Destroying Hezbollah's ability to fight is taking – and will take – Israel far longer than was at first thought. There are several reasons for this: as always in war, the first casualty is the plan. But the reason that stands out is Hezbollah's astonishing success at the tactic that has been developed over decades by the Palestinians: using willing human shields. Hezbollah have taken this tactic to new heights of evil – and effectiveness.

Never before in history has an army succeeded in packing a battlefield with human shields, filled with an ideology of hatred and spite and in many cases willing to die – with their children – and using the enemy's decency and humanity as a weapon of war. The great majority of Israel's military casualties to date have been caused, through this tactic, as a result of their own conscious choice to send ground troops to capture objectives that could have been erased from the air or by artillery.

The tendency in the media, and in Western public opinion, to attribute the exact opposite tactics to Israelis by accusing them of a ‘disproportionate response’ to being under threat of mass murder is nothing short of evil too.

Mere Rhetoric is on a roll with important facts and trenchant commentary about the Israel-Hezbollah war and related matters. Here are some must-read posts:

IDF Videos Show Hezbollah Shelling Israel From Civilian Areas
(Videos of Hezbollah using Lebanese civilians as human shields.)

Syria is Hiding Weapons in Civilian Aid Convoys. Of Course They Are

To stop these convoys, Israel has chosen to bomb roads and bridges so that no transports can get through at all. It's not the ideal solution, but it's better than constantly having to hit civilian convoys because intelligence indicates they're transporting rockets that will be rained down on Israeli homes and schools. Israel's choice is to kill civilians or to blow up roads - they chose to blow up roads, and of course are being criticized for destroying Lebanese infrastructure.

Even 40 Years Ago, Anti-Zionism was Already Anti-Semitism
Well, duh. Anyway, there's an article about it from the post-six-day-war era that seems uncannily current.

The Lebanese Prime Minister is Either a Simpering Imbecile or a Shameless Liar
Actually it's pure evil. The Lebanese Prime Minister (himself recently so heavily praised by Condoleezza Rice and every other Western politician that it's a miracle he hasn't been made Prime Minister of the whole world) says that the videos showing Hezbollah firing from civilian areas are faked by Israel. Mere Rhetoric comments:

If the stakes involved were anything less than a genocide against millions of Jews for the second time in under a century, there might actually be humor in this sick comedy.

About That Other Group of Genocidal Lunatics Currently Shooting, Bombing Israelis

...the Palestinians are usually very careful and keep their weapons safely under the beds of women and children. The IDF has come up with a new way of dealing with this tactic - a way that the Jewish state, because of the double standards and duplicity of the international community, has been loathe to employ in the past. Here's how it works: when the IDF discovers that the weapons being used to murder Israelis are being stored in a house they tell everyone to leave the house, then they blow up the weapons from the air. Western human rights organizations refer to this tactic as "collective punishment" - because Palestinians who let Hamas store weapons in their living rooms should not be inconvenienced when Israel has to come in and blow those weapons up.

Like Hezbollah, Hamas Uses Children As Human Shields

The videos of the air attacks show how Hamas makes use of the Gaza youth; they are sent to collect Qassam rocket launchers, after they have been used, and the IDF holds back from targetting them.

IDF Sacrifices Its Commandos to Minimize Lebanese Civilian Casualties

IDF commandos carried out their 17th operation deep in Lebanon. They were dispatched under the cover of darkness to Tyre to make sure that less than 24 hours would be allowed to pass between when a Hezbollah cell launched rockets into Hadera and when that cell would be eliminated. Two of them ended up severely injured in the mission, one sustaining shots to the midsection. Why didn't Israel just let the IAF take care of the job? Because the terrorists were firing from a civilian neighborhood and hiding in an apartment building

[...]

The IDF is the most moral army in the world.

Indeed.

Well done, Omri of Mere Rhetoric.

It is a fine summer morning.

There was a time when mornings like this were regarded as the epitome of beauty. When Shakespeare wanted to extol the beauty of his beloved, he compared her to a summer's day.

