Victor Davis Hanson makes the much needed point that the attacks on the US, Spain and now London exposed the catastrophic mistake made by America and Europe in assuming that the war against Israel was sui generis, a localised conflict in which the Jews who they thought had created the problem could be left to stew in their own juice:

'Jihadists hardly target particular countries for their “unfair” foreign policies, since nations on five continents suffer jihadist attacks and thus all apparently must embrace an unfair foreign policy of some sort. Typical after the London bombing is the ubiquitous Muslim spokesman who when asked to condemn terrorism, starts out by deploring such killing, assuring that it has nothing to do with Islam, yet then ending by inserting the infamous “but” — as he closes with references about the West Bank, Israel, and all sorts of mitigating factors. Almost no secular Middle Easterners or religious officials write or state flatly, “Islamic terrorism is murder, pure and simple evil. End of story, no ifs or buts about it.”

'Second, thinking that the jihadists will target only Israel eventually leads to emboldened attacks on the United States. Assuming America is the only target assures terrorism against Europe. Civilizations will either hang separately or triumph over barbarism together. It is that simple — and past time for Europe and the United States to rediscover their common heritage and shared aims in eradicating this plague of Islamic fascism. Third, Islamicists are selective in their attacks and hatred. So far global jihad avoids two billion Indians and Chinese, despite the fact that their countries are far tougher on Muslims than is the United States or Europe. In other words, the Islamicists target those whom they think they can intimidate and blackmail.

'Unfettered immigration, billions in cash grants to Arab autocracies, alliances of convenience with dictatorships, triangulation with Middle Eastern patrons of terror, blaming the Jews — civilization has tried all that. It is time to relearn the lessons from the Cold War, when we saw millions of noble Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, and Czechs as enslaved under autocracy and a hateful ideology, and in need of democracy before they could confront the Communist terror in their midst. But until the Wall fell, we did not send billions in aid to their Eastern European dictatorships nor travel freely to Prague or Warsaw nor admit millions of Communist-ruled Bulgarians and Albanians onto our shores.'

Undoubtedly, jihadi terror has been fed by the feeble appeasement over the years by governments too craven to grasp what they were actually up against. And the most lethal example of all is the way in which they left Israel to swing in the wind, thus sending the clearest possible signal that the scope for manipulating and disarming the free world in the pursuit of jihadi objectives was infinite. Thus from the first plane hijackings in the sixties, the ratchet of terror was relentlessly turned in lock-step with the pusillanimous and morally compromised response to that terror by Britain, Europe and pre-9/11 America. Only when we recognise that Israel is in the front line of the attack on the free world, and that we must all pull together in resisting Israel's attackers in the same way that we resist the terror that targets London, Madrid, France, Germany or New York, will we start to be effective in the defence of the free world.