That isn’t the only parallel between the massacre last year and its precursors in New York and Paris. As with 9/11, the horrors of 7/10 were initially marked by shock, then calls for huge retaliation. As after 9/11, a backlash swiftly followed. Over the past 12 months, campuses and city streets have been swept by anti-Zionism, just as anti-Americanism became the rage on the Left in the early 2000s. Two decades ago, moreover, there were massive protests decrying America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and calls for the troops to stay home, much like today’s demands for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon. And as after 9/11, the backlash proved impotent. The US hung on in Afghanistan until 2021. Today, Israel is busy expanding its war to Lebanon — and perhaps soon to Iran as well.

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Yet surely the strongest parallel between those earlier atrocities and October 7 isn’t the bursts of violence, or the reaction, or the escalation. It’s that term I started with. It’s Islamism, and the way the West consistently refuses to name its true enemy. I mean the Muslim Brotherhood, which created Hamas, along with those other barbarians at the gates. On September 12, 2001, after all, we declared a war on “terror”. But terror is a tactic, not an ideology. In later years, as the enemy started to strike us at home in Western towns and cities, we called it “violent extremism” and lumped it together with fascism and other forms of homegrown zealotry.

This happened first, and most importantly, because the enemy told us it was fighting in the name of Islam, and we refused and still refuse, categorically, to wage war on one of the world’s great faiths. Second, we thought we could use our vast military and intelligence resources to weaken and destroy the enemy without being trapped into starting a war with a fifth of humanity. We failed to understand the difference between Islam and Islamism — between Muslims and the Muslim Brotherhood.

By failing to name Islamism as our enemy, we allowed it to prosper. Consider, for instance, what happened in Afghanistan. After 20 years of fighting that enemy without a name, spending trillions of dollars and wasting thousands of lives, we abandoned the country to the Islamist thugs of the Taliban. It was one of the most disgraceful retreats in American history, cloaked by shabby political expediency. We looked away as the Islamists catapulted Afghan women and minorities back to another Dark Age.

There have been other consequences too, often much closer to home. As we remained silent, the Muslim Brotherhood and its many offshoots quietly entrenched themselves across Western cities, from Australian universities to Manchester suburbs. Enabling them to build mosques and take over schools, moreover, our silence has allowed them to proclaim themselves as spokespeople for every Muslim in the West.

This continued reluctance to see the enemy before us allows it to burrow into more and more hearts. As increasing numbers of desperate people arrive upon our shores from war-torn lands, many are finding solace in a new community in those same mosques and schools, as well as online. And for those of us unwilling to turn a blind eye, our Islamist enemies are ready with their tried-and-tested accusations of Islamophobia, carefully deployed to shut down discussion of the true nature of their threat. Any critics of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots are defamed as racist and intolerant — as purveyors of “hate”.

In this effort to freeze discussion the Islamists are aided and abetted by the ideological Left. In Europe, they proclaim their faith in multiculturalism. In America, social justice warriors do the work on campuses and adjacent institutions.

And so, for the moment at least, we find ourselves at an impasse. More than 20 years after 9/11, and only one year after October 7, we are still refusing to name our enemy. The irony is that not everyone struggles as we do in the West. Consider Saudi Arabia, Islam’s foundational home, the protector of Mecca and Medina, yet which has nonetheless banned the Muslim Brotherhood. A host of other Muslim countries have managed something similar: Syria, Jordan, the UAE, Egypt. This has been a startling transformation. Back in the last century, the Saudis welcomed the Brotherhood, put them in charge of schools and mosques — and funded the Islamists to spread their ideology right across the region and beyond. I witnessed this firsthand, in Kenya. They came to my home when I was only 15, and seized control of our local mosque. One reason I understand the Muslim Brotherhood is that, as a teenager, I was recruited to it.

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At first, the Saudis thought they and the Brotherhood were ideologically aligned. But the Brotherhood eventually turned around and tried to overthrow them. At that point, the Saudi princes, capable of ruthlessness as well as generosity, rounded them up and expelled them from their schools, their mosques, their newspapers — and their soil.

Today, a year on from Hamas’ heinous attack on Israel, we should welcome Israel’s war against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and most importantly, against Iran. Yet Israel must also learn from America’s mistakes. Remember that the war isn’t over until the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood is destroyed. And for that to happen, we must first recognise our enemy in our midst, and that begins by naming it.

Like Russia and China, Iran is directed by an authoritarian and seemingly bellicose regime with some strong anti-Western interests. For now, that regime shows no serious signs of losing power internally. This is despite a series of recent threats to its authority: Iranian women protesting the violence of the state-sanctioned Islamic morality police; the American assassination of Iran’s talented and nefarious expert in warfare on foreign soil, General Qasem Soleimani; the humiliating and avoidable death of the President during a helicopter crash; and the impending demise of the 85-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

Iran has been brutalised and woefully governed in recent years. Faced with moral, political, economic as well as ecological issues, Iran might appear to be floundering. The question is now: will one of the great civilisations of world history fall victim to its deep-seated internal crises or will it remain immovable and intransigeant? As the state begins to crumble, will Iran resist collapse?

The nation has endured against the odds before. More than any other region which succumbed to the Islamic conquests of Late Antiquity, Persia preserved a strong sense of its civilisational identity under the banners of the Caliphate.

Dualism has always been the key to Iran’s identity. The Zoroastrian religion of ancient Iran is renowned for its supposed cosmic dualism, positing a battle between good and evil in which the former is eventually triumphant. Iranian self-understanding has also been shaped by how Persian poets of the early Islamic era blended pre-Islamic Iranian histories and mythologies into their masterpieces. The 10th-century Abolqasem Ferdowsi preserved legendary stories of old Persian kings, and voiced nostalgic dismay that the minbar (a mosque’s pulpit) should have become as exalted as the Persian throne. Islam and Persian civilisation ended up existing in a creative tension that is peculiarly Iranian.

Modern Iran is in some respects similarly dualistic, possessing both what Westerners would recognise as the ordinary instruments of secular republican government and an Islamist constitutional superstructure. A President, parliament, and more or less modern state apparatus coexists with a Supreme Leader, a clerical Guardian Council which “supervises” elections and can veto legislation, and a legal system incorporating sharia. This dualism is by design, realising the Islamic Republic’s legal-theological ideal of the velayat-e faqih or guardianship of the Islamic jurist. Described by Ayatollah Khomeini as “one of the most important obligations” of the Iranian people and “more necessary even than prayer and fasting”, this hyper-politicisation of Shia Islam was a hallmark of his rule. While this ideology guarantees the Islamic character of the state, it is less traditionally Islamic than one might expect. Rather, as one academic analyst of Iran’s constitutional order observes, it “reinvents the [Shi’ite] tradition in response to the postcolonial crisis of Muslim-majority contexts”. The Islamic Republic’s construction of a velayat-e faqih deep state is best understood, then, as a strange fusion of Shia Islam and 20th-century revolutionary politics.

Can Iran’s unique hybrid system survive? Ali Ansari, Professor of Iranian History at the University of St Andrews, describes the socio-theological hold of radical Shi’ite Islam over the Iranian population as the Islamic Republic’s “moral problem”. He estimates that as many as five to six million Iranian women now refuse to wear the veil, and as many as two or three times that number tacitly support their rebellion. This is a significant challenge to the regime’s Islamic authority. Stories of elite corruption and the brutal and sexualised repression of female protestors are hardly an advert for the moral probity of the Islamic Republic’s guardians. There must be some in Tehran who worry that the theological and political ruling class is burning through its reserves of moral-religious capital.

Ansari nevertheless warns against Western liberals being too cynical about the regime’s commitment to a particular reading of Shia Islam. The people running Iran are, by and large, “true believers”. This makes for a tense, brittle situation, in which there is a real risk of religiously inflected protests boiling over into much more serious civil strife.

Meanwhile, a succession crisis also torments Iran. Despite lacking the more invigorating charisma of his predecessor Khomeini, Ayatollah Khamenei has been a stabilising influence on the Islamic Republic. His death will be a moment of trial for the regime. Ansari suspects that a viable succession plan will already have been worked out. For the Islamic Republic’s elites, the show must go on. Until his untimely death, some commentators considered the late President Raisi a likely choice. Now the preeminent candidate is the present Supreme Leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who is thought to have commanded the Basij, the volunteer paramilitary wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Such political instability is not helped by the mixed economic situation. A consensus hasn’t yet been reached on the effectiveness of US sanctions. But as in Russia, sanctions don’t appear to have been particularly punishing, with possible benefits such as forcing pragmatic moves towards economic autarky. Ansari, however, questions whether the issue is instead that the West has only half-heartedly enforced economic measures against Iran. For him, sanctions against Iran seem designed to send signals to foreign and domestic audiences rather than to break the country’s productive capabilities and bleed the Islamic Republic’s wealth. 

Yet Iran’s economy isn’t as robust as the country’s defenders might have it. Despite Iran possessing a significant share of the Persian Gulf’s oil resources, Ansari argues that the Revolution’s leaders made a major error in adopting a flimsy version of the Shah’s planned energy policies at the end of the Seventies. These were drawn up when Iran had a population of some 30 million; now estimates hover at around 90 million. 

Some sectors of the Iranian economy are faring worse than others. Iran’s aviation industry, once an unparalleled success in the Gulf, has been hit hard by Western sanctions and chronic mismanagement. Sanctions have made it highly difficult to acquire key parts for maintenance of an ageing fleet of aircraft. There has been some suggestion that this may have been a factor in the helicopter crash which killed President Raisi. The Iranian automotive industry is in a similarly depressing shape. Cars produced in the Seventies, in the last years of the Shah’s rule, sell for higher prices than far more recent models. Iranian drivers don’t seem to have great faith in automobiles produced in the Islamic Republic.

