I had some explanation for it.

Remember Melita Norwood, known as the “granny spy” ?  She was of Latvian origins, ostensibly a nice and well assimilated lady living in the comfortable London suburbs and holding down a good job. That was cover.  She was secretary to the director of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, the body responsible in the 1940s for the development of Britain’s secret atom bomb. Granny Melita was in fact a Communist, recruited to spy, and passing on to Moscow information that speeded up by several years the Soviet nuclear bomb program. Though aware that she was a Communist, and suspecting her of spying, officials did nothing. Their dereliction remains mind-boggling. She was unmasked only in 1999, and again nothing at all was done to bring her to account in any way. No legal proceedings, no financial deprivations, just a huge shrug of indifference. A historian, David Burke, was in touch with her at the time, and he has just written a book about the case. Simpering with the joy of it, she told him that she had been “rather a naughty girl,” but “I thought I’d gotten away with it.”  She had, she had.

Compare and contrast now the reaction to Putin and Saddam Hussein. The latter invaded and annexed an independent country recognised by the United Nation, and the former has similarly invaded another UN member, and is in the process of annexing it. If it had been left to the Europeans, Saddam would still be in Kuwait. Today European Union leaders are discussing the invasion of Georgia. It’s a foregone conclusion that they will behave like the officials who condoned Granny Melita. The French want no talk of punishing Russia. “The important thing is that Europe should talk in one voice, firmly and calmly,” says the French foreign minister, naturally not specifying the purpose of firmness and calm, or what good it will do to talk to those who refuse to listen. His German counterpart says: “We need a strong and sensible European role to return to reason and responsibility.”  It would be impossible to find a more inflected euphemism for complete and instant surrender. The British Foreign Office outdoes them all in passivity and impotence, bleating, “Russia does not like it when people get together and talk about them.”  Not even the shadow of a policy there.

When the Kremlin perceives weakness, it moves in to take advantage, sometimes with spies and sometimes with tanks. Granny Melita once contributed to the construction of the nuclear bomb, and Putin is now threatening to target Poland and Ukraine with it. No measures of defense, nothing in the arena of international law, no financial deprivations, hardly even a complaint, just another huge shrug of indifference. The continuity of the Russian advance against everyone else is impressive. Putin is entitled to think that he too is getting away with it.

Some photographs are beginning to circulate more or less covertly of an astonishing air crash. This took place in France, at Toulouse, where a European consortium is building the Airbus 340-600, the largest passenger airliner ever designed or built. All sorts of criticisms have been made of this gigantic project, but the aircraft is in production regardless.

Etihad Airways (ultimately Iranian-owned, I believe, but am not in a position to confirm) is interested in purchasing the Airbus, and an Arab flight crew of seven men from Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies (ADAT) arrived in Toulouse for pre-delivery testing. In a brand new aircraft with no previous airtime, the crew taxied to the run-up area. They couldn’t handle it, they made one mistake after another, losing control and finally wrecking the aircraft against a blast barrier. The photographs show impressive heaps of scrap, with the Etihad logo legible on the fusillage. And that’s $200 million down the drain. The fate of the ADAT crew is unknown.

I have the story from a source I think is reliable, but a news blackout in the media in France and elsewhere means that it cannot be checked. The reason for the secrecy, according to my informant, is that the story is deemed insulting to Muslims.

Russia has invaded and now occupies the part of Georgia known as South Ossetia, and looks poised to occupy Abkhazia, another part of Georgia. Russian troops are reliably reported to be moving deeper into Georgia, and its air force is continuing to bomb targets in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi as well as the Black Sea ports. The likelihood of a Russian retreat is nil. The question is where they will stop.

