We may be witnessing a strange reversal of the 1930s, with Islamo-fascists in place of Euro-fascists

March 11, 2004, was easily the greatest victory for terrorism since 9/11 itself. It was a victory not simply because so many innocent people were murdered in cold blood as they went about their business in a free and democratic society. It was also a victory because it succeeded in provoking the one response that terrorists long for and feed on.

Faced with mass murder, the Spanish electorate voted to give the jihadis what they were demanding: withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. March 11 was a reprise of September 11. But this time it worked. Instead of rising up in anger against the mass murderers of the new fascist movement in the Islamic world, as the United States did, Spain did the reverse: it gave in. In the hope of avoiding future violence, the victorious Spanish Socialist party reiterated its decision to abandon Iraq to chaos and Islamist revolution.

It is rare for terrorists to score such a clear-cut triumph. Usually, even craven democratic governments talk the talk of confronting terror, while quietly scurrying in the opposite direction. But this time Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the incoming Spanish prime minister, was almost emphatic in his eagerness to accede to the terrorists’ demands.

Do I exaggerate? In December, CNN found documents on internet message boards that laid out Al-Qaeda’s intermediate goals in the war against the West. “We think the Spanish government will not stand more than two blows, or three at the most,” one document said, “before it will be forced to withdraw because of public pressure. If its forces remain after these blows, the victory of the Socialist party will be almost guaranteed — and the withdrawal of Spanish forces will be on its campaign manifesto.”

How modest in retrospect their ambitions were. They did not need more than one blow. They did not just get the inclusion of troop withdrawal in the Socialist manifesto — they got the Socialists elected. Last week, days after the triumph in Spain, another group related to Al-Qaeda rejoiced in the success of its strategy: “Because of this (electoral) decision, the leadership has decided to stop all operations within the Spanish territories . . . until we know the intentions of the new government that has promised to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. And we repeat this to all the brigades present in European lands: stop all operations.”

It’s simple really. Bomb and murder your way to your political goals and reward the governments you have intimidated — while making sure they realise that the option of renewing violence is always available. Zapatero knows that if he does not remove troops from Iraq, Spain will be targeted again. There is an obvious description for what has just taken place: caving in to blackmail.

The risk to all of Europe has been ratcheted up exponentially. If I lived in Rome or London or Warsaw right now, I would be very afraid because of what has just happened in Madrid.

The possibility of capturing an important Al-Qaeda figure in Pakistan in the battle that has been taking place over several days does not change this equation. Al-Qaeda and its multiple offshoots are decentralised, often autonomous and able to act without central command. They have learnt an important thing from Madrid: if it worked once, why not try it again? Tony Blair is a far more tempting target than Jose Maria Aznar. A truly spectacular attack on London, using biological or chemical weapons to cow the British electorate, might surely be worth trying to topple him.

The jihadis have learnt another couple of lessons. The first is that America will not quail before a terror attack.

Osama Bin Laden misjudged that one on September 11, foolishly believing that he could shell-shock the American public into isolationism. Wrong. The opposite happened. It was a huge miscalculation on Al-Qaeda’s part which led to the destruction of its client state, Afghanistan, the removal of a de facto anti-American ally, Saddam Hussein, and — even worse from its point of view — the possibility of constitutional democracies in two Islamic lands, Afghanistan and Iraq. The Anglo-American counter- attack also took Libya out of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) equation and sent reverberations of democratic unrest into Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Now, however, the jihadis know something else: that the September 11 gambit can work in Europe. Attacking Spain first and wrecking the anti-terror alliance of new Europe was a master stroke. And it has the added effect of demoralising the others. Last week the Polish prime minister spoke for the first time of his uncertainty about retaining forces in Iraq next year. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, and Blair are obviously next on the list.

That is why the astonishing disavowal of any force in response to terrorism by Romano Prodi was so devastating. “It is clear,” the European commission president opined after the Madrid horror, “that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists.” The sentiment is sickeningly defeatist in itself but the timing was a de facto announcement of surrender. No wonder that a day later another Islamist group threatened France with mass murder if the government did not relent in its ban on headscarves. What is the cost of violence, after all, if your enemy has announced in advance that he will never retaliate? A classic statement of appeasement appeared the day after the Madrid massacre in The Guardian. Its moral vacuity and strategic stupidity sum up much that is wrong with the defeatism sweeping Europe. “Are those who perpetrated the commuter train bombings to be hunted down and smoked out of their lairs, and if they were, are we confident that we would prevent the next attack, and the one after that?” the newspaper asked.

