Terrific piece in today’s Times by Michael Burleigh, author of Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to al-Qaeda. Here’s a sample:

While we agonise about 28 or 56 days custody, it is not uncommon for terrorist suspects in France to be held in preventive detention for four or five years before their case goes to court. The use of intelligence intercept evidence in courts is being debated here, but the Italian security services have long made transcripts of this material available, so revealing the lying cynicism with which, for example, Milan-based Arab jihadis regard European asylum laws. And then there is the internet, one of the key means of radicalising Muslims. Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Interior Minister, wheelchair-bound since a 1990 assassination attempt, has argued recently in favour of hacking into the computers of Islamist radicals. We can’t even manage to shut down jihadi websites or to prohibit subversive organisations, such as Hizb ut-Tahir, from operating on university campuses where the dons think they are dealing with the usual middle-class radicals.

If Mr Brown’s anti-terrorism measures seem ignorant of what our fellow Europeans practise routinely, they also reflect an outmoded habit of separating domestic and foreign policy. Why is foreign aid not contingent upon warning recipient states that they will forfeit it if clerics they subsidise preach hatred of the West? Why aren’t we helping Afghanistan or Pakistan to build secular alternatives to the Saudi-financed madrassas where children are brainwashed with cartoon Jew killers? If this is a neo-Cold War, why are we failing to help the four fifths of Muslims who are not from the Middle East to assert themselves against that demented region? The predictable racket between rival lawyers does not even begin to address the serious questions involved if we don’t wish to live in that grim caliphate or to be murdered by hysterical fanatics.

Do read it all. Especially if you are a lawyer.