Voices in the West have been quick to assert that comparisons between the old Soviet Union and contemporary Russia should not be drawn. This is the usual comforting self-deception practiced when the West comes under threat. Russia is determining its boundaries by force of arms. It has manufactured a crisis that serves its imperial expansion. In pure Stalinist style, its leaders accuse Georgia of genocide, when they themselves are responsible for ethnic cleansing and the death of civilians. Russian spokesmen have made it plain that the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili must resign, and Georgia will have to do as it is told or suffer the consequences. That is a repeat of 1940 when Stalin swallowed the Baltic republics and parts of Romania.

Last April, at a summit in Bucharest, President Bush in an eloquent speech proposed that Georgia and Ukraine be admitted to NATO. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel persuaded those attending that this would offend Russia, and the proposal was turned down. Her policy was presented as a far-sighted way of steering clear of trouble, but actually it has been an open invitation to Russia to do as it pleased with Georgia and Ukraine, in the certainty that nobody was committed to coming to their aid. German prevarication and fear of anything and everything that might lead to confrontation has once more handed the initiative to a Russia that for centuries has built itself precisely on confrontation.

Mrs. Merkel and the other pitiful Europeans have placed the United States in a very awkward spot. Bleatings about a truce, negotiations, the intervention of the United Nations, international peace-keepers, are merely habitual, and it is anyhow ineffective to run for cover like that. When I was writing The Strange Death of the Soviet Union, an account of the collapse of Communism, I interviewed General Leonid Shebarshin, head of the First Directorate of the KGB, in charge of international affairs. Calmly he told me that the disintegration of the Soviet empire was only a temporary matter. Russia has such weight geographically and materially that the day would arise when it would reconstruct its empire over all the nearby peoples of lesser weight simply through circumstance. Events in Georgia are proving the validity of this KGB viewpoint.

It is too late to defend Georgia militarily. The logic of the situation now is that the West will duly let Georgia be dismembered and have as its next president someone ready to accommodate the Kremlin. In which case, Russian tanks will once again have determined the boundaries and the governments of other countries. Russian minorities live in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Moldavia and they too can be used in the future to manufacture some mendacity about genocide, leading to invasion and their re-incorporation into the Russian empire. Russian protection of Iranian nuclear development certainly adds another dimension of difficulty and danger. But without the necessary resolve and imagination to devise a policy in defence of democracy and its allies, a Soviet Union Mark Two will have emerged with the potential to leave the West demoralized and defeated.

In his column in the Sunday Telegraph Christopher Booker specializes in reporting the idiocies and horrors that are flooding over us from Europe. The latest comes from a German-owned energy company called npower — all in fashionable lower-case letters. This company invites children to “save the planet” by becoming “climate cops.” Children are supposed to spy on their parents, relations and neighbors, and catch them out for such “crimes” as leaving the TV on standby, putting hot food in the fridge or failing to use low-energy light bulbs.

As so often, George Orwell got there first. In 1984, that masterwork of our times, children are enrolled in the Spies, whose model was evidently the Soviet youth organization, the Komsomol. They are taught to denounce and to brutalise, so that in the eyes of Winston Smith, the novel’s protagonist, “Nearly all children nowadays were horrible.” In Soviet Russia, the young Pavel Morozov was held up as a most praiseworthy example for the young. At the age of thirteen, this boy had denounced his father for reading the forbidden Trotsky, and the father was duly shot. Family members then murdered Pavel in retribution. Even Stalin is supposed to have called Pavel “a little swine” for having his father executed. Orwell made use of this monstrosity too. Winston writes about Comrade Ogilvy who joins the Spies at the age of six, and “At eleven he had denounced his uncle to the Thought Police after overhearing a conversation which appeared to him to have criminal tendencies.”

By chance, I am reading a new and very fine book, The Forsaken, which tells the story of the thousands of Americans who emigrated to the Soviet Union, men and women who mostly were to pay for their naivety by losing their lives in Gulag. The author, Tim Tzouliadis, only just manages to restrain his rightful indignation at the murderous behaviour of the Soviets and the abject way that the American authorities did nothing to save their own citizens. In this book, a teacher is recorded praising Vasiliev, a boy in his class. With vigilance worthy of a real Bolshevik, the teacher is quoted saying, this Vasiliev “has acted like a real hero. He conquered family prejudices and denounced his own father.” Vasiliev was wearing a new suit in class, his reward for having reported seeing his father reading the banned works of Trotsky.

