Skipper

Readers of this blog will know I rate Simon Jenkins as the most thoughtful and provocative of our British columnists but I'm not sure I agree with yesterday's offering. In it he argued that the terrorist threat had been hugely exaggerated, that you could not compare it to those which had occasioned either the Second World war or the Cold War. He deems the Bush-Blair casting of a dire terrorist threat to the western way of life to be self serving 'nonsense'. 'Most western countries' he writes, 'are healthy democracies with entrenched democracies, near invulnerable to military attack.'

I wish I could see it like this as I think Jenkins displays amazing complacency on this issue. I agree with the point about Hitler and Stalin and I agree that, had Bush not over-reacted, bin Laden might well have lost the support he has subsequently garnered. But: we are not in a situation where the military tactics of either of these wars are of the slightest relevance; we went along with Bush, made the mistake, along with many others, and now face a threat which is very far from being 'nonsense'. The recent Channel 4 programme on The Cult of the Suicide Bomber, exposed the existence of unknown numbers of young Muslims being nurtured by religious extremists to self-sacrifice for their Muslim brothers via the insanity of killing themselves along with as many other members of the 'decadent west' as they can manage.

And their ranks are being swelled all the time, from within the UK and from without as jihadists return from the 'frontline' in Iraq and elsewhere. There are minorities of varying sizes in most European countries which all seem prey to these horrific teachings and we know from opinion polls that they command a worrying amount of sympathy within their respective communities. If well integrated young men from Leeds, who loved soccer and playing cricket as well as their own families and children, can morph into people who walk into the Tube stacked with deadly explosives and intent on mass murder, then we do have real reasons for concern. [The awful irony of the 7-7 bombrs is that the social club which harboured their transition from citizens to terrorists was funded by the council tax payers of Leeds.]

In Northern Ireland only small numbers of young Catholics made this journey into terrorism and caused untold destruction and heartbreak for nearly half a century. I think this new kind of terrorist is just as potentially dangerous, the more so because they live ubiquitously in mainland UK. As I see it- and I really do hope I'm wrong- in our open liberal society, we are all too 'vulnerable' to a campaign which could overshadow anything inflicted on us by the IRA.