There was a time when religious people would regard a morning like this as a sign of divine grace. When they walked out and saw a day like today, they would pray – literally, pray – in thanks for it.

Today, the devotees of the prevailing religion regard a fine summer's day as nothing but an omen, as terrifying as comets and eclipses once were. To them, it signifies impending punishment for our hubris, for the wickedness of seeking to change the world for the better. If they are pleased at all, it is with glee at the portent of the disaster that will one day vindicate them. But basically they hate the summer's day. They finer the day, the more thay hate it. Yet when they try to besmirch it, it remains clear and beautiful.

The European Union has decided to restrict its funding of human stem cell research to experiments that do not involve the destruction of fertilised eggs.

Some members of the EU are devoutly Catholic countries. Their people have irrational religious objections to that sort of research. So why should they fund it? Indeed, but now the EU will take money in the form of taxation from Britain (which is a major net contributor to the EU budget), and will forbid its use for good research that most Britons approve of.

Part of the problem with a system that requires politicians from many different countries to pool their spending is that they have to compromise on issues where their constituents disagree. Within the evolved democratic political tradition of a single nation, such compromises take place too, but they then form part of a political process in which they are discussed, dissected, reviewed, and generally implemented in such a way that their proponents are held responsible for their outcomes, and the policies can be amended or abandoned in response to criticism, and so progress can be made. The EU has no such process. indeed, there is no such thing as the European political process at all, or a European political party, or a European national debate on anything. Yet genuine political accountability depends on the existence of such processes, which is why the European Parliament is not only a meaningless, formal imitation of a democratic institution but would remain so if it were (disastrously) given significant legislative powers. Still less accountable are the European Commissioners, who are insulated by layer upon layer of institutional defences against the slightest danger that they could be held to basic standards of rationality.

At the moment, the British press and ‘opinion makers’ have taken to shrieking ‘poodle!’ whenever the Prime Minister does not achieve the full reversal of a major US foreign policy in deference to British domestic opinion. Yet somehow the EU invariably gets a pass when it materially overrules, undermines and thwarts the British people's means of deciding on their own governance inside Britain.

If Britain cannot reform the EU it should leave it.

One of the standard lines of argument of the campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament during the late twentieth century was that weapons stockpiles cause wars. “Never in history,” they would say “was a new generation of powerful, expensive weapons stockpiled, without then being used.”

They may have been right about previous history, but since then there have been a handful of counter-examples. The most important was in regard to the very stockpiles they wanted us to extrapolate that history to, namely those of the United States' and the Soviet Unon's thermonuclear weapons. Not just one but two or three successive generations of leading-edge weapons systems were designed, paid for, manufactured, integrated into doctrine and training, deployed, decommissioned, and sold for scrap, without being used once. The same is true of Israel's nuclear weapons capabilities, despite not being offset by any corresponding deterrent.

But evil regimes refrain from violence only when they are under intense pressure (Saddam in the first Gulf War, for instance, as well as the Soviet Union in its final years, both refrained from using their weapons of mass destruction) – the very situation that pacifists and other advocates of unilateral disarmament, appeasement and the like believe is the least likely to have a happy ending.

Over the last few years, the world looked on without applying any pressure at all as Iran and Syria poured sophisticated and massively destructive weapons into Hezbollah's stockpile. The world looked on as if there was some doubt as to what those thousands of missiles were for, or whether they would eventually be used if Hezbollah remained in a position to use them.

When they finally did what they were longing to do, and started to rain death and destruction on Israel's population centres, the world was slightly less enraged than usual with Israel for daring to defend itself (with the exception of President Chirac, who seems to have gone stark mad). President Bush, especially, let it be known that if Hezbollah "stopped doing that shit", everything would be fine.

