How long will the blast of reality last?

Some of the commentary pieces in today’s broadsheets certainly confirm the gathering sense of the past week that, after the foiled terrorist attacks, the kid gloves have finally come off. Falling to Confront the Enemy Within, the leading article in The Business, is mirrored with only slightly less force by that of the Sunday Times (The Enemy Within), but both are superb in their clear-headed analysis of the situation. Indeed there is an air of exasperation in both, a sense that the time has come to speak a truth that most of us in our heart of hearts know to be true, that we should stop making pathetic excuses and face hard reality.

We can only hope that this is a real sea-change. For increasing numbers of us, a terrorist atrocity brings with it a double horror - first, of the appalling act itself, and second, of the supine, self-hating appeasement with which it is inevitably dealt with by our media and cultural elites.

It’s instructive to read in conjunction with these pieces the cover article by Sarah Baxter in the Sunday Times News Review – Wimmin at War. In looking back at the Greenham Common protests in which she took part, she bemoans the current failure of the Feminist movement to speak out on Islamist fundamentalism, and condemns the way in which much of the left have found it so easy to walk side-by-side with Islamofacists, Hezbollah and other assorted virulent anti-Semites. But in there too is a retrospective admission that much of the ‘Peace’ movement during the Cold War was unbelievably credulous, indeed soft, on the then Soviet Union, and all too ready to see the fault as being with the West.

This is something which of course seemed obvious to so many of us at the time, and it’s gratifying to hear the truth told by one who was involved in the movement. But there are exact parallels with our current situation. The response of our elites to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism shows all too clearly the part that Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’ continue to play in the attack on the West. Now if anything there is even more at stake.

PW


Sunday Times's Leading article http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-2310296,00.html
Sarah Baxter's article http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2309812,00.html
The Business http://www.thebusinessonline.com/Stories.aspx?Failing%20to%20confront%20the%20enemy%20within&StoryID=7F974379-D91B-4780-A410-775F06D95B04&SectionID=803597D7-4BD5-45D5-BF88-E1AC85BF7FDF