Beware that perilous road

In this Sunday's Wall Street Journal, Nick Cohen writes:

An Upside-Down World

The British far left makes common cause with Muslim reactionaries

After suicide bombers massacred Londoners on July 7, 2005, leftish rather than conservative papers held British foreign policy responsible for the slaughters on the transport network. ("Blair's Bombs," ran the headline in my own leftish New Statesman.)

Our Stop the War coalition is an alliance of the white far left and the Islamist far right, and George Galloway, its leader, and the first allegedly "far left" member to be elected to the British Parliament in 50 years, is an admirer of Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah.

Why is the world upside down? In part, it is a measure of President Bush's failure that anti-Americanism has swept out of the intelligentsia and become mainstream in Britain. A country that was once the most pro-American in Western Europe now derides Tony Blair for sticking with the Atlantic alliance. But if Iraq has pummeled Mr. Blair's reputation, it has also shone a very harsh light on the British and European left.

Until very recently our Labour government was allowing its dealings with Britain's Muslim minority to be controlled by an unelected group, the Muslim Council of Britain, which stood for everything social democrats were against. In their desperate attempts to ingratiate themselves, ministers gave its leader a knighthood--even though he had said that "death was too good" for Salman Rushdie, who happens to be a British citizen as well as a great novelist.

Beyond the contortions and betrayals of liberal and leftish thinking lies a simple emotion that I don't believe Americans take account of: an insidious fear that has produced the ideal conditions for appeasement. Radical Islam does worry Europeans but we are trying to prevent an explosion by going along with Islamist victimhood. We blame ourselves for the Islamist rage, in the hope that our admission of guilt will pacify our enemies. We are scared, but not scared enough to take a stand.

On the contrary, in a new poll, Indians rate terrorism as 'biggest worry', and Terrorism Tops List Of Citizens’ Concerns in Spain. It's difficult to discern the difference between the threat these two societies face, and those of America and Britain. True, India and Spain are much closer to the middle east, but Spain is one of the most liberal countries in Europe. India's fears are well-founded; terror attacks by homegrown Islamic radicals, or scions of Pakistan, are nearly a monthly occurrence.

Liberal Europe and America would do well to live in just a little more fear. It would heighten our senses and steel our resolve. Unfortunately, the post-9/11 unity we saw had deteriorated into lackadaisical complacency.

I fear that we will awaken again to the terrorist threat the hard way.