On top of this, the Islamic Republic also currently faces a severe ecological crisis. Indeed, Ansari thinks this might be the most dangerous challenge to the Islamic Republic: it is currently stumbling blindly into a ruinous ecological catastrophe.

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Due to a combination of climate change, corrupt mismanagement of Iran’s water resources and infrastructure, and an unsustainable reliance on pistachio farming as a cash crop, Iran is drying up. The north of the country is, Ansari says, more or less holding up, but his prognosis for southern Iran is much grimmer. He thinks some Western analysts are underpricing the potential for a devastating — perhaps irreversible — collapse in Iran’s ability to provide water to its farmers.

Startling comparisons can be made to the destruction of the Aral Sea: the most infamous example of an authoritarian state doing irreversible environmental damage in Central Asia. From the Sixties, short-termist and overambitious irrigation programmes in the Soviet Central Asian republics steadily drained the sea, which has now all but disappeared. There too, poor government was exacerbated by a foolish overreliance on a cash crop, Uzbek cotton for the Soviets.  

These four issues don’t bode well for Iran’s future. But Westerners would be unwise to expect changes for the better. In the face of popular protest, the Revolutionary Guard Corps will most likely defend the regime and its own substantial political and economic interests. Iran’s ruling class would likely resort to using the Corps to rule by martial law if necessary.

But perhaps that won’t be necessary. For now, Iran seems socially resilient. Ansari wonders whether Iran in the second quarter of the 21st century will resemble the country as it was in the early 20th century: a weak state with unstable institutions, but a cohesive nation with a strong civilisational identity. Those traits of national stoicism and an uncanny ability to manage tensions suggest an Iranian ability to weather coming storms without collapse.

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There seems little immediate hope of a major liberalisation in Iran. The country’s middle class is somewhat politically significant but numerically small. Iranian critics of the Islamic Republic are often intensely patriotic, and suspicious of Western intentions towards their nation. Even the more liberal dissidents, who hope that Iran will enjoy a more Western and democratic future, are somewhat demoralised by the current state of the West: its internal divisions, its decadence, its indecision. 

I am told that those who might once have looked to America for inspiration have been horrified by the subversive zealotry on display in the radicalised student protests on American college campuses. Iranian moderates remember with grim apprehension where a toxic cocktail of revolutionary politics, student protest and Islamist fervour can lead an unsuspecting country.

To some extent, managing the Iran problem will require both a recovery of American backbone and a careful self-discipline to avoid needless escalation with a regime which isn’t afraid to choose violence. There is a danger of Western bluster being counterproductive: announcing sanctions and failing to enforce them can send extremely unhelpful signals. Targeted assassinations, such as that of Soleimani, are certainly risky; killing Soleimani in Iraq, however, was a wiser choice than striking Iranian soil.

America’s task is to forcefully contain Iran without being drawn into an unwinnable regional conflict. The enforcement of clear red lines is a necessity, though it seems unlikely that we will see this from the present White House. In fact, the radical politicisation of junior US civil servants and the personal unpredictability of both candidates in the 2024 election make it hard to see how Iran should be expected to reliably read the signals it receives from Washington. After all, deterrence requires the opposition to understand the cost of bad behaviour.

The more you learn about Iran, the more it feels like a perennial civilisation, stuck in endless cycles of violent tragedy, as permanent and immovable as the towering Zagros mountains. It is hard to avoid feeling cynical and pessimistic about the medium-term future of this civilisation-state. In the words of the 19th-century statesman Lord Salisbury, “whatever happens [in Iran] will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible”.

Last Friday, at about 11:30am, a 25-year-old Afghan went on a knife spree at a rally in Mannheim. He stabbed Michael Stürzenberger, the convener of the rally, along with a policeman and four others, before a second policeman shot him. Two days later, the officer succumbed to his wounds.

We still don’t know everything about the incident. What we do know, though, is that it is a deeply sad — and obvious — metaphor for the way Western countries function. People protest Islamic violence. The press smears them. Islamists attack. The state tries to subdue the protestors. The Islamists continue attacking. Rinse and repeat.

It isn’t even the first time Stürzenberger’s protests have been attacked. He has been assaulted twice before by Islamists, in 2013 and in 2022. Why? Well, according to the mainstream media, he is a far-Right extremist. As Euronews puts it: he has been “previously linked to Pegida, a xenophobic extreme-Right group with a strong neo-Nazi following, prompting an investigation by the German federal state’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution”.

And what did this investigation uncover? Little more than the fact that he’s a relatively normal man who condemns Islamic violence — and who, like many such people, including some of my friends, has now ended up being stabbed. Yet Stürzenberger’s normalcy hasn’t stopped the German legal system from persecuting him. One of his convictions was for sharing a photo on Facebook of a Nazi shaking hands with an Islamic cleric, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Not a doctored photo. Just a photo. After all, photos reveal facts — but in Germany, even sharing the government’s own statistics can get you a criminal record.

Last week’s attack prompted the standard response from the German political establishment. The Chancellor condemned it. He expressed sadness. His government promises to investigate, to defend “against Islamist terrorism with determination”. But did anyone buy it? Though there are exceptions like Hungary, these attacks seem to happen regardless of national borders, and regardless of whether the country in question has a Left-wing or a Right-wing government.

The more cynical among us are inclined to claim that they keep happening because no one really cares. But that is lazy thinking. Not all of these politicians are feckless monsters, however temporarily gratifying it may feel to say so.

So why do they seem to do nothing? Part of the answer — a significant part of the answer — lies with the cluster of policies and assumptions that all mainstream European countries have written into their rules regarding immigration.

The first concerns treaties. These governments are signatories to international treaties that inadvertently leave them with no option but to leave their borders unprotected and to allow unwanted migrants to stay put. The Geneva Convention on Refugees. The European Court of Human Rights. As long as these are in place, national governments can do little to stop Islamists from entering — even if they wanted to.

The second concerns constitutions. Western nations abide by constitutional laws that leave them with no alternative but to allow the Islamists to recruit operatives and establish networks, mosques, schools and charities devoted to the spread of political Islam. Again, there is nothing they are able to do, because Islam is not singled out in their constitution as a singular cause for concern. If it were, the lawyers for these institutions would sue, saying that it is illegal to treat Islam differently. And, infuriatingly, under the current system, they would be right.

The third concerns perceptions. Our governments assume that anyone — citizen or organisation; journalist, politician or academic — critical of the government’s way of handling Islamism is a dangerous bigot who must be shamed into silence. Maybe such attitudes were forgivable half a century ago, but it is pretty obvious now that there is nothing bigoted about fearing Islamism. Islamists make that clear with increasing regularity. Nonetheless, it is not as if any human is immune to the effects of the echo chamber. The elites swim in a pool where everyone believes that racism underlies opposition to open borders. This is particularly true of Germany’s elites, who are still so focused on stopping the re-emergence of Nazism that they see it everywhere, and are blind to any other threat.

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What this means is that, without a seismic shift, there is actually very little that can easily be done about the first two problems. Even if he wanted to, the Chancellor of Germany does not have the authority to change Germany’s basic law, let alone an electoral mandate. And while the Bundestag could just about get Germany out of some of its international treaties, because those treaties underwrite Germany’s international relations, they underwrite the trade her economy needs for survival.

The constitutional problem is broadly similar. All constitutions lack perfect foresight. Of course, it’s true that, when these documents were written, states had no business treating religions differently. But that was before Islamism arrived. Once Islamic migration really began in earnest, the days of procedural neutrality should have ended. And while none of this is to say that peaceful, patriotic Muslims should be targeted, Islamism — as I well know — is plainly different.

We do not yet know whether Mannheim’s second attacker, who stabbed an AfD politician on Tuesday night, was an asylum-seeker. He may have just been an ordinary immigrant, or even a German-born citizen. But if I were a betting woman, I would bet he came in on one of the many schemes designed to help threatened people, in very small numbers, in a previous era. Most conventions around refugees were drawn up just after the Second World War or the Cold War, with those conflicts’ problems in mind. Things are different now, and the change is killing our nations.

What is the cure? It certainly doesn’t involve electing a centre-right government. As the past 14 years in the UK have shown, centre-right governments do nothing. Instead, what is needed is a shift in international and constitutional law, or events like those in Germany will just keep happening until the nations of Europe collapse.

No doubt I’ll write this article again in a year. And the year after that. But if we think big, and enough of us wake up, then one day, I’ll be able to stop. Until then.

On one side, there is a growing belief that an open borders policy is a vital moral response to the economic inequality between countries. In these milieus, national citizenship within a bounded community in the Western world is increasingly seen not as a birth right but as just another unfair advantage. As the political theorist Joseph Carens puts it, Western citizenship is “the modern equivalent to feudal privilege — an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances [that] is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely”. And just like feudal privileges, they should be cast aside.

On the other side, meanwhile, the vox populi disagrees. Polling consistently shows that most Western citizens want less immigration, a sentiment that has risen in recent years in the US, UK, France and Germany. Faced with the elite-approved “human right” to unlimited free movement, popular opinion responds with an emphatic no.

With die-hards on both sides, it’s no wonder the Senate border bill has become such a point of contention. For Democrats, the problem is not that too many foreigners are abusing asylum claims in order to immigrate illegally; it’s more that, with an election coming up, news coverage of chaotic conditions at the border doesn’t paint Biden in a good light. For the rest of us, meanwhile, the problem is the assumption that everyone in the developing world has a moral right to claim asylum in the US.