But, unfortunately, that is not enough to halt or even slow the juggernaut – Iranian nuclear weapons – that is currently heading both for Israel and the United States. Hypocrisy and paralysis are still the norm against which actions are judged. Condoleezza Rice issued a strong statement in support of Israel:

First of all, Israel has a right to defend itself. No country would sit and continue to receive rocket fire against civilian populations and not try to do something about it.

Indeed. But unfortunately, she felt obliged to continue as follows:

What we have asked of the Israelis is that they act in a way to avoid innocent civilian casualties, to avoid the destruction of civilian infrastructure, because there does need to be another day. Israel will need to have those moderate allies in Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories in order to create a stable peace.

That is to say, “OK, for once, you're justified in using violence, but even so, please take care to restrain yourselves from indulging your natural tendency to slaughter civilians and drink their blood. We know you are deaf to moral arguments in general, but you are good at understanding material advantage, so please note that on this occasion, mitigating the slaughter will be of material advantage to you in the future.”

That is how friends of Israel among the world's politicians and diplomats feel obliged to talk. This is especially irksome because, in fact, Israel has the most morally advanced defence and foreign policy in the world, so all these condescending strictures come from people, and polities, that are markedly inferior to Israel in that very respect. But also, if we may respond to Secretary Rice in kind: this moral prevarication is not only wantonly unfriendly and immoral. It is a serious material danger to the United States.

Via Vital Perspective (which, by the way, is doing a good job collating news about the current Israeli hostage-rescue operation in Gaza):

Bear in mind that not too long ago, Annan wasn't even aware that there were rocket attacks against Israel from Gaza.

In the aftermath of the Gaza incident, Prime Minister Olmert spoke by phone with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Annan demanded an explanation for the Gaza deaths. When Olmert asked why Annan had not shown similar concern about the scores of missiles hitting Israel, Annan was nonplussed. "What missiles?" he asked.

Can it really be true that the Secretary General of the United Nations, the man at the pinnacle and focus of international relations, whose primary role is to promote and maintain international peace and security, was unaware of the hundreds of missiles that have been pouring into Israel from Gaza ever since the Israelis ended their occupation of the territory? Or is it just that he doesn't see anything wrong with that situation?

In an amusing reversal of their stereotyped positions, some Democrats, including Jimmy Carter's Vice President Walter Mondale, have called for pre-emptive strikes to destroy North Korea's new missiles. (By the way, do they imagine that the UN would approve these? Would the policy be subjected to that 'test'?) Meanwhile the current Vice President Dick Cheney seems to be dismissing the idea. He even doubts that the weapons exist in the advertised form...

Of course Cheney doesn't want a war with North Korea. It may be groaning under an evil bloodthirsty communist regime, but it has no oil. Right?

Wrong, actually.

The Jerusalem Post is first with an AP story quoting the Iranian defence minister letting slip the fact that his country's nuclear programme is military, and intended for use:

Iran's defense minister on Thursday vowed that his country would "use nuclear defense as a potential" if "threatened by any power."

But the idea that Iran is merely responding to a threat is a cynical, transparent excuse and is the reverse of the truth. Now surrounded by US allies, Iran is not faced by any military threat from any power, except that caused by the fear that it itself has created, and continues to exacerbate, as a matter of policy. In reality, Iran could dismantle not only its nuclear weapons programme but its entire armed forces tomorrow and not a single harmful consequence would result. On the contrary, there would be prodigious benefits to all Iranians and the whole of mankind.

Teheran has denied accusations by the US and its allies that Iran was seeking uranium enrichment technologies in order to develop nuclear weapons, saying its program was only meant to generate electricity.

These standard denials will no doubt be repeated shortly. Perhaps the minister mis-spoke. Perhaps the AP misheard or misinterpreted. Perhaps he let slip the truth or perhaps he isn't even privy to the relevant information. But the weapons programme is real. And the threat is real, whether spoken or not.

