Mediterranean Living

Clear this hornets' nest of extremists

Daily Mail Commentt
30th August 2006


Which country poses the greatest threat to America's homeland security: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea?

None of the above, according to a growing body of opinion across the Atlantic. The answer, say many American pundits, is the United Kingdom.

At first sight, this looks outrageously ungrateful. After all, aren't British troops dying every week, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, for an American foreign policy slavishly followed by Tony Blair?

Yet the more you think about the charge - spelt out in the current New Republic magazine and echoed by American think-tanks of every political persuasion - the more truth you can see in it.

Hasn't Britain indeed become, in the words of Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation, 'a hornets' nest of Islamic extremists'?

How have we let this come about?

Much of the answer lies in our authorities' spineless refusal to confront Islamic extremism for fear of being thought anti-Muslim.

Americans gape in disbelief when our senior policemen's first reaction to every terrorist atrocity is to try to appease religious extremists. Or when Ministers employ apologists for terrorism as special advisers at the Foreign Office.

Tony Blair is forever promising crackdowns on preachers of hatred. Yet what actually happens, after he has got the headlines he wants?

Not a single person has been charged under his new law against glorifying terrorism since it came into force in March. Not one.

Yet here is Abu Hamza's sidekick Abu Abdullah, free as a bird, announcing he would 'love' to kill British soldiers and making excuses for suicide bombings.

Certainly, you can expect trouble from the police if you are an 82-year-old heckler at a Labour conference or a woman who stands by the Cenotaph, daring to read out the names of soldiers killed in Iraq.

But the real warmongers face nothing harsher than a grilling from Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman and get the chance to broadcast their views.

No wonder the Americans are nervous, with more than four million Britons flying to the U.S. each year under the privileged visa waiver programme.

Until we clear these hornets from our nest, they will remain a deadly threat to the entire free world.

Dirty politics

Revelations about Charles Kennedy's drink problem cast the LibDems and their new leader in an ugly light.

When it suited their purposes, Ming & Co campaigned to put into Number 10 a man they knew to be an often-incapable drunk. So much for their sense of responsibility to the nation.

Now it suits senior LibDems to blacken Mr Kennedy's name, at the very moment when he is planning a comeback, by reviving memories of his past troubles.

We have long known that many LibDems like to play dirty - as much in politics as in their private lives.

That didn't matter so much while they were stuck in the political wilderness. But the way the polls are going, they may well hold the balance of power next time.

Isn't that a terrifying thought?

Give us a break

Prezza gagged. John Reid back in his box. Blair in Barbados and Brown on extended paternity leave. How peaceful the political world has been with the big guns out of action. And how serenely the ship of state has sailed on without them.

But now they're getting back into the fray, itching to bore us with their speeches and bombard us with fatuous laws.

Roll on next summer, when they clear off again.