This is not to say that immigration should be stopped entirely; but rather that unlimited immigration is incompatible with the right of a bounded community to durable political self-determination. This, in turn, is a far weightier moral consideration than the self-interest of any given economic immigrant. As the political philosopher Christopher Heath Wellman put it: “[n]o collective can be fully self-determining without enjoying freedom of association because, when the members of a group can change, an essential part of group self-determination is exercising control over what the ‘self’ is.”

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But how can a community control its “self” in a world of open borders? Inevitably, a subsection of immigrants will acquire the right to vote in their new home. Over time, their presence will change the composition of the electorate, or, in other words, the “self” part of “self-determination”. And eventually this will alter the outcome of political decisions taken by the demos — for immigrants typically don’t share the same preferences or identity as the existing citizenry. Give a large group of outsiders the vote, and you may find that voting patterns start to change. To prevent this, claims Heath Wellman, the demos must have a right to say “no” to radical, unwanted alterations to the citizen body.

The open border advocates would naturally dispute this, insisting that no self-determining group of citizens has the right to protect itself from such change. After all, who’s to say that the next generation of voters won’t also revolutionise politics? Radical change doesn’t just come from abroad. We wouldn’t choose to disenfranchise our rebellious children, even if they threaten to overturn our political decisions. By the same token, we cannot deny the vote to immigrants with conflicting values or interests.

This analogy, however, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Generational changes in the electorate arise from citizens voluntarily exercising their basic human rights: in this case, the right to form a family and the right to freedom of conscience. By contrast, the replacement of the electorate through unwanted mass immigration occurs wholly involuntarily and is facilitated by governments acting entirely morally ultra vires.

What’s more, education and upbringing tend to ensure a large amount of continuity between the preferences, interests and identity of one generation and the next. A parent and child have far more in common than a person born in the US and a newly arrived immigrant. This is especially true under conditions of mass migration across great civilisational distances, and even more so when the state insists on multiculturalism, rather than integration. While new arrivals will be subject to some cultural pressure to adopt the norms of their host society, contemporary liberal democracies encourage immigrants to celebrate their ethnic identities and, increasingly, their grievances. These groups then ask for policy shifts to accommodate their cultural preferences.

We have seen this play out in America, the UK and Europe, where — contrary to those who talk of the natural conservatism of immigrants — new arrivals tend to vote well to the Left of non-immigrants. Over time, this can start to distort the political system. As former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew once observed, “in multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion”. This can eventually lead to an aggressive style of ethnopolitics evident in many countries around the world from South Africa to Malaysia.

Even if this doesn’t happen, mass migration can warp democracy in other ways. As Robert Putnam argued, “ethnic diversity” can reduce both “horizontal” interpersonal trust and “vertical” trust in political institutions, leading residents of all races to “hunker down”. We can see this in the way social trust had steadily declined since mass non-Western immigration began in the mid-Sixties, while political polarisation has conversely increased. Some have blamed this on the rise of cable news or social media — and indeed, both probably play a part. But the timeline of America’s deteriorating social trust and the geographical distribution of that trust — highest in homogenous places such as New England and the Midwest, lowest in the Southwest and in New York — are consistent with the diversity-trust hypothesis.

While declining trust probably won’t result in societal collapse, it will certainly weaken our political institutions. A high-trust society can afford the sort of deliberative democracy that offers fair consideration of all affected parties. This system presupposes that political parties play fair, keep their promises and work together for the common public good. But it is easily distorted, and can swiftly morph into a low-trust society with a Lebanon-style “consociational democracy” and a system of zero-sum tribal bargaining. In such a scenario, political outcomes are determined by the balance of power between representatives of different ethnic and religious communities. This makes redistributive economic policies difficult to pass, as warring factions care little about each other’s welfare.

As a result, it’s hard to see how open border advocates would enjoy living in the world they propose. They would be poorer, unhappier and exposed to conflict. What could be more immoral than that?

***

A version of this article was first published on Restoration.

In that same summer, Charles Krauthammer responded to Senator Moynihan with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He acknowledged Senator Moynihan’s point but said it was only one side of the story. Deviancy was defined down for one category of society: the lower classes and black communities. For the middle classes, who are overwhelmingly white and Christian, the opposite was true. Deviancy was in fact defined up, stigmatising and criminalising behaviour that was previously regarded as normal. In other words, there was a double standard at work.

But Krauthammer went further: he reckoned that this double standard makes us feel good. A society must feel that it is policing its norms by combatting deviancy. And once we have given up fighting it in one section of society, we move to concentrate on another.

This sociological pathology is now pervasive, contributing to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that forms part of modern identity politics. And, as foreign policy becomes increasingly entangled with the culture war, this pathology has now extended to a new terrain. The result is that the application of progressive moral double-standards is now seen at the level of geopolitics, most specifically over the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. We have produced a discourse in which deviancy is defined up for Jews and Israel, and down for Arabs and Muslims.

Immediately, for instance, it was forgotten that the greatest display of deviancy in this conflict came from Hamas. More than anything, October 7 illustrated in a single day how swift the descent from civilisation to barbarism can be. On that day, the heinous acts themselves were manifested in the massacre of innocent, unarmed and totally unprepared civilians. These were young people at a music festival, many of them peaceniks. Family members were shot, stabbed and mutilated in front of one another. Women were raped, homes were burned, and the perpetrators revelled in their acts. Their GoPro cameras were set to record, for they knew large audiences at home awaited that footage.

Celebrations ensued, not only by Palestinians but also by many Arabs, Muslims, and fellow travellers on Western university campuses. Top university administrators displayed a shocking level of moral confusion in response. The three Women of the Ivies could not even take courage before Congress simply to say: “This is not who we are. We condemn this.”

The ensuing demonisation of Israel for waging what is historically a standard siege, and the relentless calls for a ceasefire, have followed. And these calls have been so effective that now Israel’s great allies in the UK and the US are twisting Israel’s arm to concede. But even without the appeasement of a complete ceasefire, we know full well that it is only a matter of time before Hamas and her helpers reorganise and repeat the atrocities of October 7. We know it because this has been Hamas’s pattern. Attack, provoke a retaliation, complain of disproportionality. Then acquire the world’s sympathy, and negotiate ceasefire, aid, and the time to plan the next attack.

This is only possible due to several common false assumptions about the conduct of this conflict, all of which define deviancy up for Israel and down for Hamas. Chief among these is that Islamic terror is only a monstrous creation of the Israeli Frankenstein. We are frequently told that if Israel continues to pursue her mission to destroy Hamas, then Israel will create the next generation of Islamists and terrorists, not just in the Middle East but across the globe. As a result, Israel should agree to a ceasefire and hold to it even if, as would certainly be the case, the other side does not. But this assumption is plainly false. The overwhelming evidence of the last 75 years is that Islamist extremism is unaffected by what Israel does or fails to do. The extremists are created in the classrooms, sitting rooms, and neighbourhoods of Muslim and Arabs countries, in madrasas and mosques — many of which are half a world away from Israel.

Nevertheless, we are still enjoined to blame Israel for Islamism, with the crimes of the former often personified by its prime minister. A standard refrain has developed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions and failures were the cause of Hamas’s savage attacks. But whatever the truth behind the portrait of Netanyahu as the belligerent, uncompromising, democracy-undermining monster, the trope shifts attention away from the core issue, which is the belligerent uncompromising Palestinian intransigence backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Since 1947, the Arabs have remained fixed in their determination to eliminate the state of Israel, in part by preventing peace from ever coming about. Were the failed peace attempts in 1973, 1993, 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2008 all the fault of Netanyahu? Was no Arab agency involved? Take the Oslo Accords and their follow-on at Camp David in 2000. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin offered “a separate Palestinian entity short of a state”, and an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, PLO leader Yasser Arafat left the negotiating table.

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In a similar vein, we are often told that the classic human dynamic of war and peace does not apply to this conflict. The standard dynamic is that the winner takes all so that a lasting peace can occur. But this logic has never been applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Up until 1967, a conflict was waged called the Arab-Israeli war. And Israel won that war, defeating the Arab countries in 1967, and then again six years later. Only at that point was its name changed to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the territories Israel had acquired in defending itself against aggression were declared to be “occupied” and therefore illegitimate. In war, if there is no winner, and no truce holds, then peace can never prevail.

Amid this moral confusion, though, there are rays of hope. Within a few hours of the October 7 massacre, the Moroccan regime condemned the violence against civilians. The UAE called the event “barbaric and heinous” and demanded that Hamas immediately release the hostages. This is not nothing and it shows that one source of the rot — Gulf funds for indoctrination of Palestinian children — may one day dry up. The United States should help this along by applying the same standards of conduct to Muslims and Jews, the same standards of statecraft to Arab nations, Iran, and Israel. Regimes like the UAE’s need to be helped and rewarded. Conversely, when Arab states promote the death cult of political Islam, they must be condemned and shunned.

Everything eventually ends, but not all things must end in failure. In the West we have a choice to uphold our moral vantage point, or let it crumble away. But in doing so we should recognise that every lowering of standards to appease extremist Arabs and Muslims is racism dressed up as compassion and disdain masquerading as kindness. It is moral confusion and it is dangerous — suicidally so.

***

Adapted from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s 2024 Russell Kirk Lecture delivered at the Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., and co-sponsored by Alliance Defending Freedom, on March 12, 2024.

In the hope of making this task easier, the strategy group also issued a peculiar demand: that I keep silent on all issues to do with Islam, at least until after the election. They then went even further and asked that I publicly state that Islam is a religion of peace.