Israel and the Jewish people do not want another Holocaust. America does not want another Pearl Harbour or 9-11 many times over. The world does not want a catastrophic war. What do Iranians (not counting the evil regime and its supporters) want? Is it possible that they, too, are miscalculating? Are they halfway OK with this escalating tension because they reckon that, at worst, they will be liberated by external force without making more sacrifices than they already are? That line of thinking would certainly be understandable but it would be a mistake. People of Iran: for everyone's sake, deny that the tyrants act in your name, and deny them the means to do so. Time is short, and the only alternatives are very bad.

Retired New York City policeman Bruce DeCell gained entry to the headquarters of the US Homeland Security Agency, using an ID card which:

• was forged;
• would not entitle him to entry even if it was real;
• cost him $20 in a California street.

Mr De Cell's experiment illustrated that a security system is only as strong as its weakest link. The British government should take note. If just one criminal finds a way of faking ID cards – through some combination of forgery, hacking of government computers, suborning of one of the tens of thousands of new employees who will be running the system, and so on – then the ID card system will fail. If British police, borders and security services fail to institute systems of checking the cards that are both secure and workable, or if some of them are too lazy to follow those systems scrupulously, then the ID card system will fail.

In fact, the only things that ID cards are guaranteed to do is damage civil liberties by branding all British citizens as suspects and allowing for many new forms of petty bureaucratic oppression, divert the effort and attention of the security services towards ordinary citizens and away from terrorists, cause massive inconvenience, and cost a very large fortune.

Via Solomonia:

Why would a movement for black racial purity, in France, which seeks to unite all people with 'pure' black skin and resents lighter-hued people, nevertheless have a soft spot for Islamists (most of whom do not have black skin and some of whom are currently committing genocide against people who do), but pathologically hate Jews, some of whom do have 'pure' black skin?

The case of the house broken into by armed police officers in London on Friday, resulting in the shooting of one of the occupants, is beginning to bear an uncanny resemblance to that of the invasion of Iraq:

Intelligence behind raid was wrong, officials say

Senior counter-terrorism officials now believe that the intelligence that led to the raid on a family house last Friday in a search for a chemical device about to be used to attack Britain was wrong, the Guardian has learned.

[...]

"There is no viable device at that house. There is no device being constructed, or chemicals. There does not appear to be anything there or anywhere else."

Soon we'll be hearing from our holy men that the raid was illegal, immoral and unwise, from the legal profession that it was a war crime, from the press that Blair lied, and so on. They'll make up stuff as needed – you know the sort of thing.

No doubt they'll all be very very angry with the Government for having raided a house that contained no weapons of mass destruction. Would they have been any less angry, we wonder, if the men arrested had nevertheless been mass murderers with 300,000 bodies buried in their cellar? And an entire nation held hostage in the attic? Presumably not.

The logic of the farce that we commented on recently under the heading Mixing Incompatible Scare Stories has now repeated itself in the form of tragedy.

US Representative John Murtha has made a series of allegations about a reported atrocity by US Marines that is currently being investigated by the Marine Corps:

"There was no firefight. There was no IED that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood," Murtha said.

[…]

"They actually went into the houses and killed women and children,"

A Marines spokesman said: “Any comment at this time would be inappropriate and could undermine the investigatory and possible legal process.” Yes indeed, and Murtha's decision to prejudge the outcome in public is reprehensible for that reason alone. It is an abuse of his position for him to purport to know, at this stage, not only that a crime was committed and who was guilty, but the underlying causes of the crime too – especially as they happen to fit his agenda that the war is an unwinnable quagmire. But our point here is different.

Did the troops “overreact because of the pressure on them”, or did they “kill innocent civilians in cold blood”? It cannot be both. Murtha did not say (in the CNN video clip linked by that article) what the nature of the pressure was that he says turned these men into mass murderers. But whatever he meant, if that was the explanation it would reflect badly, perhaps criminally, on everyone in the chain of command that ordered them into the situation. It would also mean that the murders were not in cold blood. That Murtha should make both allegations in the same breath shows that, like the environmental journalist we quoted before, he is not interested in what the facts are. But unlike the journalist, he has done this over an issue of life and death.

