Longtime terrorism scholar <a href=”http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112112303770182751,00.html?mod=opinion

“>Walter Laqueur’s essay in today’s WSJ is well worth reading. A key excerpt:

Many Britons believed that the country would be safe if it showed tolerance towards radicals and suspected terrorists. No one went further in this respect than Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, who welcomed some of the gurus of the “militants” and claimed that they were harmless religious dignitaries maligned by Zionists and neoconservatives. George Galloway, Saddam Hussein’s greatest admirer this side of Baghdad, was recently elected to the British parliament from a racially-mixed precinct in East London…
Before the attacks of 7/7, there was a growing number of people in Britain, as in the U.S. and Europe, claiming that the terrorist threat had been greatly exaggerated. Why devote so much time and money and energy combating an enemy that wasn’t so dangerous, they said. Such a reaction was in many ways natural. There had not been an attack on the scale of September 11 for almost four years. BBC television screened a three-part documentary, widely praised and given international awards, that more or less implied that terrorism was largely a myth, invented by George W. Bush and neoconservatives inspired by Leo Strauss….
[H]undreds of terrorists reside freely in European cities, moving from one country to another. This could be stopped, but it would mean implementing controls that are vehemently opposed by some on human-rights grounds.