Suffice it to say that I refused. I explained why refusing to question the threat of Islamism wasn’t exactly a shrewd political tactic. Instead, I emphasised, we should be encouraging Muslim minorities to integrate and embrace Dutch values. But the party sided with Griffith, I was put on the naughty step, and we lost the election. Yet even this didn’t give the leadership pause for thought, its main takeaway being: if we wanted to win in the country’s four largest cities, we should continue to give isolationist forms of Islam a free pass. As I was told over and over by my senior colleagues, it was numerical common sense.

Over the past 18 years, we have witnessed the repercussions of such “common sense” — and not just in the Netherlands. Across the West, the fracturing force of Islamism is causing once-mighty political traditions to creak. In France, for instance, Emmanuel Macron is now doing his best to talk tough on Islam in an attempt to claw back what political authority he hasn’t spent. In the US, meanwhile, the Democrats have no such luxury: concerns are already starting to creep in that they could lose this year’s election if the pro-Palestine supporters mobilised by well-organised Islamists stay home in swing states. Already in Michigan, Rashida Talib has urged Democrats not to vote for Biden.

Even the United Kingdom, that island nation often seen as immune to radical forces, is now being forced to reckon with Islamism. In the week since the Labour Party suspended its candidate in Rochdale, much blame has been placed on a nebulous strain of antisemitism. What’s been missing, however, is an appreciation for where this prejudice so often originates: it is not just the product of an activist-decoloniser undergraduate politics, but of the party’s willingness to appease its Islamist voters.

This phenomenon, of course, extends well beyond the confines of Rochdale and one particular party. Rather, we are witnessing what Christopher Caldwell identified as “the revolution in Europe”. As far back as 2009, Caldwell observed how the mass immigration of Muslims was altering the culture of Europe. These new arrivals were, he noted, not enhancing the spirit of Europe’s cities but supplanting it. As he wrote: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”

For this, he (like many others) was dismissed by many as a fear-mongering xenophobe. And, taking note of his treatment, Europe’s political leaders continued to sell us false promises about multiculturalism — without realising that, in doing so, they were allowing this process of Islamisation to take root.

When observing this downward spiral, it’s fashionable to blame America; it is, after all, the nation that birthed the mantra of multiculturalism. But if America created the seeds of today’s chaos, the European climate allowed it to blossom. It is no coincidence that the European surge in Islamism came just as the continent’s dechristianisation began to take hold. This surging fanaticism was met with a spiritual vacuum — and therefore thrived.

Faced with the arrival of a new community with such a strong belief system, Europe’s political elites sought refuge in the soft bigotry of low expectations. Denying them agency, we shrouded Muslim immigrants in a rhetoric of victimhood. A set of false assumptions were developed to characterise them as a casualty of exclusion and discrimination. It became just another form of “common sense”.

After 2001, when Jihadi terrorism started to take place in Europe, and survey after survey showed that most Muslims quietly supported the belief system that justified the terrorists’ activities, European leaders doubled down on those assumptions. Rules were relaxed, standards were lowered, and excuses were made whenever their estrangement tipped over into violence.

Meanwhile, the phenomenon of data manipulation became the political norm. Academics and think-tankers lined up to produce reassuring outcomes on paper that refused to acknowledge the rising tide of Islamisation, either by ignoring it completely or downplaying the number of Muslim migrants. The establishment of Sharia tribunals was barely registered, while we were told the construction of gigantic Mosques, madrassas, and Islamic centres were led and manned by moderate Muslims. Those brave enough to still speak out — for example over grooming gangs — were silenced or expelled.

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This is the backdrop to the rise of Islamist attacks in Europe and the West, but it is also the cause of today’s political crisis in Britain. Across the country — from Rochdale to Tower Hamlets, Salisbury to Manchester — we are starting to witness what happens when Islamism is given licence to flourish. Many were fooled into thinking that 2024 would be a “boring year” for Britain: that, after the turbulence of the Tories, the reign of Starmer would, at worst, be benignly insipid.

But this was always a fantasy. Starmer, like so many of his predecessors and counterparts in Europe, is simply focused on the short-term goal of winning the general election. And, again like so many of them, he now finds himself wrestling with a Muslim base that will require compromise if he’s to win their vote: only yesterday, he called for a “ceasefire that lasts” in Gaza, without explaining how that might come about. It is, in other words, increasingly starting to feel like 2005 redux: a replay of the VVD’s electoral conundrum, and an allegedly “common-sense” response that inevitably backfires.

It’s hard not to conclude that this is the “new Britain” promised by its next Prime Minister, where scenes like those we have witnessed in Rochdale become repeated over and over again. This is, after all, what happens when a nation’s foundational principles are eroded — and when, faced with a moral and political vacuum, Islamism is the only potent force in town.

The answer is straightforward: both Ali and Gay came unprepared onto a major public stage, failed spectacularly in their respective roles, and massively embarrassed their respective organisations.

In early August, Ali had dreams of winning the 100-metre sprint for Somalia at the International University Sports Federation (FISU) Summer World University Games in China. Her performance was a fiasco. She looked confused at the starting blocks. Once the race started, she was so slow the cameraman struggled to keep her in the frame. As for the remainder of the race, one Forbes reporter noted: “Ali completed the 100-metre dash in 21.81 seconds, an embarrassing finish that’s almost double the winning 11.58-second time run by Brazil’s Gabriela Silva Mourão and nearly nine 9 seconds behind the second slowest time of 13.15 seconds by Turkmenistan’s Alsu Habibulina — leading many to ask questions about how a runner, who has never competed in a major event and appears to be untrained, was able to compete on such a large international stage.”

When she finally made it to the finish line, she did a little skip and a hop of triumph. A video of her sloth-like performance went viral on social media, along with demands for an explanation.

In early December, Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard was called to testify in Congress and asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews on campus violated Harvard university’s code of conduct. Gay delivered prepared remarks, priding herself and her institution on protecting free expression and, after a pitiful exercise in evasion, settling on the answer that calling for the genocide of Jews on campus depended on the context. She did the equivalent of Ali’s hop and skip with her smiles and smirks. The video clip of her abysmal performance went viral along with demands for an explanation.

Back in Somalia, the most pertinent questions in Ali’s case were obvious. Where was her record? How did she qualify? Where were the gatekeepers? The Somali Minister of Sports ordered an investigation, which found that a relative of Ali had ignored or lowered the standards of athletic selection for Ali. He sacked the woman in question and apologised publicly. This may not be the end of corruption in the government of Somalia, but it ended the story there within about 48 hours.

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After Gay’s shambolic performance in Congress, similar questions were asked and answered by the public. The most obvious being: how did someone with a wafer-thin scholarly record of only 11 journal publications over a period of 26 years get to become the president of Harvard? Allegations and proof of nearly 50 instances of plagiarism followed. How on earth was this overlooked? Where were the gatekeepers?

The Harvard Corporation, the authority responsible for hiring the university’s president, chose a different path from the one taken by the Somali Minister of Sports. After a series of denials and statements of “unanimous support for the president”, threats against the New York Post and accusations of bigotry, they persuaded Gay to step down. Nevertheless, she continues to stay employed by Harvard as a tenured professor, retaining an annual salary of around $900,000. As for the university itself, the result is at least a billion dollars in withdrawn commitments from various donors, more congressional probing, a slump in applications from prospective students, and the trashing of its reputation.

All of which raises a peculiar question: if the Sports Ministry of a war-torn African country is able to show ethical clarity when objective standards of merit have been violated, what is holding back the leadership of America’s most renowned university? The answer, I suspect, lies in the three-letter acronym that has been menacing American and other Western institutions of higher education for the past decade: DEI, which supposedly stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

DEI is the programmatic implementation of an intolerant progressive agenda that views the existing structures of government, education, media, and industry as deeply unjust. It presents these institutions in the light of a hierarchical “intersectional” model of the oppressors and the oppressed. The ultimate oppressor is white, male, and straight. Blacks, women, gays and others are defined as their victims. To redress these past wrongs, DEI is supposed to design new structures of “positive” discrimination, or “affirmative action”.

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This is how individuals such as Claudine Gay secured promotion to the commanding heights not just of the Ivy League, but of many other august institutions. Merit, qualifications, the ability to lead — all these criteria were cast aside as expressions of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy”.

The blame for this, of course, cannot be solely pinned on the individuals who have since benefited from DEI. As Gay ascended the ladder of academic preferment, her ambition was central but hardly sufficient. Rather, she did so with the complicity of a network of gatekeepers: the admissions offices of Princeton and Stanford; the peer reviewers who overlooked her plagiarism; the Harvard committees that promoted her through the various ranks of the professorship; and, finally, the members of the Harvard Corporation who deemed her the most suitable candidate for the position of president.

Thanks to their collaboration, and the fall-out following their exposure, the truth about DEI has been thrust into the mainstream. As an acronym, it still holds, but not in the way they intend. In reality, the D stands for the degradation of the standards once upheld at institutions such as Harvard; the E stands for their erasure; and the I stands not only for the indoctrination that follows, but also intimidation. Gay, after all, not only plagiarised the work of Carol Swain and other black academics. As dean and then as president, she set about destroying the careers of black scholars who choose to play by the rules of merit and academic integrity, notably Roland Fryer.

In a homogeneous society such as Somalia’s, identity politics is all about the bloodline. There, people in positions of authority try to give members of their extended family a leg up, whether or not they are qualified for the position in question. On rare occasions, the corruption might be caught on camera, as with the chubby girl who fancied she could win the 100-metre sprint. Normally, though, the favouring of family and friends continues until the resentment erupts into the next cycle of civil violence. There are no nice-sounding acronyms to cover up venality and, since everyone has the same skin colour and adheres to the same religion, immutable traits are irrelevant.