The totalitarian mind-set dies hard, and it has evidently found a fruitful new incarnation in npower and its “climate cops.”

“Perhaps I shall die forgotten in Siberia,” says one of the characters in that astonishing novel The First Circle, “But if you die knowing that you are not a swine, that’s something, isn’t it?” The Soviet authorities did their best to make sure that Alexander Solzhenitsyn died forgotten in Siberia along with the millions of the lost. They failed. The Germans had also failed to kill him as a wartime artillery officer. Unexpectedly, he even survived cancer, to die rightly celebrated in Moscow in the fullness of age.

Solzhenitsyn is far and away the most influential writer to have emerged in my lifetime. You have to search history very thoroughly to think of any one man who changed the intellectual climate as dramatically as he did. By and large, people really believed the propaganda that the Soviet Union represented peace, and Communism was progress. A.J.P. Taylor, my Oxford tutor, to give a personal example, had the widest reputation as a historian, but he insisted that the Soviet Union did not have concentration camps and Gulag was a fiction put about by White Russian exiles in Riga. I doubt he knew that he was in danger of dying as a swine, and pretty well the entire academic and journalistic and social elite were equally perverse. To give the Soviet Union approval, or at least the benefit of doubt, was far, far more acceptable than to criticize it. The few who were openly anti-communist, why, my dear chap, we can’t possibly invite them even to a drink, we don’t want to know them.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich broke through to the truth. One who had had first-hand experience of the Soviet secret police state was conveying the horror of it. But of course, it was The Gulag Archipelago that really rocked the world. Here was the evidence of hundreds and maybe thousands of fates, their stories painstakingly collected, the material marvelously organized, the author’s moral judgment clear without the least shadow. Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, The House of the Dead, had recorded Czarist injustice, but the scale of Soviet inhumanity, and the wantonness of it, gave Solzhenitsyn the opening to document something new and worse than anything a Czar had ever done: Communism was state-controlled murder machinery, and its progressive image a lie from top to bottom.

To give another personal example, at the time when Gulag Archipelago was rocking the world’s conscience, I was taken to a smart literary party in Paris. And there I heard Agnès Varda, a filmmaker with a fashionable reputation, declare, “No, I don’t read Solzhenitsyn, he’s a writer on the Right.” Ah, and didn’t Solzhenitsyn become a Russian Orthodox believer, and wasn’t he also a Russian nationalist, and didn’t he accuse the West of becoming a feckless moral slum? Swarms of like-minded idiots tried to write him off in this style. It doesn’t work. The pen really has proved mightier than the sword. Solzhenitsyn’s writings will inform posterity’s view of the twentieth century.

In the last few days, the Muslim world has revealed its political working in the most tragic way. Bombs in Turkey killed scores. Bombs in India, placed by Muslims, killed scores more. Bombs in Iraq, exploded by women who killed themselves in the process, killed over 50, and wounded many more. Bombs have been set off in Algeria, probably by al-Qaeda now building a base in that country. Palestinians in Fatah exploded bombs in Gaza City, killing members of Hamas, its Palestinian rivals. Five bomb outrages within the space of a week, and the huge majority of the victims were Muslim, like the perpetrators. Also in the same week the Iranian authorities executed no less than 30 people, most of them young, and charged with crimes that cannot be verified.

It is tempting to say that this is all the doing of savage brutes, and that in the end everyone will turn on them. Undoubtedly those responsible for the killings are savage brutes, but they are also calculating, devious, secretive, long-term planners, excellent at recruiting simple people to run risks for them. These are no mean skills. In their way, then, these killers have a dreadful sort of intelligence. Their goal is power and they pursue it single-mindedly.

