Jewish Chronicle, 19 March 2004

The Spanish election result is quite simply a catastrophe for democrats and lovers of peace and freedom all over the world. Following the carnage in Madrid, 11 million Spaniards marched in apparent solidarity against terror. Two days later, they voted out a government which stood up to terror and voted in a party which campaigned on a platform of appeasement.

Of course, it remains to be seen what the new Spanish Prime Minister will actually do. But his immediate declaration that Spain would get out of Iraq and that the war had been a disaster was extraordinarily irresponsible. Whatever one’s opinions about that war, to desert the battleground now is to invite further mayhem.

Such weakness is a signal to the terrorists that they are winning. At the time of writing, it was still not certain that the perpetrators of the Madrid atrocity were al Q’aeda, but all the signs pointed to Islamist terror. Certainly the Spanish electorate thought so, which is why they threw out the government which they believed had made them a target by going to war against Iraq.

Before the bombing, there was every indication that despite the overwhelming opposition to the war, the government would have been returned to office. Afterwards, although many were angry more specifically at the government’s attempt to blame the Basque separatists, the fact remains they voted for appeasement. The result changed solely because of the atrocity. Mass murder was the manifesto that won.

Terrorism thus effectively suborned not only the democratic process but the logic of a population. Instead of blaming the perpetrators of the outrage, they blamed the government on the grounds that if it hadn’t gone to war in Iraq, the attack wouldn’t have happened.

This ignored the fact that al Q’aeda has long been obsessed with re-conquering Spain, along with other chunks of Europe, Asia, Africa, India and China in order to restore the ancient Caliphate, or Muslim empire. It ignored the fact that it has attacked countries that were never involved in Iraq, including reformist Muslim states, because its aim is to defeat democracy and modernity everywhere.

What is true is that stifling the struggle for democracy in Iraq is a central preoccupation of the Islamic jihad. Indeed, despite the risible claims that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with terrorism, having been a veritable cockpit of terror Iraq now holds a key to its defeat. So al Q’aeda is out to destroy the coalition in Iraq. And where better to start than with its weakest link, the Spanish public, which was overwhelmingly against the war.

The Spanish fell headlong into the trap. The terrible irony is that it wasn’t support for the war that caused the slaughter in Madrid; it was that the population had advertised their weakness by opposing the war. The terrorists calculated correctly that an atrocity at home would destroy their solidarity altogether.

This has particular resonance for Britain. For there remains a very large anti-war constituency which week in, week out inflicts palpable political damage on the Prime Minister. If al Q’aeda wants to hole the coalition below the waterline, it will therefore be encouraged by Spain’s example to perpetrate an atrocity in Britain.

It will be less inclined to do so if it judges that such carnage may make the population more resolute rather than less. This is why the activities of our own appeaseniks are so significant. By advertising national weakness, their relentless defeatism makes it more likely that Britain will be attacked. Their carping and demonstrations prepare the ground for mass murder.

The way to deal with it is by people in public life declaring as strongly as possible that Britain will not be cowed, and to back this up by an equivalent strong-mindedness in dealing with all enemies of the state.

For this is not terrorism as we know it — the promulgation of violence in pursuit of a limited objective. Al Q’aeda cannot be appeased, because it does not want concessions. This is an attempt to subjugate the free world by a cult of death.

It cannot be dealt with merely by military means. It must involve also a direct assault on the fascist ideology behind the violence. And that means taking on both the regimes which spew it out abroad, and the demagogues who spew it out at home. There should be no more tolerance of the attempt to destroy this nation by incitement, recruitment or funding of terror than there was of Nazi sedition during World War Two.

This may not be war as conventionally defined but it is nevertheless a world war that is now under way: a war in which the lovers of democracy, freedom and humanity everywhere are defending themselves against an ideology that is potentially even more devastating than either communism or fascism, in battlegrounds that now stretch round the globe.

Posted by melanie at March 19, 2004