The Saudis paid for a big shiny mosque in this area, very impressive. The LEA pays £150 million each year for translation services in the Education Sector; and the new specialist language school (read comprehensive with new label) now teaches Arabic for the up and coming generation to read the Koran more easily.

Now if Saudi were to pay for the English lessons !!!!

Sorry, Melanie, but it is the Euros who need to wake up to the threat of militant Islam, not the Americans. As to the "Faustian bargain" with the Saudis, one could say that the Euros have their hand in that as well. After all, the whole world is dependent upon Saudi oil—including the Saudis. Germany, France, Russian, the UK all have done their share in the ME.

We would do better to put our national treasures into alternative energies instead of wars. That way, when the oil runs out the Saudis can go back to camel herding and we can live comfortably in modernity. Fat chance though, the genie has been let out of the bottle. Let us hope that Iraq will turn out well and at least semi-democratic. . .
before the militant Muslims get the bomb.

Lili

There is only one alternative energy source --- nuclear. The Germans seem to hate it, but depend for oil and gas on Russian supplies.

YOu cannot run a chemical industry without oil.....I think too few people know just how much everyday living depends on oil. You may get rid of the factory, but you still expect to use a PC, writing 'green' articles for the newspaper.....which I suppose has no chemical treatments, inks, presses, cleansers, electronics, glass, etc.........a world without oil..........interesting notion

Peter Williamson, in the above post, makes a most powerful riposte to the anti-American jibe from empty-headed street demonstrators who parrot, "It's all about Iraqi oil". Even if their mindless mantra were true (and of course it isn't) history would one day judge that as a sensible strategem for the West to employ. Any move to prevent Islamic terrorists from blackmailing the West by threats to restrict the commodity that is at present as essential as the air we breathe and the water we drink, is justifiable, surely? Moreover, as Williamson points out, the only forseeable method of producing the power we need in the quantity we need, nuclear generation, is also violently opposed by the very idiots who mindlessly scream, "It's all about Oil!"
Their slogan could therefore be used to extol the virtues of their perception of Bush/Blair policy, given the current balance of power and geopolitics of oil. But of course, it is much more complex than that, as Bush's scriptwriters so cogently averred in the clarifying speech he delivered so well during his recent State visit: an invitation to the American Head of State that was long overdue and which turned out to be very successful, despite the smallish swarm of gnats buzzing up and down Whitehall, niftily controlled by an opposing swarm of somewhat over-benign bluebottles thoughtfully provided by HM Government.

Actually the European Union represents The Congress of Vienna which mopped up after Napoleon. It consists of Princes who bind their peoples with treaties without the consent of the governed; and it is their schema for an overarchingsettlement of the European Continent which leaves the citizensof each European nation feeling alienated from what was once a democratic process.

Al-Qaeda wants to smash the nation-state as it exists today in the Middle East and replace it with a Caliphate built around a religion built in warring desert tribes, and which spread its faith through military conquest rather than individual baptism.

Turkey after Kemal Ataturk is a secular republic, and as such an object of hatred for the fanatics. It kept out of the Iraq invasion, but is punished for what it IS not what it DOES or does not.

The 'liberal' mindset should realise that every single thing they have pushed forward in the past 50 years,esp the last 30 is anathema to their terrorists. They are the ultimate conservatives, as their reign of terror in Afghanistan made plain.

I hardly think the 'liberal' New Hampshire diocese voting for an Apostate 'Bishop' did much to placate the Al-Qaeda biys, more likely it convinced them of the utter decadence of the West and 'betrayal of The People of The Book'.

Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands was killed by an Animal-Rights/Leftist - Militant Vegan -- but the homosexual Fortuyn recognised that Islam was the threat to Dutch liberalism and would lead to the country being partitioned or increasingly violent.

Because 'Liberals' have hollowed out Christianity and removed most of its duties and obligations, transfiorming it into a marketable humanist credo, does not mean that Islam will follow suit, but may well decide it is the ONE true Faith because it still requires obligation from its adherents, and believes in an Omnipotent, Omniscient God in place of the Disneyfied Jesus of the Apostate Christian Church. It is the flaccidity of Westen civilisation that is under attack, not its traditional values; those are te ones that can withstand Al-Qaeda until Hell freezes over.

It is our Doubts that the terrorists attack, not our Certainties.

A brute kills for pleasure. A fool kills from hate.