In civil societies, power is diffused through the checks and balances of institutions, and these Muslim killers would be seen as mere psychopaths. In Islamic society so far, institutions instead concentrate power in the hands of whoever can seize and hold it. So those in power kill to maintain their position, and those in opposition kill to take their place. These bombs and executions, then, are the equivalent in the Muslim world of no-confidence votes in a parliament. And just as a parliamentary vote determines the direction a society will move in, so does all this killing. Except that in the former case, the direction is onwards, in the latter case backwards, further and further backwards to degradation.

Every so often, whole populations appear to suspend their powers of judgment and swamp themselves in emotion. It was impossible, for example, to say at the time that the Beatles were mediocre musicians and rather childish in their opinions, or that the late Princess Diana was a seriously troubled young woman causing havoc around her. Senator Barack Obama is similarly whipping up European levels of irrationality. What a phenomenon his tour of the main continental capitals has been! As my friend Josef Joffe, the editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit and a highly rational man, put it, “He’s being celebrated like a victorious Roman general who comes back from the conquest of Gaul or something.”

200,000 people gathered in the open air in Berlin to listen to him. They applauded, they cheered, especially when he told them that America was less than perfect, and had failed to live up to its ideals – a fault that Change We Can Believe In would instantly remedy. Only some 25 years ago, crowds like this had assembled and marched in protest against the stationing in Germany of Cruise missiles to protect the country against the Soviet Union.

In Paris, President Nicolas Sarkozy fawned over him. They’d met before, he said, and “One of us became president, the other just has to do the same thing.” He was virtually endorsing him. It was the same in London, where Prime Minister Brown and leader of the opposition David Cameron fought for time and photo-ops. Tony Blair flew in from the Middle East, to resolve its disputes over a breakfast publicized with special smarminess.

Now the BBC correspondent in Washington is someone called Matt Frei. His hall-mark has long been a high-minded contempt for all things American. They brought him over for Obama’s trip, and his reports and body-language suddenly pointed the way to a rational explanation for the flood-tide of emotion. All this Obama mania is only the flip side of anti-Americanism. They’re all hoping for a president who will dismantle everything the United States stands for, and so prove them to be the intellectual and moral superiors they think they are. That may be what Jo Joffe meant when he tagged that enigmatic “or something” on to the end of his great remark.

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic by the Serb authorities is something we can all applaud. He is undoubtedly a war criminal. As self-proclaimed President of Serbian Bosnia and in the name of Greater Serb nationalism, he was responsible for the attempted ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian Muslims and Croats. He allowed concentration camps to be built, he encouraged Ratko Mladic, his military commander, to shell Sarajevo, and gravest of all, to massacre about 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica. These past thirteen years he’s been in hiding. The United Nations forces, the world’s intelligence services, and certainly the Serbs in Belgrade, knew where he was, but hesitated to pick him up for fear of stirring up the Serb nationalism he claimed to represent. When arrested, he was found to have disguised his trademark quiff as a hippy pony-tail, grown the sort of luxuriant beard that Orthodox clergy have, and was making a living as a health guru. 

At which point, moral clarity starts to blur. Serbia has a new government, one most anxious to join the European Union. The EU, however, has made the arrest of Karadzic and Mladic a pre-condition of joining, and the Serbs evidently decided to pick him up out of political expediency, and not for his crimes. Even that might be all right, if they were going to try him in Belgrade, and use his trial to put the record straight, and give the Serb population the opportunity to come to terms with crimes committed in their names. As a precedent, the fact that an Iraqi court tried Saddam Hussein helped to evolve Iraqi identity and solidarity.

But no, Karadzic is likely to be extradited to the U.N-backed Special Court in The Hague. Judges of other nationalities would then try him. That court changes the rules of procedure as it goes along, it admits hearsay as evidence, and its politicized purpose means that it is “little more than a kangaroo court,” as Anthony Daniels once described it. That is the court in which the Serb President Slobodan Milosevic, once Karadzic’s mentor but later rival, was tried. The Milosevic case lasted four years and cost $200 million, ending only because Milosevic and the presiding judge were both dead. This is justice?   