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In a more sophisticated society such as the United States of America, corruption takes a different form. Here, identity politics assumes the role of bloodlines. Preferment is given to “women” or “women of colour”, so long as they follow strictly the progressive party line. But the net result is essentially the same. People without talent are rewarded and promoted. Those who would fare better in a meritocracy are left seething with resentment.

In her graceless attempt to portray her downfall as something more than the result of her exposure as a fraud, Claudine Gay alleged that there was “a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society… Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organisations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.”

The reality is very different. Harvard — like the New York Times, which published her screed — has done the work of unravelling public faith all by itself. It has made a mockery of itself as surely as the Somali Sports Ministry did when it fielded a manifestly unqualified runner. The difference is that Harvard humiliated itself for the sake of an ideology, as opposed to plain nepotism. Until that ideology is extirpated not just from one university but from American education as a whole, the mafia of mediocrity will continue to march on — and produce many more Claudine Gays along the way.

The year before, I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the twin towers in New York. They had done it in the name of my religion, Islam. I was a Muslim then, although not a practising one. If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me? The underlying principle that justified the attacks was religious, after all: the idea of Jihad or Holy War against the infidels. Was it possible for me, as for many members of the Muslim community, simply to distance myself from the action and its horrific results?

At the time, there were many eminent leaders in the West — politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts — who insisted that the terrorists were motivated by reasons other than the ones they and their leader Osama Bin Laden had articulated so clearly. So Islam had an alibi.

This excuse-making was not only condescending towards Muslims. It also gave many Westerners a chance to retreat into denial. Blaming the errors of US foreign policy was easier than contemplating the possibility that we were confronted with a religious war. We have seen a similar tendency in the past five weeks, as millions of people sympathetic to the plight of Gazans seek to rationalise the October 7 terrorist attacks as a justified response to the policies of the Israeli government.

When I read Russell’s lecture, I found my cognitive dissonance easing. It was a relief to adopt an attitude of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my faith in God and declare that no such entity existed. Best of all, I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of everlasting punishment.

Russell’s assertion that religion is based primarily on fear resonated with me. I had lived for too long in terror of all the gruesome punishments that awaited me. While I had abandoned all the rational reasons for believing in God, that irrational fear of hellfire still lingered. Russell’s conclusion thus came as something of a relief: “When I die, I shall rot.”

To understand why I became an atheist 20 years ago, you first need to understand the kind of Muslim I had been. I was a teenager when the Muslim Brotherhood penetrated my community in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. I don’t think I had even understood religious practice before the coming of the Brotherhood. I had endured the rituals of ablutions, prayers and fasting as tedious and pointless.

The preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood changed this. They articulated a direction: the straight path. A purpose: to work towards admission into Allah’s paradise after death. A method: the Prophet’s instruction manual of do’s and don’ts — the halal and the haram. As a detailed supplement to the Qur’an, the hadeeth spelled out how to put into practice the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, God and the devil.

The Brotherhood preachers left nothing to the imagination. They gave us a choice. Strive to live by the Prophet’s manual and reap the glorious rewards in the hereafter. On this earth, meanwhile, the greatest achievement possible was to die as a martyr for the sake of Allah.

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The alternative, indulging in the pleasures of the world, was to earn Allah’s wrath and be condemned to an eternal life in hellfire. Some of the “worldly pleasures” they were decrying included reading novels, listening to music, dancing, and going to the cinema — all of which I was ashamed to admit that I adored.

The most striking quality of the Muslim Brotherhood was their ability to transform me and my fellow teenagers from passive believers into activists, almost overnight. We didn’t just say things or pray for things: we did things. As girls we donned the burka and swore off Western fashion and make-up. The boys cultivated their facial hair to the greatest extent possible. They wore the white dress-like tawb worn in Arab countries or had their trousers shortened above their ankle bones. We operated in groups and volunteered our services in charity to the poor, the old, the disabled and the weak. We urged fellow Muslims to pray and demanded that non-Muslims convert to Islam.

During Islamic study sessions, we shared with the preacher in charge of the session our worries. For instance, what should we do about the friends we loved and felt loyal to but who refused to accept our dawa (invitation to the faith)? In response, we were reminded repeatedly about the clarity of the Prophet’s instructions. We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not be loyal to Allah and Muhammad while also maintaining friendships and loyalty towards the unbelievers. If they explicitly rejected our summons to Islam, we were to hate and curse them.

Here, a special hatred was reserved for one subset of unbeliever: the Jew. We cursed the Jews multiple times a day and expressed horror, disgust and anger at the litany of offences he had allegedly committed. The Jew had betrayed our Prophet. He had occupied the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem. He continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind and soul.

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You can see why, to someone who had been through such a religious schooling, atheism seemed so appealing. Bertrand Russell offered a simple, zero-cost escape from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment of other people. For him, there was no credible case for the existence of God. Religion, Russell argued, was rooted in fear: “Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.”

As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun. 

So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

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That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.

And so I have come to realise that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilisation built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope.

For instance, he gave his lecture in a room full of (former or at least doubting) Christians in a Christian country. Think about how unique that was nearly a century ago, and how rare it still is in non-Western civilisations. Could a Muslim philosopher stand before any audience in a Muslim country — then or now — and deliver a lecture with the title “Why I am not a Muslim”? In fact, a book with that title exists, written by an ex-Muslim. But the author published it in America under the pseudonym Ibn Warraq. It would have been too dangerous to do otherwise.

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

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Russell and other activist atheists believed that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action — mostly by engaging in virtue-signalling theatre on behalf of a victimised minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage and mobilise the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

This piece was first published in November, 2023.

The year before, I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the twin towers in New York. They had done it in the name of my religion, Islam. I was a Muslim then, although not a practising one. If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me? The underlying principle that justified the attacks was religious, after all: the idea of Jihad or Holy War against the infidels. Was it possible for me, as for many members of the Muslim community, simply to distance myself from the action and its horrific results?

At the time, there were many eminent leaders in the West — politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts — who insisted that the terrorists were motivated by reasons other than the ones they and their leader Osama Bin Laden had articulated so clearly. So Islam had an alibi.

This excuse-making was not only condescending towards Muslims. It also gave many Westerners a chance to retreat into denial. Blaming the errors of US foreign policy was easier than contemplating the possibility that we were confronted with a religious war. We have seen a similar tendency in the past five weeks, as millions of people sympathetic to the plight of Gazans seek to rationalise the October 7 terrorist attacks as a justified response to the policies of the Israeli government.

When I read Russell’s lecture, I found my cognitive dissonance easing. It was a relief to adopt an attitude of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my faith in God and declare that no such entity existed. Best of all, I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of everlasting punishment.

Russell’s assertion that religion is based primarily on fear resonated with me. I had lived for too long in terror of all the gruesome punishments that awaited me. While I had abandoned all the rational reasons for believing in God, that irrational fear of hellfire still lingered. Russell’s conclusion thus came as something of a relief: “When I die, I shall rot.”

To understand why I became an atheist 20 years ago, you first need to understand the kind of Muslim I had been. I was a teenager when the Muslim Brotherhood penetrated my community in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. I don’t think I had even understood religious practice before the coming of the Brotherhood. I had endured the rituals of ablutions, prayers and fasting as tedious and pointless.

The preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood changed this. They articulated a direction: the straight path. A purpose: to work towards admission into Allah’s paradise after death. A method: the Prophet’s instruction manual of do’s and don’ts — the halal and the haram. As a detailed supplement to the Qur’an, the hadeeth spelled out how to put into practice the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, God and the devil.

The Brotherhood preachers left nothing to the imagination. They gave us a choice. Strive to live by the Prophet’s manual and reap the glorious rewards in the hereafter. On this earth, meanwhile, the greatest achievement possible was to die as a martyr for the sake of Allah.

More from this author

The infidels will not be silenced

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The alternative, indulging in the pleasures of the world, was to earn Allah’s wrath and be condemned to an eternal life in hellfire. Some of the “worldly pleasures” they were decrying included reading novels, listening to music, dancing, and going to the cinema — all of which I was ashamed to admit that I adored.

The most striking quality of the Muslim Brotherhood was their ability to transform me and my fellow teenagers from passive believers into activists, almost overnight. We didn’t just say things or pray for things: we did things. As girls we donned the burka and swore off Western fashion and make-up. The boys cultivated their facial hair to the greatest extent possible. They wore the white dress-like tawb worn in Arab countries or had their trousers shortened above their ankle bones. We operated in groups and volunteered our services in charity to the poor, the old, the disabled and the weak. We urged fellow Muslims to pray and demanded that non-Muslims convert to Islam.

During Islamic study sessions, we shared with the preacher in charge of the session our worries. For instance, what should we do about the friends we loved and felt loyal to but who refused to accept our dawa (invitation to the faith)? In response, we were reminded repeatedly about the clarity of the Prophet’s instructions. We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not be loyal to Allah and Muhammad while also maintaining friendships and loyalty towards the unbelievers. If they explicitly rejected our summons to Islam, we were to hate and curse them.

Here, a special hatred was reserved for one subset of unbeliever: the Jew. We cursed the Jews multiple times a day and expressed horror, disgust and anger at the litany of offences he had allegedly committed. The Jew had betrayed our Prophet. He had occupied the Holy Mosque in Jerusalem. He continued to spread corruption of the heart, mind and soul.

Suggested reading

Humanism is a heresy

By Tom Holland

You can see why, to someone who had been through such a religious schooling, atheism seemed so appealing. Bertrand Russell offered a simple, zero-cost escape from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment of other people. For him, there was no credible case for the existence of God. Religion, Russell argued, was rooted in fear: “Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.”

As an atheist, I thought I would lose that fear. I also found an entirely new circle of friends, as different from the preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood as one could imagine. The more time I spent with them — people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins — the more confident I felt that I had made the right choice. For the atheists were clever. They were also a great deal of fun. 

