Something seems to be going very wrong in parts of the British establishment well before the Iranian piracy/confess to non-crimes/sell your story fiasco.

Palestinian gunmen kidnap a British BBC reporter (now rumors swirl that he may have been executed) and sometime later the British National Union of Journalists vote to boycott Israeli goods. At a time of both increased terrorism and rising anti-Semitic incidents in Britain, some schools question whether studying the Holocaust might offend Muslim students.

Now some members of the British government decry the use of the “American” notion of a “war on terror” not because, as some of us have complained, it is an inexact idea of a struggle against a method rather than the perpetrators themselves of such violence–Islamic jihadists–but because of the very opposite concern: We have no real enemy, or in the words of Hilary Benin, a Labor Deputy Secretary, “This isn’t one organized enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives.” What will follow then: the non-war on non-terror?