Besides, the powers that be – whether Serb or others — have jumped on Karadzic only because they are able to do so, and in order to cut the EU deal into the bargain. The sinister Mladic is likely to be arrested pretty soon too. Karadzic is of course a wicked man for whom it is more or less impossible to feel anything like pity. But the world is full of men equally or even more wicked, such as Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-Il, General Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, and they’ve made sure that nobody is in a position really to jump on them or to cut political deals at their expense. Those who end up in international courts are victims of power politics, to put it plainly, and they cannot expect a fair trial.

Samir Kuntar is the Lebanese who infiltrated Israel twenty-nine years ago in order to kill. Entering a family house, he murdered the father in front of that man’s four-year-old daughter, and then beat the little girl’s head in with his rifle butt. Meanwhile the mother, trying to hide with a two year old daughter, accidentally smothered her to death trying to stop her screaming. Israel does not have the death penalty (though it made an exception in the case of Adolf Eichmann). Those who object to the death penalty will have very little grounds for their argument in Kuntar’s case. What he did was as inhuman as any crime in the sad annals of mankind.

Many, perhaps most, countries would have found a way to take Kuntar’s life, if only in a shoot-out during his capture following the murders. In Israel. there was never any question of that.  In a court of law, Kuntar was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy now in the process of taking over Lebanon, has long hoped to have Kuntar released. To that end, Hezbollah two years ago once more infiltrated Israel, killed some soldiers and kidnapped two more, by name Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Hezbollah then refused to say in what condition these two were, did not allow Red Cross visits, ignoring every international convention about the treatment of prisoners.

For reasons of its own, which may be wise or unwise, moral or immoral, Israel agreed to exchange Kuntar for the corpses of its two soldiers. Those who opened their coffins have been too appalled to speak openly of the mutilations they observed. In contrast to the treatment Kuntar had received in his captivity, the two had evidently been tortured to death. And that is all anyone needs to know about Hezbollah.

Now every human being is responsive to the inborn taboo against killing. To overcome that taboo is difficult, and requires at the minimum the kind of primitive hate that societies usually make their best efforts to overcome. Hate, prejudice, and ignorance are necessary, and even quite simple levels of civilization keep these irrational sentiments under some sort of control.

There must be Arabs who feel the normal human revulsion at what Kuntar did, and there may well be some with the courage to speak out against his infamy (though none that I know of have done so). But the very opposite happened. A reception committee of the high and mighty of his native Lebanon greeted Kuntar on his release. Dressed in military fatigues, he boasted to the world that he would do his crimes all over again. On behalf of the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas sent his blessings, and his spokesman could talk about the return of “the heroes and Martyrs headed by the great Samir Kuntar.” In a rare public speech in Beirut, Sheikh Nasrallah of Hezbollah had similar praise for Kuntar.

Rationalizations or excuses of course can be found to cover this glorification of murder. Arabs feel shame at their impotence and failure, for instance, so pretend that their defeats are victories. Or these Lebanese and Palestinian dignitaries know that they have to whip up hate in order to stay in power. Or that lack of education makes it possible to mobilize Muslims to believe they have a duty to kill those of other faiths.

All of that is specious. The Nazi S.S. killed Jewish children with a brutality similar to Kuntar’s, but they did not then appear on public platforms to boast to the world of what they had done; on the contrary they kept their crimes as secret as they could, thereby acknowledging the survival somewhere in them of a guilty conscience. But here are important and supposedly responsible men who find it in themselves to embrace, encourage, and hold up as a model a man as vile as any, as though there was no such thing as conscience, and never has been. By every human standard, this is degradation, this is depravity.

In Britain, the Lord Chief Justice has just told an audience in one of the largest mosques in London that there is a place in Britain for sharia law. The Archbishop of Canterbury not long ago was of the same opinion. The pillars of the Establishment, in other words, are willing to collapse what they were supposed to be upholding. Amazingly, the feminists have not uttered a squeak of protest about what would happen to women in the event that sharia law was applicable alongside or within British law.