Notice the sneering contempt with which the Guardian leader writers refer to George W Bush’s attempt to hunt down and destroy the terrorists and their allies who have declared war on the West. Notice, too, the implication: that the perpetrators of these atrocities somehow should not be “hunted down and smoked out of their lairs”. The implication is that any attempt to defeat terrorism merely fosters more terrorism and so . . . so what exactly? What is The Guardian’s solution to the thousands murdered in New York and the hundreds who died in Bali and Madrid? What is its solution to the terrifying possibility that such terrorists might also be able to amplify their mass murder by deploying new technologies of destruction that would make September 11 seem like a side-show? Here is its solution: “The victims of the commuter train bombings in Madrid, and the Spaniards who came out of the streets last night, surely deserve more than party political responses. Europe too needs to mould a different response to its September 11.

“Spain has a history which places it at the crossroads of the European and Arab worlds. It understands both traditions. It is a country where once Jew, Muslim and Christian lived together. An international conference, to bridge the divide between Muslim and Christian communities, should be one first step. But there are many others. We need to take the fight against terror out of America’s hands. We need to get beyond the them and us, the good guys and the bad guys, and seek a genuinely collective response. Europe should seize the moment that America failed to grasp.”

The stunning aspect of this boilerplate is how utterly empty it is. The only constructive suggestion that The Guardian proffers is an “international conference”. This is not, apparently, self-parody. While hundreds lie dead, while limbs and severed heads lie scattered across railway tracks, the most important thing is to stick on your lapel name labels, hurry down to the nearest hotel lobby and have a seminar. In sophisticated Europe, according to The Guardian, there are no bad guys, even those who deliberately murdered more than 200 innocents and threaten to murder countless more.

Ask yourself: if The Guardian cannot call these people “bad guys”, just who does qualify? If the leaders of democratic societies who fight back cannot qualify in this context as “good guys”, then who does? What we have here is complete moral nihilism in the face of unspeakable violence.

Then we have the absurd canard that there is a “divide between Muslim and Christian communities”. There is no such divide. There is a divide within Islam between a large majority and a small minority of theocratic, extremist mass-murderers, almost all from failed Arab dictatorships — men and women who have killed Muslim, Christian and Jew alike, young and old, and almost always innocent bystanders in free societies.

That small minority has terrorised large populations, enslaved women, murdered Jews and homosexuals, bombed mosques and Muslim shrines, launched a murderous war against western civilians, taken over whole countries and targeted individual writers and thinkers for murder.

With them we need a dialogue? With them we need a conference? At what point would the leader writers of The Guardian decide that these murderers need to be fought against? It will be argued that this is not the point. The Spanish were not protesting against the war on terrorism, some insist; they were protesting against the war to depose Saddam — and, as all right-thinking people acknowledge, there is no connection whatsoever between the war on terror and the war to liberate Iraq.

There are a few points to be made about this argument, and the first is that Al-Qaeda begs to differ. If the war in Iraq is utterly unconnected to the broader war on terror, then why does Al-Qaeda want the Spanish government to withdraw its troops?

If the war in Iraq is such an irrelevance to the war on terror, why would Al-Qaeda and the jihadis be so keen to force western governments to withdraw?

If Iraq is such a distracting quagmire for the West, why wouldn’t it be in the terrorists’ interests to see more troops committed, more resources diverted, more attention distracted from the real war that it is busily fomenting elsewhere?

The truth, of course, is the exact opposite. Nothing threatens Al-Qaeda or the Islamo-fascist terror network more than the possibility of a constitutional democracy in Iraq. If Iraq succeeds, the entire dysfunction in the Middle East on which Al-Qaeda relies for its recruitment and growth would be in danger of unravelling. If Iraqis can achieve a semblance of a free and democratic society — with economic growth, political pluralism and religious freedom — the Al-Qaeda model of theocratic fascism will lose whatever appeal it has now in that part of the world.

Losing Afghanistan was bad enough for the jihadis. Seeing Iraq emerge into modernity would be fatal. How long could Syria’s dictatorship last if that occurs? What would happen to Iran, where a young generation desperate for freedom and democracy could finally look over the border and see a Muslim state prosper with real elections and a meaningful constitution? Al-Qaeda understands the stakes. That is why it is so desperately keen to drive a wedge between Europe and America, to intimidate anybody building a new Iraq with violence and murder, and to mobilise the young and disaffected among Europe’s Muslim population to unleash terror from within.