So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

More from this author

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That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.

And so I have come to realise that Russell and my atheist friends failed to see the wood for the trees. The wood is the civilisation built on the Judeo-Christian tradition; it is the story of the West, warts and all. Russell’s critique of those contradictions in Christian doctrine is serious, but it is also too narrow in scope.

For instance, he gave his lecture in a room full of (former or at least doubting) Christians in a Christian country. Think about how unique that was nearly a century ago, and how rare it still is in non-Western civilisations. Could a Muslim philosopher stand before any audience in a Muslim country — then or now — and deliver a lecture with the title “Why I am not a Muslim”? In fact, a book with that title exists, written by an ex-Muslim. But the author published it in America under the pseudonym Ibn Warraq. It would have been too dangerous to do otherwise.

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

More from this author

Israel's distraction is a warning to the West

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Russell and other activist atheists believed that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action — mostly by engaging in virtue-signalling theatre on behalf of a victimised minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage and mobilise the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

***

Watch and read Ayaan respond to her critics here.

The more important question, however, is this: what will the West itself do now?

Launched from land, sea and air, the attack was unprecedented in both scale and barbarity. It was a display of Isis-like savagery. But it was also the culmination of a sophisticated military operation, probably months in the planning and aided by at least one foreign power. As a result, more than 800 Israelis have been slaughtered, and no doubt more will follow in the days and weeks to come. Again: how could Israel, with its vast intelligence apparatus and decades of experience, let this happen?

The obvious answer — at least the one doing the rounds of the think tanks in Europe and America — is that Israel was distracted. And when facing such determined enemies as Hamas and Iran, who are always on the lookout for the perfect moment to strike, distraction amounts to suicide.

There is certainly some truth to this. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “a house divided against itself cannot stand”. Israel, riven by internal discord over Netanyahu’s attempted reform of its supreme court, has been hamstrung for months. Instead of looking outwards to the existential threats on and within its borders, politicians have been infighting over judicial reform. And when the leadership of a civilian-led democracy becomes obsessed with such a complex issue, who leads the military? What good can tomorrow’s justices do for today’s victims of terrorism?

Yet the danger of distraction is not merely an Israeli one. It is just as prevalent, if not more so, in the US-led Western world. In recent years, old fronts have opened in the clash of civilisations (Samuel Huntington is proved more correct by the day). America is now involved indirectly in battles against Putin’s Russia and Iran-backed Hamas, while China is watching closely, perhaps eyeing up Taiwan. Between Khamenei, Putin and Xi, the new anti-Western Axis looks increasingly threatening. And how do we respond?

We can be partly grateful that both the UK and US have pledged to support Israel, as they pledged support for Ukraine against Putin. But these are not difficult decisions to make. A few words here; a press conference there. This is no substitute for strategy which, at present, is sorely missing.

In the UK, the two major political parties are busying themselves with the circus that is conference season, doing their best to emerge with some semblance of respectability. (Judging by the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the Labour Conference yesterday, Keir Starmer has his work cut out.) In the US, the situation inspires even less confidence. While the Democrats see the return of Trump to the White House as a threat to democracy itself and the Republicans view 2024 as a test of election integrity, America’s enemies continue to circle, looking for an opening. The House of Representatives lacks a Speaker. A government shutdown seems inevitable. We are distracted, and they know it. In my view, it was as much the distraction of the West as the distraction of Israel’s politicians that emboldened Hamas and its backers to launch their war of terror.

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None of this is to say that the issues that dominate the media cycle and political discourse are not important: immigration, crime, the climate. But are they existential? Certainly not when compared with the threat posed to Israel by its malevolent neighbours; and certainly not when compared with the threat of an emboldened Middle East to a West that has grown complacent about the threat of terrorism. In a well-functioning democracy, there would be clarity about the need to support Israel with more than fine words. We would not ramp up the rhetoric to the apocalyptic; we would not distract ourselves with internecine infighting.

Just look at how the West has attempted — and failed — to process the carnage in Israel. Caught in a Manichean trap that prioritises moral certainty over reality, anti-Israel activists have succeeded in distracting us further. They distort reality by pretending Israel is simply paying the price for its aggression; that it must, as former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn put it, end its “occupation” of Gaza. (Ironically, these very same people tend to be the ones warning Israel not to launch an invasion of Gaza — is it occupied or not?) Further distraction follows: in the form of protests outside Israeli embassies, in those contortions that enable activists to justify attacks on Jewish shops and restaurants.

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As a result, many people are unable to agree on the few facts in this interminable conflict that are clear: that Hamas is driven more by its hatred of Jewish people than its love for the Palestinians; that Hamas routinely kills, tortures and persecutes Palestinians who seek peace with Israel; that, well before Hamas paraded the dead bodies of Israeli women down its streets, it used Palestinian children as human shields.

And now, there is the fact that Iran, Russia and China are looking on with glee. They see anarchy in Israel and a weeping wound in the Western alliance. The palaces of Tehran, Moscow and Beijing are all looking West, and what do they see? Activists in Time Square calling another intifada, Jewish schoolchildren being told not to wear their uniform, national broadcasters giving airtime to Hamas apologists. Our weakness is plain for the world to see.

So the West must decide. Do we degenerate into quarrelling factions or do we reassert our enduring values and highest ideals on the global stage? Do we stand with Israel in action as in word or do we fall into a chasm of distraction and division? This might just be the most important choice our generation makes.

Was Suella Braverman’s speech on Tuesday so outrageous? Was her suggestion that “many” asylum seekers pretend to be gay “homophobic”, or “dog-whistling”, or an “insult to refugees”? Did it have echoes of Enoch Powell?

Not really. For anyone who’s been paying attention to Europe’s immigration crisis, the only surprising thing about her speech was that it has taken so long for a politician to air the unsavoury truth about the mess in which we now find ourselves, and how we can possibly fix it.

Braverman wasn’t making a political point when she observed how Britain’s broken asylum system creates huge incentives for uncontrolled illegal migration, which, inevitably, has a serious “impact on social cohesion”. She was merely stating the truth. Once upon a time, this was an argument acknowledged by the Left. I’m old enough to remember when the Joseph Rowntree Foundation argued that “both our immigration and asylum systems make people destitute by design and need urgent reform”. It was this July.

What might that reform look like? Braverman made two recommendations that, seen in the clear light of day, don’t seem particularly radical. The first was that Britain should consider removing itself from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), an unaccountable legal factory housed in Strasbourg which issues more than 4,000 judgements a year. Given Britain’s recent and historical aversion to being ruled by unelected European institutions, withdrawing from the ECHR would hardly be out of character. The same can be said of Braverman’s suggestion that the United Nations’ Refugee Convention, which came into force in 1951, might merit a rethink.

And yet, after the speech, the deluge. Sir Elton issued a stern statement that he was “very concerned” by what she said about gay migrants, believing it would legitimise “hate and violence against them”. Many on the Left denounced what they saw as Braverman’s betrayal of her background as the daughter of immigrants. Even a number of her fellow Conservative MPs criticised her “alarmist” rhetoric.

Yet perhaps more surprising is the support she received. Many in her party concede that Braverman has a point. Even The Times, not known for its xenophobic bigotry, admitted in its leader column that “she is right to ask the questions that need asking”. For many, this is simply a matter of history. The world, after all, has changed since the Cold War era in which the Convention was conceived. Mass immigration is no longer defined by those fleeing from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, but those fleeing from less stable countries whose cultural norms clash with modern Western values. Trust me: I would know.

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It is hard to exaggerate the intensity of despair felt by those who reside in failed and failing states ravaged by conflict, poverty, natural disasters and the disorder that accompanies political corruption. Consider the tragedies that unfolded this month in Morocco and Libya; the never-ending civil strife in the Congo and Eritrea; the breakdown of Syria; the regression of Afghanistan into Taliban rule. Every man, woman and child who risks their lives to escape the place they call home deserves all the support and sanctuary they can get. It is pointless to wrangle about whether the despair driving people out of their homes is, as stated in the Convention, caused by political persecution or social discrimination or even a bleak economic outlook. There is nothing progressive about that.

Yet none of this is an excuse for ignoring the very concrete problems raised by mass immigration. The most obvious is one of scale: the sheer volume of people determined to flee their homelands and relocate permanently to Europe and America. The figure of 780 million people mentioned by Braverman may even be on the small side: surely reason enough to doubt the usefulness of the Convention.

The net effect has been to increase human suffering by empowering networks of people smugglers who con vulnerable populations into paying them thousands of pounds. Far from being empowered by reaching the promised land, too many migrants find themselves dehumanised even further. Consider the scenes in Lampedusa this month, where more than 2,000 migrants arrived by dinghy in a single day; or the streets of southern Europe, where starving migrants beg for food. If this is the utopia built by the ECHR and the Convention, is it one worth maintaining?

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This is the question Britain and Europe face. And in answering it, perhaps surprisingly, it becomes clear how, far from being an extremist, Braverman isn’t extreme enough. For if we accept the reality she describes, the solution isn’t “reform” of the Convention — but “withdrawal”.

Just as with the ECHR, the Convention is evidently unfit for purpose. And just as with the ECHR, the Convention cannot be fixed by elected politicians. Yes, British representatives can make suggestions and seek to work with other signatories on changes favourable to all. But they don’t have the power to revise, review or reform those treaties. What they do have, though, is the option to leave if it doesn’t work for them, to shift power away from supranational institutions to the British state.

As Lord Sumption wrote this week, Britain faces a simple question: “How we should make law for our society? And does this particular way of making law have any democratic legitimacy?” The answer, I suspect, depends on where one falls on the political divide of our time: do you favour the inhumane reality of our fractured world — or the power of democratic rule to change it?

