John Howard, Australia’s Prime Minister, really really gets it. The Australian reports:

Prime Minister John Howard has launched a scathing attack on Australia’s left-wing intelligentsia, questioning its loyalty to the nation over the past decades. In a speech delivered last night for the 50th anniversary of the conservative magazine Quadrant, Mr Howard said the left had a history of denigrating the nation and was now doing the same with the war in Iraq, describing Islamic terrorism as the new tyranny.

He said Australian universities were still breeding leftists and described pro-communists of decades past as ‘ideological barrackers for regimes of oppression opposed to Australia and its interests’ Fairfax reports today. Mr Howard said the left was wrong in its view that the Cold War was an equal struggle between the ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union. ‘ became the height of intellectual sophistication to believe that people in the West were no less oppressed than people under the yoke of communist dictatorship,’ Mr Howard said in his speech.

Howard is the only western leader who has grasped that the greatest danger to the west lies in the way it has been attacked and undermined from within, a process that is continuing and which threatens to hand liberal democracy over to its Islamic enemies who are laying siege to it from without. He is the only one who puts these two things together, and is using his office as a bully pulpit from which to fight for the values of western civilisation in the culture war. Can you imagine President Bush, or Tony Blair or David Cameron, denouncing the universities as breeding grounds for left-wing enemies of civilisation? Of course not. Howard is Australia’s Churchill, and is the true leader of the west at this perilous time. What a pity he can’t run for President of the United States.