The Swiss are not taking so easily to creeping Islamization. In the past, the King of Saudi Arabia felt free to break building regulations at a palace he owned on the shore of Lake Geneva, and the City Fathers forced him to demolish what had been put up without permission. A mosque already existed in Geneva, but when the Muslim community sought to have a second mosque, the City Fathers replied that this would be possible when the Christians were allowed a church in Saudi Arabia. There is no record that outraged Arabs consequently withdrew their petro-dollar millions held in the local banks.

There are just over seven million Swiss, and they are Europe’s premier example of multi-culturalism, a centuries-old fusion of French, German, and Italian cultures and languages. Muslims, almost all immigrants, are said to number some 300,000. The Swiss Peoples’ Party (SVP) has raised a storm by collecting more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for a ban on minarets in the country. Minarets, according to the SVP, are “symbols of political-religious imperialism.” A spokesman for the party pointed out that, “Many women, even socialists, signed this petition because not one Swiss woman can tolerate the way that Muslim men treat their wives.”

By law, a national referendum is now obligatory. Favouring this form of direct democracy, the Swiss constantly hold referendums on every kind of issue. The Swiss authorities, including the country’s President, recommend the rejection of the ban on minarets. They are openly and explicitly terrified of provoking Muslim anger, thus bringing a security risk on themselves. That’s also the sum total of the argument put forward in Britain by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chief Justice. All these great persons on the one hand openly hold themselves and their societies in disdain, and on the other hand show an even greater degree of contempt for Muslims by treating them as creatures of a fanaticism so furious that it can only be propitiated and never reasoned with or moderated.

This is a time when a foul murderer by the name of Samir Kuntar is being exchanged for the bodies of two Israelis kidnapped and killed by Hezbollah in Lebanon. This is a time when the Iranian leadership regularly promotes genocide by boasting that Israel is about to be wiped off the face of the earth. But it is also a time when an Algerian intellectual by the name of Boualem Sansal can give an interview in the prestigious French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur and reveal that hope has not necessarily died.

I had never previously heard of Boualem Sansal. He is described in the interview as a former Algerian civil servant, and author of four earlier novels, and now a fifth with the title of Le Village de l’Allemand, or The Village of the German. He says he took his subject from a real-life discovery that there was a Nazi, a former S.S. man who had more or less colonized a village in Algeria, converted to Islam and was regarded as a hero locally. “The Hitler salute,” Sansal says, “has always had its partisans in Algeria.”

For a couple of decades now, Algeria has been in the throes of a brutish and murky civil war, costing an estimated 200,000 lives, most of them simple villagers caught and massacred either by Islamists or the military regime. Al-Qaeda in North Africa is presently establishing a base there, trying to colonize the country. The more he researched his novel, Sansal tells us, the more he saw “a substantial similarity between Nazism and the political order that prevails in Algeria.” Both are one-party states, with militarization, brainwashing, the falsification of history, the exaltation of the race, the tendency to claim victimhood and to assert that there is a conspiracy against the nation. There is glorification of the leader, an omnipresent police, mass organizations, religious indoctrination. Xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism, he adds, have been elevated to the status of dogmas. We all know, he sums up, that “the line separating Nazism from Islamism is a thin one.”

September 11 was “a terrible shock to all of us.” Then he understood that Islamism was far more radical than anyone had imagined. Islamism is the matrix of terrorism, and only Muslims and their theologians can engage with it, to recover the Enlightenment that long ago was theirs. His books are banned in Algeria, he thinks of packing his bags, but decides to stay because one day the country will rediscover its way, and he would like to be there to see it happen.

Which is more impressive, the truth and clarity of this man’s vision or his courage in expressing it so openly? And who knows what a free spirit like this may achieve?

