I have just taken part in a debate on the Jeremy Vine show with the Conservative MP John Gummer about the anti-American protests which are dogging and interrupting the progress of Condoleezza Rice as she visits the Blackburn constituency of her friend the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. You can listen again to this item here. It is a telling commentary in itself on the times in which we are living that a Conservative politician took the line that the protests were entirely justified because the Americans are so awful and they are doing such terrible things in Iraq and we were taken to war on a lie and...well, you can write the rest of the script.

What is so striking about these protests is not just the discourtesy shown to a senior member of the government of our most powerful ally; it is not just that it is extraordinarily bone-headed to insult and alienate the ally on whom we continue to depend for our protection; it is not just the craven appeasement of intimidation, as I wrote in the Mail this morning. It is the lethal moral inversion of the argument, which is not surprising since these protests are being fuelled -- if not orchestrated -- by the comrades of the Trotskyite/Islamist Stop the War Coalition, as can be clearly seen from their website which provides details of and helpful travel arrangements for marches and demonstrations today and tomorrow.

Here is a country which utters not a batsqueak of protest when Sheikh Qaradawi, who endorses and encourages human bomb terrorism in Iraq and Israel, speaks on a London platform – and indeed is actually embraced by the London Mayor Ken Livingstone as a hero of religious enlightenment – and yet is treating the US Secretary of State as if she is a major war criminal. Why? Because the US is apparently waging war against the innocent in Iraq. Excuse me?? The US is currently in Iraq at the express request of the Iraqis themselves to defend the innocent against the war being waged against them. The US went to war in Iraq to start unpicking the axis of terror that so threatens the world. The US remains in Iraq to help the Iraqis, at their express request, build the institutions of democracy, law and security. It is in Iraq to help protect innocent Iraqis against the forces of al Qaeda and the remains of the Ba’ath party who are determined to stop them and replace freedom by tyranny. It is in Iraq to help defend Iraqi lives and liberty against those who seek to destroy them.

Yet in Britain anti-war hysteria has institutionalised a Big Lie that the US is waging war not on behalf of the innocent but against them. One can make many justified and bitter criticisms of the way in which the US has prosecuted this defence of life and liberty and the terrible errors that have been made. But to say that it is waging war on the innocent is simply a gross inversion of reality. It is the big propaganda lie of the enemies of freedom and democracy, promulgated by those who have every interest in bringing about the defeat of the west – both radical Islamists and the extreme left, now in close and unholy alliance with each other in the Stop the War Coalition and elsewhere – and now fast becoming the accepted unwisdom of those who opposed the war for more respectable reasons. The result is a madness which is consuming British public debate.

Welcome, Condi, to Londonistan.

*Please see my home page for details of my new book, Londonistan.