Since the Sixties, the answer on campuses from Harvard down has been race-based affirmative action — a policy dedicated to increasing racial diversity on campuses. Until today, that is, when the Supreme Court rejected the practice as unconstitutional.

In the coming days, you will no doubt be treated to a cacophony of views either celebrating the decision as a victory for meritocracy or abhorring it as a racist verdict that exposes the white supremacy inherent in our institutions. What you won’t hear, however, is much discussion about whether affirmative action has realised its intended outcome of raising black Americans, the descendants of slaves and victims of segregation, out of poverty. It is all too easy for a university to boast about having a certain number of black kids on campus. It is much harder to reflect on whether the policy that put them there has succeeded more generally.

While the birth of affirmative action can be traced back to the end of the Civil War, its role in college admissions was only secured by a Supreme Court ruling in 1978. Since then, all affirmative-action policies have articulated the same goal: to make the second-class socio-economic status of black Americans a thing of the past.

In part, this was to be celebrated. In the US, access to college is seen as a prerequisite for success; indeed, those with bachelor’s degrees tend to earn significantly more than those with only a high school diploma: 75% more, according to one recent study. In other words, despite recent cynicism, affirmative action comes from a genuine desire to improve the lives of black Americans.

But have these attempts worked? Although the formal and objective legal and social barriers to black prosperity have been eliminated, and despite the fact that all sorts of other government welfare and criminal justice policies have been adopted since the Sixties, disparities between white and black Americans remain entrenched in wealth, education, housing and crime. One recent study by the Federal Reserves notes, for instance, that black households earn on average about half as much as white households. In fact, black Americans do less well than any other minority groups in America, including other black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa.

As for those black Americans who do get into college, only 42% graduate within six years — well below the national average  of 63%. Forgive me for spelling this out, but it bears emphasising: if you are a black college student in America, you are more likely to drop out than graduate.

From a humanitarian point of view, then, one of the key problems with the debate around affirmative action is that it focuses on admissions, and not on the trajectories of students after they are admitted. For a university to enrol a student is, in some ways, easy — in the sense that all it consists of is sending out a formal letter. By contrast, putting the admitted student on the path to graduation and a successful future is more challenging. All of which raises an uncomfortable question: just how fair is it to admit students without considering their ultimate chance of degree completion and the debt load they will be saddled with regardless of whether they graduate? Or, to frame it more constructively: if affirmative action is not the answer to the plight of black America, what is?

To answer this, it pays to compare successful black Americans with those who lag behind. In May 2022, I attended a conference of distinguished black thinkers, including Clarence Thomas, Glenn Loury and Ian Rowe. During the gathering, I identified three main groups of black Americans. The first consists of those who are quietly successful and rarely make the news. Even during segregation, they somehow prospered, and with the abolition of formal racism in America, they thrived.

The second faction is embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. These people loudly argue that recent racial progress is irrelevant and seek to exploit the history of American racism to further their own radical agenda. They mostly come from affluent families, which is perhaps why they prefer to focus on skin colour rather than economic class as an explanation for why black America remains disadvantaged. This is the group which benefits most from affirmative action policies.

The third grouping is made up of a vast number of poor black Americans. They tend to be wards of the state, in prison, involved in or affected by crime, unemployed or employed in low-paying jobs that are threatened by mass immigration and growing automation. The second group claims to speak for this group’s interests, but in fact exploits their genuine grievances for their own political ends, encouraging poor black Americans to think of themselves as forever doomed to be victims. This inspires a mindset of permanent resentment and does nothing at all to actually inspire them, let alone improve their economic circumstances in an enduring manner.

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The other obvious difference is that those in group one tend to come from stable, monogamous families. They largely complete their education before marrying and having children. They cultivate a strong work ethic and are members of strong communities.

The problem is that poor black Americans (group three) live in an environment in which these values are difficult to nourish. They often face an intergenerational cycle of poverty involving fractured families, dysfunctional school systems and financial strain. Young men are forced to look to all the wrong role models to survive, embracing norms that are not compatible with durable socio-economic stability.

When one looks at other demographics, however, one finds that this pattern is not solely racial. The factors outlined above can lock any group of people into poverty, forcing them to live in neighbourhoods where violence is common and education is poor. In such cases, the cycle continues. Think, for example, of the poor white Americans discussed in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, who have ended up in distinct but not entirely dissimilar circumstances.

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Besides strong families that nurture habits associated with stability and success in life — literacy, inquisitiveness, a hard work ethic — access to good schools at an early age is essential for remedying the economic disparities. And this is where affirmative action stepped in, no doubt because other factors — such as stable families — were beyond the power of legislators to address.

Seen in this light, affirmative action on its own could never solve the problems of black Americans born into terrible environments, because its operation came too late. It worked in the latter half of the 20th century for those black Americans who came from environments that encouraged high educational attainment, because the only obstacle facing them was formal discrimination based on skin colour. But it could not work for those who came from less auspicious backgrounds. If you were poor, it was never going to be enough.

So, what comes next? Of course, nobody is to blame for the environment into which they are born. But, equally, we have to recognise that there are good and bad environments — and whichever one you are born into does affect your life outcome. Accepting this is the first step to solving the disparities faced not just by black Americans but also by other disadvantaged groups in the US. This was affirmative action’s fundamental flaw: the plight of poor black Americans has little to do with race. It was a policy inspired by good intentions, born into a world that no longer exists.

In Delaware the following day, Joe Biden did his best to keep up the act, opting to go for a bike ride near his beach house. When he bumped into a gaggle of reporters, he broke into a laugh and told them that post-Title 42 America is clearly “much better than you all expected”. Everything was still going smoothly. Nothing to see here.

To some extent, Biden and Harris can be forgiven for displaying a certain level of self-satisfaction. Today marks one week since Title 42 expired, and the expected surge of migrants is yet to materialise. Quite the opposite, in fact. The number of illegal crossings seems to have dropped; short-term bed capacity appears to be increasing; the country’s southern borderlands have not descended into anarchy. As the media has enjoyed pointing out, America’s immigration crisis appears to be waning.

Except, I suspect, it isn’t. Overshadowed by the gleeful coverage in recent days was one story that, more than any other, hints at the chaos to come. On Friday, footage from the Central Processing Center in El Paso showed an alarming level of overcrowding. The site, according to Texas Congressman Tony Gonzalez, has a maximum capacity of 1,000 migrants; on Friday, there were 6,000.

This hardly came as a surprise to those, such as Gonzalez, for whom the border crisis is a matter of everyday politics. America’s immigration numbers have been soaring for months: as of Friday morning, the Border Force had more than 24,000 migrants in custody — twice the average daily number last November.

The more significant problem here, however, is more complex than a straightforward numbers game — and it extends beyond the practicalities of the border issue. Of course, stories abound of governmental and administrative failure on either side of America’s crossing with Mexico. There’s the smartphone app required to apply for asylum that often doesn’t work, the arbitrary nature of the decisions over who is allowed through, and the inhumane conditions that plague so many migrant centres.

But the real failure of America’s immigration system only becomes apparent once those hurdles are cleared. When an illegal migrant is detained in the US, they have to appear before an immigration court before they can be deported. And at present, the average waiting time between an arrival and the issuing of a “Notice to Appear” before a judge at one of the country’s 66 immigration courts is four and a half years. As Art Arthur, a former immigration judge, recently put it, the system is “well past broken”.

So in terms of remedying the greater problem — of the administrative dysfunction that underscores the entire system — the recent reduction in numbers change nothing. As a recent investigation by RealClear revealed, it doesn’t take much to overwhelm the current programme. In Atlanta, there is a four-year waiting time for just 1,757 people; Baltimore’s court is “mostly booked” with fewer than 3,500 cases.

And even if these backlogs were miraculously cleared, it is uncertain whether terminating Title 42 will stem the future flow. According to federal records, ICE had already eased off using it in the months before it expired: in the second half of 2022, a monthly average of just 4,000 migrants were expelled under the programme. Overall immigration continued to increase and America’s creaking system continued to flounder. In other words, scrapping Title 42 was a smokescreen — a distraction that provided cover for a failing political class that has given up solving a decades-old problem.

Nor is this incapacity unique to America — if anything, it is a feature of almost every modern Western democracy with high levels of immigration. Last year, for instance, an unprecedented surge saw Canada’s population increase by one million for the first time. Next week, it looks to be the turn of the United Kingdom, with a government report set to show migration doubled last year.

The case of the UK is particularly instructive, not least because “being tough on immigration” has frequently been viewed as a vote-winner for the Conservative Party, especially since Brexit. Even today, the country generally views levels as too high. It has been striking, then, to watch the British Right attempt to explain away the current crisis at its first National Conservatism conference this week.

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During her keynote speech, home secretary Suella Braverman failed to address whether the dramatic rise in 2022 might have something to do with her own party’s inability to devise a successful immigration policy during the 13 years that it has been in power. Instead, she suggested that British workers should be trained to fill shortages among occupations such as lorry drivers and fruit pickers.

If that seems like an obvious alternative to importing foreign labour, that’s because it is: in 2020, the Conservative Government launched a campaign to recruit more UK-based workers for seasonal farm roles — but the programme was scrapped a year later after too few people signed up. Braverman’s proposal has been tried and failed. Just as with Biden and Harris, the poverty of imagination is astounding: in America, they hail the expiration of a mediocre immigration policy as a victory; in the UK, they simply recycle rejected ones.