The emphasis on weakening and dividing the West is also a consequence of a number of serious losses for jihadis around the world.

The Iranian theocrats have already lost the younger generation, which looks increasingly to America and the West for a future that will allow it some semblance of freedom and modernity. That is why the theocrats could not afford even a semblance of free elections earlier this year.

Afghanistan, for all its enduring security problems, now has an actual constitution, a slow rebuilding of infrastructure and greater freedoms than ever before. The constant violence in Iraq is a sign not of American failure but of American success.

Again, a fledgling constitution is in place; the United Nations will shortly be more involved; elections will be held before the end of the year; oil production is back up to pre-war levels and rising fast; American military casualties are at their lowest since the war began. The Islamists’ only recourse is to try to spread mayhem and ethnic conflict to destabilise Iraq — and to get the allies to withdraw.

In Pakistan the tide is turning too. The fierce battle of the past week in south Waziristan may or may not capture an important Al-Qaeda leader, but its very existence reveals something important. President Pervez Musharraf, after several attempts on his own life and the devastatingly embarrassing revelation of the Pakistani sale of nuclear know-how to North Korea and Libya, has finally committed himself wholeheartedly to defeating jihadi terror.

Behind the scenes, Washington declined to punish Musharraf or to repudiate him publicly after the nuclear debacle — but privately it asked for full-fledged co-operation to flush out Al-Qaeda from the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands. That co-operation is now in full force. It is a huge victory in the war.

On all these fronts the terrorists are losing. So where do they turn? To the weak underbelly of the West: continental Europe. If they cannot win on the battlefield, they have to undermine the enemy from within. And that is exactly what they have just succeeded in doing.

There is a fascinating and perverse historical analogy here. What we may be witnessing is the 1930s in a strange reversal. In the 1930s the Euro-fascists — like today’s Islamo-fascists — were also a movement of connected cells and organisations in several countries who used terror, street violence and murderous intimidation to weaken democracies into surrender. Eerily enough, Spain was a forerunner of dangerous trends to come.

In order to succeed, the movement needed a wedge between the United States and democratic Europe. America in the 1930s was isolationist, unwilling to intervene as threats grew in Europe: threats that built on the use of violence, anti-semitism and thuggery to intimidate weak governments and terrified populations.

Today, in a surreal inversion, it is the Europeans who are isolationist, believing that somehow the cauldron of the Middle East will not boil over into their back yard if only they can take cover, look the other way and salve their worries with insistent criticisms of crude Americans.

In Britain this position is taken not only by the hard left but increasingly by world-weary Tory polemicists. “Mr Blair, with his preacher’s eyes and rhetoric calculated to chill our spines, has taken us down a path where we are more, not less, vulnerable to Al-Qaeda,” one whined last week.

“Spain was a bit-part player in the futile war against Iraq, and its citizens have paid heavily for their former prime minister’s desire to strut around the international stage as he attempted to restore his country to its former glory as a world power. We may pay even more grievously.”

Another urged his fellow Tories to oppose the war on terror because “people really do not like it”.

The latter-day Halifaxes and Chamberlains, when they are not busy running from danger, are busy denying that it even exists. One thing is as true today as it was in the 1930s: it is Europe that is most at risk. It is Europe that is closest to the explosive Middle East — which is growing demographically as rapidly as Europe is declining. It is Europe that has a Muslim population most receptive to the toxins of anti-semitism and medieval theocracy that sustain the new fascists. It is Europe that is most vulnerable to terror because it is geographically far more accessible across borders and national frontiers. Yet it is Europe that is most set on pretending that it is not at risk. Or worse: pretending that the risks Europe confronts are somehow the fault of America.

It should be conceded immediately that the United States has been neither perfect in its conduct of the war nor innocent in its long history of engagement with the Middle East. Looking back with the advantage of hindsight, you could well argue that the United States committed too few troops to Afghanistan, misjudged the nuclear shenanigans in Pakistan, woefully underestimated the security needs in post-war Iraq and failed to mount as aggressive a diplomatic offensive in the months before the war as was necessary. It would also be hard to find characters more likely to rub Europeans up the wrong way than Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

So let’s concede all that. Let’s also concede that almost every western government misread the intelligence on Saddam’s WMD. The deeper point is still this: the Islamist war against the West was not created by these mistakes. It existed and grew in strength and potency throughout the 1990s. It draws its roots from the Muslim Brotherhood of the 1970s and 1980s. It is quite candid in its goals: expulsion of all infidels from Islamic lands, the subjugation of political pluralism to fascistic theocracy, the elimination of all Jews anywhere, the enslavement of women, the murder of homosexuals and the expansion of a new Islamic realm up to and beyond the medieval boundaries of Islam’s golden past.