No, not the non-existent ‘Western pressure on Iran’ to abandon its headlong rush to commit genocide. We are referring to the new national uniform for men that has just been provisionally approved by the Iranian Parliament. Iranian women are, of course, already subject to a draconian dress code. Among other things, the new dress code for men would prohibit Western clothing such as suits.

Neckties are already illegal under Iran's existing dress code. Nooses, ironically, are not. Even for teenage girls.

We invite comments making the usual facile comparisons between Iran's national uniform and some European countries' ban on headscarves in state schools. Or between the United States' death penalty for aggravated murder, and Iran's death penalty for sassy teenagers.

A charity called Buglife has apparently warned that

Rare insects that are vital for pollinating crops and feeding birds are threatened with extinction because of the Government's determination to build on brownfield sites.

An insect species can be rare, or it can be vital for pollinating crops and feeding birds. It cannot be both.

One wonders whether journalists even read their own scare stories. Or is it just a case of: if it's scary it must be true; if it's technology it must be bad.

Recently a student found plans for a nuclear powered interplanetary space vehicle developed by British Rail in 1970-73. This vehicle would have used nuclear fusion initiated by lasers as its power source.

Cynical 21st-century folk rubbished the idea:

“I thought it must be a joke at first,” the student who found the plans said yesterday. “It is amazing that British Rail actually developed these plans. They obviously believed people would be transported around space to different planets in the future...”

We, on the other hand, are astonished that there exist scientifically literate people who believe that they won't.

Michel van Baal, from the European Space Agency, based in Holland, said: “I have had a look at the plans, and they don't look very serious to me at all. It is based on a fusion process that doesn't exist yet and if it would, would need an unbelievable amount of energy...”

And this objection does not look serious to us. Does a spokesman for the European Space Agency really think that because the vehicle would be powered by a fusion process that does not yet exist, the designs for it are worthless?

Mr van Baal has ruled out in advance a possible means of reducing the cost of space travel not because of evidence but because of pessimism.

It so happens that physicists at Berkeley are working on producing nuclear fusion using lasers and making this technology commercially viable. Suppose that Mr van Baal is right and this technology can't be used for space travel. Then by investigating its viability we shall rule out one possible means of interstellar travel and focus our resources elsewhere. And if he is wrong then this investigation will lead to improved space travel. If humankind does not spread out into the universe then sooner or later we will be destroyed by an asteroid or some other catastrophe. Optimism will not guarantee survival but it is the only possible route. Pessimism will certainly destroy us.

If only the mainstream institutions of today had the optimism – and the gumption – displayed by British Rail in 1970.

We once criticised the attitude of the present-day Argentinean government and people towards the Falklands war of 1982.

We have now replied to a recent comment on that thread.

Something sinister is happening in the field of climate science. No, this time we do not mean their discovery that the Planet is Doomed (again) unless the governments of the world embark on an emergency orgy of concerted spending and regulation on a scale that dwarfs all precedent.

Some of the so-called climate-change ‘sceptics’ – not political stooges or cranks, but bona fide, competent scientists who, as is commonplace in science, disagree with the consensus in their fields – have been sounding an alarm. In a recent disturbing article Prof. Richard Lindzen (who is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT) says that

Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence

Similarly, Prof. Bob Carter, a geologist engaged in paleoclimate research at James Cook University, Queensland wrote recently:

There are other reasons, too, why the public hears so little in detail from those scientists who approach climate change issues rationally, the so-called climate sceptics. Most are to do with intimidation against speaking out, which operates intensely on several parallel fronts.

The intimidation is presumably not perfectly effective, since Lindzen and Carter are speaking out. Indeed, recently sixty “leading scientists” wrote an open letter to Canada's new Prime Minister urging withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty. Nevertheless these claims of intimidation from scientists are extremely bad news. Discovering the truth is hard. This institutions of science forbid intimidation and other forms of irrationality not merely for the comfort of scientists. It is because even small amounts of certain pathologies in the scientific process can completely halt progress, or worse, create the semblance of authority for illusory discoveries.

