WAR NEWS AND VIEWS

Jeff Jarvis has some links and analysis to several articles I have also noted over the weekend, including one by the Dutch writer Leon de Winter who writes about the tragedy of too much tolerance in the Netherlands.

Kenan Malik also blames wooly-headed multiculturalism for weakening Britain.

An Imam in Detroit weighs in. Based on what he has written in the article, I assume he is a Shiite. When will Sunni Imams condemn Al Qaeda?

Gerard Baker strikes an optimistic tone about the effect of the London attacks on the British public.

The news seems already to have profoundly altered the debate in Britain about the war on terror. Suddenly there is a new seriousness in much of the political discussion about the challenge the United Kingdom faces. For the last few years, since 9/11, and especially since the invasion of Iraq, Britain has been fighting a phony war, like the first eight months of World War II, one that some even doubted was a war at all.

The anti-American, antiwar crowd, of left and right, allied with the apologists for terror on the extreme left and in some sections of the Muslim community, had been insisting that the threat of terrorism was either all a fantasy of George W. Bush's and Tony Blair's evil minds or, if it did exist, an entirely justified response by angry Muslims to the "illegal" invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

But last week the phony war ended. Opinion polls showed a sudden leap in support for Tony Blair, giving him his first net positive approval in more than two years. They showed large majorities in favor of keeping British troops in Iraq and, most strikingly, a jump in the number of Brits who believed their country should stay close to the United States in its foreign policy--now a clear majority--rather than striking out on its own or siding with the Europeans.

What the British people seem to grasp is that the real threat to their own lives now comes not from the British role in Afghanistan or Iraq or Israel's relations with the Palestinians, but from a global ideology, one held by fanatical Islamists in Kandahar, Falluja, Gaza, or Leeds, who will not be appeased by dialogue or changes in policy, who want nothing less than the overthrow of the basic values of British society.

One can only hope it is so.