Bin Laden spoke of reclaiming Andalusia long before Bush was president. He was building terror camps and seeking WMD while Bill Clinton was in the White House. Blaming the policeman for exposing and punishing the criminal may feel good for a little while but it is a fool’s errand.

The result of the counter- attack by the West — for all its mistakes — is a real, if still fragile, advance in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m sorry, Mr Zapatero, but the liberation of millions from two of the most brutal police states in history is not and never could be described as “a disaster”. Just to utter that sentiment is to have lost even the faintest sense of moral bearings.

It is in absolutely nobody’s interest, either in Europe or America, to see those two devastated countries implode or their fledgling democracies fail. Withdrawal from either would be catastrophic — not just for the countries themselves but also for the West and the entire Middle East.

For Americans and Europeans to bicker among themselves about the past when their shared and mutual future hangs in the balance is almost suicidal.

We are in danger of missing the most important fact in front of us. It’s a fact that, to his credit, Blair has long grasped and refuses to abandon. That fact is that we are at war.

Local terrorism by itself, rooted in territorial or ethnic grievances, might be perceived as something less than a war. But global terrorism, fuelled by a unifying Islamist ideology and potentially armed with weapons more powerful than anything used by terrorists before, is a far more formidable foe.

Appeasing this force will strengthen it; blaming allies because they have dared to confront it is simply to play into the hands of the enemy.

To say so is not McCarthyite, as some have claimed. In free societies, free people should be able to differ about this with no consequences at all, just as the electorate in Spain should be free to exercise its democratic choice. That freedom of thought and discussion is what we are defending, after all. But this does not mean that the choice to appease or avoid is not a disastrous and potentially fatal one.

What happened last week in Spain was easily the gravest event since Al-Qaeda struck the streets of New York. It is a portent of catastrophe for Europe. And only Europe, in the last resort, will be able to reverse it.

THEY GAVE IN: The county that gave us the Scopes trial has decided to reverse its decision to make itself Homorein. But the spirit of Rhea county Christianity lives on among its youth: But 12-year-old Caitlin Kinney, attending the meeting with her mother, said she supported the commissioners' initial vote. "I think they should go further, try to see if they can ban them," she said. "It's not a Christian thing." The evangelicals brought her up well, didn't they?

Andy wants to have it both ways.

I’m sorry, Mr Zapatero, but the liberation of millions from two of the most brutal police states in history is not and never could be described as “a disaster”. Just to utter that sentiment is to have lost even the faintest sense of moral bearings.

Sullivan gets it.

"No wonder that a day later another Islamist group threatened France with mass murder if the government did not relent in its ban on headscarves."

France has already declared its cowardice and corruption clearly and loudly. It will either do the terrorists' bidding or suffer the consequences. That country was unwilling to face islamofascism on its feet and now it will do so on its knees.

Hitler felt that the Germanic people were destined to rule the world; he did very little to make it happen.

He set out to conquer Greater Germany's neighbors; he had no plans, and developed no weapons, to take it beyond that.

"European fascism" encompasses much more than "Nazism".

About sums up the whole conflict and what is at stake...

"Any comparison between European fascism in the 1930s and Islam today is a serious underestimation of Islam"
I don't think the comparison was between the entire worldwide Islamic faith but between the radical, violent Islamic groups that sponsor and participate in terrorism vs. the groups that came to power in Europe in the 1930s. In fact, I think the comparison is highly accurate.
Both groups- the IslamoNazi's (radical Islamic terrorists) and the terrorists of the 1930s (Hitler and his ilk)- gain acceptance through public trickery and brutal repression, through exploiting intolerance and ignorance and feelings of clan or national superiority.
"Regardless of how they are viewed today, "Euro-fascists" were never interested in world dominations."
HUH? The German/Italian Coalition conquered nearly all of continental Europe, was threatening Norway and Finland, and had its sights set on the conquest of Great Brittain, The Soviet Union, and Africa. If they were never interested in world domination, why would they have gone to all that trouble?!

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