Nicolas Sarkozy is said to be the first French president in a long time who doesn’t nourish all manner of grudges and resentments against the United States. “U.S. Go Home,” used to be a very popular slogan in France, chalked up on walls here, there and everywhere. And now consider what just happened at Saint Pierre de Varengeville, in Normandy. After D-day, from September 1944 to February 1946, 20,000 American soldiers had tents in a beech forest there, and called it Camp Twenty Grand. Beech has a nice soft bark, and the soldiers used bayonets or knives to carve their own or their girlfriend’s names, and their home states. Since then, the trees have grown, and the carvings with them, into something like a living museum. The Times of London reports that the locals hit on a phrase, “The Trees of Names.”

Ah, but officials deemed that overhanging branches had to be pruned. The cost of pruning is four times the cost of felling, so they simply cut the trees down. This unusually evocative memorial is no more. Here’s “U.S. Go Home,” in practice, as at least some French people are freeing the future from these traces of the men who liberated them. The attitude conditioning this act can only be heedless or outright nasty, and in either case too ingrained for Sarkozy or anyone else to be able to change it.  

The Irish have convincingly voted NO to the Lisbon Treaty. Outside Dublin Castle a vast crowd is cheering. White-faced Eurocrats cannot believe what they are hearing and seeing.

The Lisbon Treaty was supposed to mark the moment when the United States of Europe irrevocably became a political and juridical entity, with the character of an empire. In earlier stages of the empire-building process, the French and the Dutch voted NO in referendums, but the European Union and national governments chose to ignore those votes, pressing ahead as though public opinion did not exist. The 27 heads of states in Europe all signed up to the treaty in draft, and all are in the process of ratifying it, simply bulldozing it through by means of presidential decree or parliamentary measures without consulting their populations. The absence of democratic consent would have been delightfully familiar to Stalin.

All except the Irish, that is. Their constitution alone specified a referendum. As usual, the elite, big business, the media, favoured a YES vote, and took it for granted. But the Irish people did not want to lose their constitution or their sovereignty. If other countries in the EU were allowed a similar vote, they too would reject the Lisbon Treaty. In a very real sense, the Irish have spoken for the majority of Europeans.

The Irish voted NO once before on an earlier treaty, and in a moment of sheer insolence were obliged to vote again to give a YES. The mournful EU President, José Manuel Barroso of Portugal, dropped a hint that some trick of the same sort will have to happen now. The EU leaders are due to meet next week in Brussels to analyse the Irish NO, and it will be richly comic to watch them squirming. A prediction: They will find in the small print some way to avoid taking NO for an answer, no matter how undemocratic they are seen to be.

And yet these are politicians who do not hesitate to deplore Mugabe for disregarding voting and re-running it to obtain pre-determined results.

Robert Mugabe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are both attending a conference in Rome, and using it to reaffirm that they are two of the world’s most brutal and repulsive men in public office. Mugabe told listeners that his country, Zimbabwe, has “democratized land ownership,” an unusually insolent way of describing how his goons have evicted rightful owners by force, expropriated them, and in the process devastated agriculture. Zimbabwe now imports food instead of exporting it as before, and huge numbers of the poor are starving. As Mugabe was speaking, some goons were killing and intimidating the opposition as part of the process of rigging elections, while other goons were smashing the farmhouse of William and Annette Rogers, and setting fire to it. After being assaulted, whipped and shot at, Mr and Mrs Rogers finished in hospital, lucky to be alive. That’s democratization, Mugabe-style.

Ahmadinejad is as practiced at unleashing violence as Mugabe, and his equal in lying and nonsense too. This was his first visit to Western Europe, but he took the liberty of advising that it was “in the interests of the people of Europe if Israel ceased to exist.” Shamelessly, in pure fascist idiom, a few days previously he had told another audience that, “The criminal and terrorist Zionist regime has reached the end of its work and will soon disappear off the geographical scene.” Not content with that, he went on to threaten the United States, another favorite bugbear of his: “The era of decline and destruction of its satanic power has begun, the bell on the countdown of the destruction of the empire of power and wealth has begun.”