The issue of climate change, its causes and effects, is a highly technical one about which we at The World do not have the relevant expertise to be capable of passing judgement. The trouble is that the climate-science community, by casually or deliberately politicising its field, is increasingly destroying its own standing to advise the rest of us. And if the truth emerges from such a process, we shall be very lucky.

This is a point that is bound to be made all over (the sane parts of) the blogosphere today, but it deserves to be made again.

Three so-called ‘peace activists’ who had been kidnapped by the very terrorists in Iraq for whose cause they had gone there to campaign, were freed today by British and Canadian special forces whom they vilify as criminals.

They have been given their freedom, no doubt at some slight risk to their own lives (though, in the event, their captors had fled by the time of the rescue), and potentially at great risk to the lives of their rescuers. They pronounce themselves “delighted” to have been granted exactly what they have devoted their lives to denying the Iraqi people.

Slobodan Milosevic, former strongman of Serbia, has died in a prison cell in The Hague, four years into his trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He died of a heart attack after the Court denied him permission to travel to Russia for medical treatment. By putting up a spirited and intelligent defence, he had had considerable success in manoeuvring himself into the role of victim, and international justice into the role of oppressor. To his supporters and sympathisers, his death under these circumstances will lock that psychological victory in place.

For comparison (procedurally only, there being no comparison between the defendants) the trial of Adolf Eichmann lasted only four months. It is hard to see why it was necessary for Milosevic's to take twelve times as long with no end in sight. In any case, there can seldom, if ever, be a justification for putting people on trial whose guilt takes over four years to prove beyond reasonable doubt – for a policy of doing so will necessarily waste over four years of the lives of defendants who are eventually acquitted, which is surely oppressive.

In 1923, the Nazis under Adolf Hitler tried to overthrow the German government by force. They failed and he was tried for treason. But the judges allowed him to use his trial as a political soapbox and so turned it into not only a mockery of justice but a potent means of building support for the next attempt, which succeeded without a shot being fired.

Saddam is less smart than Milosevic and guilty of far worse crimes. He and his defence team have been trying silly tactics to gain political advantage from his trial. For instance, his lawyers walk out and then claim that the court is depriving Saddam of the right to lawyers of his choice. Or Saddam stands up and starts making speeches. The new presiding judge has been refusing to allow these tactics, and he is quite right. In this trial, the defendants' political theories are totally irrelevant. They could not possibly supply any excuse for the defendants' alleged actions or evidence that they did not commit them. So the judge should not tolerate such tactics even when the defendants are in the witness box.

Update: See Mark Steyn's take on the conduct of the Milosevic trial and its relevance to Saddam's.

To modern perceptions (though certainly not to those of people at the time) one of the most bizarre forms of antisemitic blood libel popular in the middle ages was that of torturing the Host. According to this, Jews would break into churches at night and torture the consecrated communion wafers (known as the Host) which, according to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, are literally the body of Christ. As the Jews hammered nails into them, the wafers would scream and bleed. The Jews would be delighted that they were crucifying Jesus yet again, and would use his blood, which had magical properties, for nefarious purposes. Many Jews were themselves tortured and executed for this crime. None ever committed it.

Since this myth was an exclusively Christian manifestation of antisemitism, what does it have to do with the idea of the ‘enemies of Islam’? On the face of it, nothing.

Yet the underlying logic is similar. In order to believe that Jews torture the Host, one must first believe that Jews know that the Host is literally the body of the living Jesus. But that is tantamount to their knowing that the Catholic religion is true. And indeed, the idea that The Jews know that Christianity is true but wilfully reject it was itself a staple of Christian antisemitism. It is a conspiracy theory that would require Jews to be lying about their own religious beliefs, in a way which, as we have discussed here, would have made it impossible for those beliefs to be propagated to the next generation. The Host-torturing libel was even more incoherent because it implied that Jews were materially relying upon, and risking their very lives in order to witness, a miracle predicted only by a rival religion and contradicting their own. Unfortunately, philosophical incoherence has seldom been much of a handicap when it comes to religious doctrines.

