The conclusion I previously drew from the London bombings is that the terrorists are weakening.
I will go further than that: the whole of modern Islamist terror is a sign of the weakness, and indeed of the death throes, of what could be called “primitive” Islam.
I leave aside the nationalist struggles that have produced terror – the Algerian conflict, for example, had nothing to do with “primitive” Islam; it was essentially a western-style nationalist movement, and the Palestinian movement also had that character through the 1970s. Today, however there is a mixture of western-style nationalism and primitive Islam involved, and that may be the reason it is proving so intractable.
The truly Islamist terrorist movement, however, that of the Muslim Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden, is, as the leftists tell us, driven by anger.
And the root cause of that anger is that wherever their culture comes into contact with ours, it loses. From Turkey under Kemal Ataturk to modern Pakistan, traditional Islamic society is giving way to an imitation of the West.