And who could have organized the conference which provided these two murderous racists with an international platform? Why, the United Nations through its Food and Agriculture Organization. What did Mugabe have to contribute to discussion about global food resources? What right had Ahmadinejad to spew his anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism here? Adding insult to injury, those attending the conference had slap-up meals in the Villa Madama, a state-owned palace decorated by Raphael, and all expenses paid. What does that do for the many in the world who are poor and underfed?

The UN has transformed itself from an organization set up to resolve the world’s injustices and quarrels into one that perpetuates them. The FAO, like UNRWA as it keeps the Palestinians in their misery, the Human Rights Committee, the U.N. peacekeepers engaged in pedophilia and racketeering (but not in resolving Darfur, Lebanon, or other horrors), and the U.N. officials getting away unpunished for creaming tens of millions of dollars in Saddam Hussein’s oil scam, all do more harm than good. The real message Mugabe and Ahmadinejad brought to Rome is that the U.N. and its various bodies have to be reformed, or else one cantankerous day they’ll be abolished in the interests of humanity.

La Pietra is as grand as any house in Florence, a seventeenth-century mansion. Its last owner, Harold Acton, lived there in style, and left it in his will to New York University. For the last five years, NYU’s Center on Law and Security has held a conference there on terrorism. One of the keynote speakers at the latest conference, a few days ago, was Admiral William Fallon, who recently quit U.S. Central Command. Presentations are supposed to be confidential, so I will only say that the admiral seemed in good spirits.

I don’t suppose many people read Harold Acton’s books now, and I think he knew that might be his fate. He was a man of his time, an aesthete of the Twenties, avant garde though not enough to be really shocking. Evelyn Waugh, a contemporary and friend, put him into his fiction as the rather camp character Anthony Blanche, and Acton never quite got over the fact that Waugh’s novels were so much more recognized than his own.  Between the wars he lived in China, and collected art, all of which the Maoist regime was eventually to expropriate. His very rich American mother paid for everything.  Learned, amusing, catty, he was certainly mannered. His voice rose and fell like nobody else’s, and a New York film producer once asked me to do a documentary to record this amazing intonation with its unique precision of speech. Alas, Acton refused.

Acton came to stay with my parents in central London towards the end of the war, when I was still small. Perhaps because he had nowhere of his own, he was there for weeks. My mother refused to go into air-raid shelters for fear of being buried alive, so at night we would all sit in the dark with the windows open as a precaution against blast. The ground shook under the Luftwaffe bombs, and the beams of searchlights criss-crossed the night skies fitfully illuminating our faces, while Acton passed the time by teaching us Chinese.

In post-war Florence, he found perfect subjects to write about in the Bourbons and the later Medicis. He entertained in that splendid house. Behind the chairs in the dining room were statues, one of them a Donatello. Stories about him were as legendary as the setting. A famous film star visited, but she was a kleptomaniac. Noticing how she was filling a capacious hand-bag with his possessions, Acton said at the end of the tour, “And now, my dear, we shall restore the missing trinkets.” Every summer, Princess Margaret invited herself to stay. Leaving, she said once, “I suppose you’ll now dance and sing.” Acton replied, “Oh no, ma’am, much too tired.” An author sent him proofs of a book in which she called him a homosexual. Furious, he made her take it out as libellous, saying, “What do these impudent young women know about me?”

NYU has spent a fortune on the house and its out-buildings and especially the gardens. The place looks more majestic than ever. Moreover La Pietra offers programs, lectures, seminars, research facilities, all valuable. And yet, and yet. What not so long ago was the domain of a highly cultivated, generous, and eccentric individual has become public property, busy with worthy purpose, as it were nationalized and socialized. Melancholy lingers in the great approach lined with cypresses, the rose beds. and box hedges, the classical façade, the statues, because the kind of past that produced all this is over and done with.