Today, the Islamists' narrative in regard to the ‘enemies of Islam’ is as follows. First of all, of course, Islam is the true religion. It is also destined to spread to every nation on Earth. Why? Because that is what God in His omnipotence has willed. On a level playing field, this spread would happen rapidly and peacefully. Unfortunately, the leaders of other religions, and the demonic leaders of the West, know this and are afraid. They seize upon (or invent) every possible excuse to kill Muslims, weaken and subjugate Muslim nations, and sow mindless hatred of Muslims among the ignorant masses of their own countries. That makes those leaders ‘enemies of Islam’, and Muslims are obliged by their religion to respond violently to them. In this holy war, Islam is destined to prevail.

To Western apologists for Islamist violence, some of that narrative is familiar and congenial. The inherent violence of the West, the baseness of its motives, its guilt and responsibility for the evils of the world, the explanation of history as being driven by a grand conspiracy among its ‘rulers’, and the fraudulent nature of its apparent success, are all themes of the basic left-wing narrative too. However, the leftist apologia for Islamist violence is that it is caused by Western oppression, and that the Islamists' specific beliefs are a mere rationalisation for their desperate lashing out: a different indigenous culture would have resorted to similar violence but attached different words to it. But to the Islamists themselves, their religion is not an ‘indigenous culture’ but the unique, universal truth. Their violence is a focused and moral response to a coordinated attack on their religion which was caused by their enemies' knowledge that that religion would otherwise sweep the earth.

But in reality their 'enemies' have no such knowledge. No one, other than Muslims, has believed anything of the sort for several centuries now. After all, the Islamic religion, which at its height managed to overtake Christianity in terms of numbers of believers, nowadays stands at closer to half, with the majority living in jurisdictions where the mildest criticism of it is savagely punished and converting to a different religion carries the death penalty. To a believing Muslim, it is not relevant that the Islamic empire passed its peak over five centuries ago, nor that Islamic nations are decades or centuries behind Western ones in terms of wealth, military power, scientific progress, cultural creativity, and every other measure that is conceivably relevant to which of them is likely to become the global civilisation. In modern times it simply does not occur to anyone without faith in Islam, that Islam will peacefully sweep the world unless it is violently stopped. But Islamists pathologically assume that it is a fact known to everyone, but opposed by the wicked, just as believers in the host-torturing myth thought that some of the supernatural attributes of Jesus were known to, but opposed by, Jews.

In reality, medieval Jews cared nothing about the doctrine of transubstantiation, and therefore did not, in reality, lie awake at night obsessing about the Host – until, presumably, it began to be used as a pretext for murdering them. Likewise, President Bush and Mr Blair do not lie awake worrying about who is going to convert to Islam next. Indeed, they were entirely unconcerned with Islam – until September 11, 2001. Just as it was sheer fantasy that medieval Jewish religious practice centred around the truth of Christian doctrines and a desire to hurt Jesus, so it is sheer fantasy that fear of the peaceful spread of Islam, and a grand historic plan to hurt Muslims, are at the heart of Western leaders' political philosophy. But unfortunately, as incoherent fantasies go, both of these are exceptionally nasty and dangerous ones.

There are, no doubt, some enemies of Islam who wish to spread some other religion – perhaps because it, too, contains a supernatural promise that it must inevitably triumph – or who are simply bigots. But they are of no significance in world events. Who tortured the Host? No one. And the ‘enemies of Islam’ in the sense envisaged in the Islamists' narrative simply do not exist either. There are only people who fear the Islamists' unjustified, conspiracy-theory-driven violence.

----------------------------------------------

Note: For further thoughts on the relevance of the Host-desecration myth to present-day political issues, see this interesting article.