Jewish Chronicle, 28 November 2003

Former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has compared Tony Blair’s decision to support the invasion of Iraq to Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia. Hitler, he said, also claimed to be protecting the rights of an indigenous population.

By this remarkable comparison Cook demonstrates that he apparently cannot tell the difference between an act of self-defence (whether one thought the invasion of Iraq well-advised or not) and an act of wanton expansionist aggression. Once again, we see the extraordinary moral confusion now prevalent in this country, so evident in the representation of Israel’s attempts to defend itself as aggression.

Yes, Czechoslovakia should now be on our minds, but surely we should draw a very different conclusion. The British belief that if Hitler grabbed Czechoslovakia he would not have turned upon Britain typified the appeasement culture of the 1930s. The parallel with today is indeed striking. For Britain and Europe are currently gripped by a very similar mood of appeasement.

If only Israel would allow a Palestinian state to be established, goes the thinking, the Islamist jihad would just go away. The slightest criticism of the Muslim community provokes outrage - as the Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane found when he commented, in the wake of the discovery of a Sheffield boy who had turned himself into a human bomb in Iraq, that British Muslims had to show more clearly that they upheld democracy against terrorism. And the EU has suppressed a report on antisemitism because it found that many such incidents were carried out by Muslim or pro-Palestinian groups, and so there were fears the report might increase hostility towards Muslims. This is appeasement gone barking mad.

In Islam, the servility that flows from appeasement is a well-established weapon in the cause of jihad. The Bali bomber Amroz shouted at his trial: ‘Jews, remember Khaibar. The army of Mohamed is coming back to defeat you’. The Arabian desert oasis of Khaibar was where, in 628, the Arabs who conquered the Jews made it a condition of their surrender that they could return to farm their lands as tenants if they ceded half their harvest, before they were ethnically cleansed from the region — along with the Christians — in 640. Khaibar became the milestone in the creation of the Islamic status of ‘dhimmi’, the condition of subjugation and humiliation in which Muslim conquerors permit certain ‘infidel’ enemies to live.

This condition of ‘dhimmitude’ produces a cast of mind in which the desire to appease a tyranny rather than fight it is uppermost. And despite the war on terror, we can see ‘dhimmitude’ in the extraordinary refusal to acknowledge the real nature and scale of the Islamic jihad.

People are almost entirely ignorant, for example, of the worldwide Muslim persecution of Christians that is taking place. In country after country, Christians are being harassed, attacked and killed. In the last week, Muslims burned down 13 churches in Nigeria, killed four Christians in Indonesia and set fire to and looted Christian homes in Egypt.

Why do people not know about all this? Certainly, the media barely report it. But more important still, there is also a stunning silence from Tony Blair, President Bush and the Church itself.

Since 9/11, the line from Blair and Bush is that Islam is not the problem: merely a lunatic fringe is responsible for global terror. It is certainly true that the jihad does not represent Muslims generally. Indeed, thousands of Muslims themselves face harassment, intimidation and death at the hands of the jihadists, who have reformist Muslims in their murderous sights along with Christians, Jews, Hindus and secularists. But equally, the jihad cannot be merely a fringe movement when the Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamed received a standing ovation and no dissent from more than 50 Islamic states for his disgusting remarks alleging a Jewish world domination by proxy.

Yet the truly global aspirations of the jihad and its systematic persecution of Christians, Hindus and reformist Muslims are never mentioned by Blair and Bush. Nor do they ever mention the torrent of demented Jew-hatred pouring out of the Arab world which provides limitless incitement for terror. Doubtless, their silence is caused by fear - fear of the reaction by the domestic Muslim population, fear of jeopardising commercial interests in the Arab world, and fear of provoking further anti-western animosity.

Their silence is echoed even more astonishingly by the church itself. On the worldwide persecution of its flock, it is mute. It believes it can stave off even worse through ‘reconciliation’. But by its truly shameful failure to speak out and fight back, the church is abandoning and betraying its own people.

And the result of this ‘dhimmitude’ is that the population in general remains ignorant of what we are all up against - a war declared upon the civilised world, which has yet to wake up to its own predicament.