Important and highly disturbing interview with Daniel Pipes, the American Islamic scholar. Pipes warns that the golden age for American Jews which started with the easing of antisemitism in the 1950s may now be coming to an end under the influence of militant Islamism, whose prevalence he estimates at between 10 and 15 per cent of the global Muslim population and which at present has the upper hand over moderate Islam. He defines Islamism as a totalitarian movement which wants to replace the American constitution by the Koran. This poses a particular kind of threat with which the US is curently unable to deal:

' "As Islamists are dangerous, the methods to be used against them cannot be like those the United States usually applies to dissenters. However, much of the U.S. public is unprepared to discuss these matters; if one broaches the topic, one is accused of McCarthyism...Militant Islam cannot be compared to any segment of Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism. These religions do not embody groups with totalitarian utopian ideologies that seek world hegemony. In fact, militant Islam resembles fascism and communism more than any religious movement. All we can do presently is prepare ourselves for worse to come. Eloquence and perceptivity did not make Churchill prime minister of Great Britain; it was the fall of France that did so. In like fashion, those who are warning of the dangers of militant Islam will be turned to should a fall-of-France style disaster occur." '

Pipes identifies the political left as the main problem in failing to face up to the danger, with Jews on the left no less impervious to the particular threat they face:

' "Conservatives have increasingly become the backbone of understanding what the United States represents, what its duties are, and what it means to be an American. While Jews have traditionally been on the liberal side of the political spectrum, many are now becoming more conservative. Nevertheless, as moderate Democrats move increasingly to the left - as Dennis Prager points out, it is hard at this point to see a difference between a liberal and a leftist - there are many Jews on the left who are part of the problem. They see the United States as a 'rogue state,' want it never to respond with force, call for open borders, and generally disparage their own country...The academy is attempting to close down debate of key issues, making it less open to free exchange than the media, the government, think tanks, and even corporations." He has written that academics work more insidiously than the street toughs they effectively team up with on occasion. Pipes defined this as follows: "They maintain a veneer of civility. Sometimes however, they reveal their true face of intolerance. A typical example of this was when a mini-intifada prevented former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from speaking at Montreal's Concordia University." '

This all rings many bells here in Britain. The one big difference is that, while in the US the conservatives have understood the point, that is not the case in Britain. Yes, the poison of ignorance and prejudice has similarly been spread by the left in Britain, through the political and intellectual establishment (and with many British Jews on the left subscribing to the same world view). But it has also spread widely throughout conservative Britain, where unlike in the US the British churches do not stand in principled opposition to this propaganda of defeatism and hatred but actively promote it. The result is that the rot in Britain goes much wider and deeper. And the situation is even worse, although different again, in Europe.

For these reasons, Pipes is surely right to conclude that the US will be alone if it continues to fight for western democracy.

'"Unfortunately, the U.S. will have to shoulder more, similar burdens in other parts of the world, as it did in Afghanistan and Iraq, because nobody else wants to get involved. It would be disastrous if we followed Europe's self-hating weakness. The United States thus has no choice but to lead the democracies away from appeasement policies. This means that the major antagonism against the U.S. - which already inevitably exists - may become even stronger." '

But the question must remain, given all this, whether the US will actually have the stomach to carry on the fight to defend the west.