Three short years ago, we were being assured that a wonderful new Middle East was dawning. Arabs would no longer be downtrodden by cruel and unjust rulers. Intellect and conscience were said to be at last freeing the masses in a great movement generalized as the Arab Spring, supposedly a historic moment comparable to European Enlightenment. How and why outlets like the New York Times or the Guardian overflowed with rubbish about Arab progress and democracy will be a suitable subject for a future Edward Gibbon writing The Rise and Fall of the West. A month ago, President Obama speechified about Muslim Americans’ “building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy.” In reality, a number of American and other radical Islamists are working as hard as they can to reconstitute the fabric of the nation and to smash the core of its democracy.

What the Arab Spring has actually led to is the Islamic State, the self-declared caliphate taking shape in the ruins of Syria and Iraq, and likely soon to have a go at Lebanon and Jordan. It’s a phenomenon indeed. There seem to be 10,000 Islamic State fighters, about 750 of them British, and hundreds more from many countries in a sort of Muslim International Brigade. Recently the seven-year-old son of one fighter featured in a photograph smiling shyly as he held up the severed head of a Syrian soldier. The Sunday Telegraph tells the story of one Aine Davis, aged 30, from London, a convert to Islam, also smiling in a group of heavily armed men. How has it come to this? Poverty, discrimination, and anti-British prejudice may be part of the explanation, but the life stories of such men make it plain that for them, killing is good fun — and they are loving the chance to go in for some. Society normally has laws, taboos, manners, and hierarchies such that men like these cannot act on their primitive instincts. Breaking through all restraints, Islamism frees such evil men to do their worst, just as Communism and Nazism once did.

The Sunday Telegraph also carries an article by Prime Minister David Cameron that is a response to the Islamic State, to the atrocities it is committing, and to the appeal it makes to the basest murderous instincts. He writes, “We are in the middle of a generational struggle against a poisonous and extremist ideology, which I believe we will be fighting for the rest of my life.” A difference opens between Cameron’s challenging prose and President Obama’s apologetics. If really there are to be no boots on the ground opposing the Islamic State, that projected history of the rise and fall of the West will not be long delayed.