Once again, Islam takes centre-stage, while the West watches anxiously on. From Brussels to Beijing, terrorists are still slaughtering civilians. Across Africa, from Libya to Nigeria and Kenya, fragile states are falling apart under the Islamist assault. In the Middle East, the Syrian civil war has now spread to Iraq and threatens to destabilise other states.
Further East, Pakistan is under Taliban attack even before Afghanistan is evacuated by Nato. We are now seeing the results of President Obama’s premature withdrawal from Iraq, his encouragement of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, his irresolution in Syria, his appeasement of Iran and his failure more generally to grasp the scale of the Islamist challenge to the West.
Elliott Abrams and Alexander Woolfson show how the world is paying a heavy price for a US administration that lacks a coherent strategy and a Nato that is not fit for purpose.
In Britain, the dispute between Michael Gove and Theresa May over the infiltration of schools by “extremists” has overshadowed the equally alarming consequences of such indoctrination. Hundreds of young Muslims emerge from the schools and mosques of cities such as Birmingham and Bradford, volunteer to fight for the Islamist cause in Syria, then return to bring jihad back to Britain.
The attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels was the work of just such a jihadist from France, and it may only be a matter of time before horrors perpetrated in the name of Islam on the road to Damascus are repeated on the streets of London.
The world is still reeling from one of the periodic waves of fundamentalism that have expanded the Umma since the days of the prophet. Looking back to the first rise of Islam in the 7th century, Gibbon reflects on the secret of its success in Volume the Fifth of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
“Mahomet was alike instructed to preach and to fight, and the union of these opposite qualities, while it enhanced his merit, contributed to his success: the operation of force and persuasion, of enthusiasm and fear, continually acted on each other, till every barrier yielded to their irresistible power.”