Events four years ago in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania
alerted a somnolent world to a campaign against the West which
had been growing for decades. From September 11, there was a
benchmark. To those who lied that there was no terrorist threat,
all one had to do was point to the scars of New York City. To those
who lied that reacting to terror causes terror, that city’s
violation disproved that claim.

There are still today many people who insist that the jihadist
attacks on so many cities—including, now, my home city of
London—are not part of some wider campaign. There are, also,
legions of paid and unpaid apparatchiks propagating the notion
not only that there is no wider campaign, but that any wider
campaign has nothing to do with Islam. Such claims—as is
becoming clearer with each attack—are based not on knowledge,
but on hopefulness, not on truth, but on helplessness. Western
governments have so consistently welcomed Islamic Trojan horses
into our cities, that the only strategy now apparent to many of
them is to pretend the problem is not there, or to pretend that
it is other than it is.

But as long as Muslim terrorists attack us in brazen acts of
mass murder, the publics of the West will be revolted enough to
turn further against the murderers and
the faith which
allows them to ferment.
After the July London bombings, two-a-penny
commentators wrote “We will never surrender”
articles. Most
such claims rang