In the coming weeks, it is not inconceivable that Britain and America’s immigration crises will be framed as polar opposites. On one side of the Atlantic, a smiling Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will assure voters that the immigration crisis is over; on the other, Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman will try to convince voters that their glossy “new” policies will make sure it is over soon. But for all the optics, the truth is that both sets of leaders find themselves in a similar situation. With an election year coming, they each sit proudly atop two creaking immigration systems that they are unable to fix but will have to defend against a fired-up opposition. Perhaps then it will finally become clear that everything isn’t going smoothly.

This is the paradox of the past 12 months: the existence of women is being questioned in the very place where female emancipation has come furthest, while in places where women remain shackled to medieval notions of honour and chastity, true feminism is at its strongest.

Why should we worry about dictionary definitions, when everyone knows what a woman is anyway? This may seem like a fair question. Yet simply dismissing the erasure of a word as a “culture war issue” misunderstands the forces that drive it. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay noted in their 2020 book Cynical Theories, language is now viewed as a tool of oppression, and thus must be altered in the name of so-called “liberation”. These arguments over the word “woman”, then, have wider repercussions: they are fronts in a greater war that will determine how language itself is used.

Those who would divorce “woman” from its biological implications often present their ideas as innocuous. They are, we are told, simply champions of “inclusion”. But their ideology is hardly uncontroversial, and surrendering to it is not harmless. The past year has seen reports of transgender women attacking women in female-only spaces and unfairly winning trophies in women’s sports. The spirit of these failures was perhaps best-distilled in the words of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who in March was unable to define what being a woman entailed during her Senate confirmation hearing. “I’m not a biologist,” she said, as if one needed to be a professional scientist to know basic biological facts.

A word of clarification. I am immensely sympathetic to the plight of transgender people and believe they ought to have the same moral and legal rights as everyone else. To be against militant trans activists’ gender ideology is not to be transphobic. Rather, it is simply to agree, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie succinctly put it, that “trans women are trans women”. Adichie was savaged for this and other statements evincing wrongthink, but acknowledging that trans women are distinct from women, that there are potential conflicts between their rights, and that gender ideology opens the door to abusive men masquerading as women, should not be controversial. Standing up for the rights of transgender people should not mean pretending sex does not exist altogether.

Indulging in this fantasy can have perverse, and dangerous, repercussions — both at home and abroad. Here in the West, it culminates in a myopic worldview which holds that a bestselling author (and domestic abuse survivor) should be trolled for funding a women-only service for victims of sexual abuse. Elsewhere in the world, the erosion of our understanding of what it means to be a “woman” has more immediate consequences.

Consider what has taken place in Kenya, Iran and Afghanistan in just the past two months. In Kenya, while women in America debated what we should call a person born with a cervix, FGM has taken a new and insidious form. In Iran, the female-led protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who was arrested for breaking mandatory dress code laws, have been met with an equally inhumane response. Reports abound of Iran’s security services raping protestors and shooting at the faces and genitals of female protesters. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban government reintroduced Sharia Law, meaning women are now barred from walking outside without a male relative and must cover up with a burqa or hijab when outside the home. Earlier this month, a woman was publicly flogged for entering a shop without a male guardian. Last week, the Taliban banned women from studying at university

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Is it really a coincidence that, in the same year the West forgot what it means to be a woman, we decided it was acceptable to turn our backs on women in those countries? The above is what happens when a society stops caring what it means to be a woman; when a centuries-old fight for emancipation becomes relegated to semantics. Of course, this takes a different form in Kenya, Iran and Afghanistan. But there still seem to me to be similarities between today’s gender activists and theocratic subjugators. Both believe, on the basis of a contentious ideology, that they have a monopoly on truth. And both, in a sense, are champions of the subjective over the objective: in one case, particular religious beliefs are said to tell us how society should be run — and in the other, mere feelings are said to abolish material reality.

This is why gender ideology advocates are a threat not just to women but to Western ideals, too. Western culture prides itself on the achievements of the Enlightenment and science — in other words, on objectivity. It was on an objective basis that previous generations of feminists staked their claim: their plight was based on an appeal to reason. Now, so-called “progressives” — another term that has been redefined into meaninglessness — stake their claim on subjective feelings and happily ignore or dismiss its material effects.

The effects of this are slowly taking shape. In the Seventies, the anti-Shah Iranians threw in their lot with the ayatollahs in the delusional hope that the ayatollahs would share power after the revolution. They learned very quickly that fanatics cannot be trusted or restrained. Similarly, many Western feminists ended up allying themselves with progressivism, and now far too many women have felt the terrible consequences of that alliance. If the spirit of true feminism is to be reclaimed, we need more JK Rowlings and fewer Ketanji Brown Jacksons.

It is not just feminism and the rights of women that are at stake here: so, too, are the best ideals of the West itself. If 2022 is the year of the “woman”, let’s hope 2023 will be the year when we can delete those quotation marks.

Ever since Britain voted to leave the EU, countless politicians have tried to place immigration at the heart of public debate. Perhaps they think that tackling the issue is a guaranteed way to make their name and advance their career. What few realise, however, is that it is a career-killer.

What are we to make of this? Are we simply to conclude that immigration is an unsolvable problem, fated to forever curse Britain’s unfortunate Home Secretaries, from Jack Straw through to Braverman? It often seems that way. But such fatalism is not helpful. Immigration is a political problem like any other, and can be solved like any other, even if it happens to be a particularly tough one.

Perhaps the real challenge isn’t actually immigration itself, but a lack of political willpower. After all, the immigration issue is not going away any time soon. If anything, it is likely to get worse. Africa and the Middle East contain more than 1.5 billion people, many of whom live in areas rife with political instability and will be the hardest hit by the looming global economic recession related to the war in Ukraine. Nearly all these regions are on Europe’s periphery.

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To put it simply, many, many more will likely make their way to Europe in the very near future. This will mean more political polarisation and extremism in Europe, as those frustrated by politicians’ failure to control their nation’s borders seek radical, even violent, solutions. If there has ever been a time to reverse decades of incompetence on immigration, it is surely now.

What, then, can be done? For a start, instead of hollow tough-talking and tinkering around the edges with frivolous, impractical plans like the Rwanda scheme, politicians need to address the underlying issues that have allowed this crisis to flourish. And the most obvious place to start would be completely replacing the underlying, outdated legislation that is at the root of so many of the UK and Europe’s immigration woes.

The UK, for instance, remains a signatory to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which, along with its 1967 Protocol, the UN’s refugee agency calls “the key legal documents that form the basis of our work”. What the UN fails to mention, however, is that its legislation dates from the Cold War, and was originally devised as a short-term Eurocentric solution to a post-war problem: to help those fleeing from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Its architects never envisioned a world of mass, global migration from poorer, less stable countries whose people follow very different cultural norms, many of which clash with modern Western values (women’s rights, for one). The 1951 Convention is, in other words, decades out-of-date. Its authors could never have conceived the scale of today’s migrant crisis.

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Yet the 1951 Convention is just one example of international legislation hampering British attempts to control its borders. There are many others. As the Joint Committee on Human Rights found last year when examining a proposed bill to give the UK government more power to criminalise and turn back migrants crossing the Channel:

“As a signatory to international treaties governing maritime law, including the SOLAS and SAR conventions and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea… the Joint Committee finds that Government proposals to ‘pushback’ migrants attempting to cross the Channel in small boats is likely to see the UK act in contravention of its international obligations.”

The bill passed, but as the above shows, it is unlikely to be effectively implemented. At present, then, it is impossible for the immigration crisis to be solved, for the simple reason that any effective new laws will clash with other legal obligations. Indeed, it is because of the UK’s membership in the European Convention on Human Rights that the Rwanda scheme failed: at the last minute, the ECHR ruled that the UK could not deport migrants to Rwanda. This is not to say that the Rwanda plan was a suitable solution, but rather that if progress is to be made, a fundamental conflict has to be resolved — and the only way to achieve this is for the UK to revisit its legal obligations and amend or even abandon them completely.

In today’s climate, of course, this will prove tricky, if not impossible. Braverman’s position is increasingly unstable: as last week’s attack in Dover demonstrated, she has lost control of her brief and shows little sign of regaining it. In the short term, at least, it is unlikely that she will have the parliamentary support to push through a complete overhaul of the UK’s legislative commitments. All of which means that Rishi Sunak has little choice but to step in. This is no longer a battle he can afford to delegate. For immigration is a career-killer — and if it’s not warded off soon, Braverman is unlikely to be its only victim.

The prospects certainly look better than in 2009, when the country’s protestors were primarily middle-class and more narrowly focused on the issue of Ahmadinejad’s election victory, rather than on dismantling the oppressive system in its entirety. Today, men and women, rural and urban, affluent and poor are all marching to bring down the Islamic Republic. Khamenei is also reported to be in very poor health, so the chants might just come true.

Yet senior US officials I have spoken to have cautioned against blind optimism. As they explained, we’ve seen many moments in recent Iranian history where the tide seemed about to turn, only to be disappointed. The same officials also warned that America is trying not to become too involved: the Biden administration isn’t supporting the protestors, but it isn’t explicitly discouraging them, either.

This isn’t an example of craven politics: I also fear that the end of the regime might not herald a brave new world, but rather a bloody mess, where Khamenei’s death is followed by internecine fighting for power between various Iranian factions. Would the overthrow of the regime lead to civil war, a military coup, or liberal democracy? Nobody knows.

None of this is to say that, faced with a possible uprising in Iran, America should avert its gaze. Perhaps more than anything, the wave of protests now sweeping the country is a perfect moment to remind ourselves of the shameful stupidity of US policy in the region in recent years. Take the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal, which gave the regime time and space and money to strengthen its morality police and security infrastructure, as well as extend its regional influence. If no deal had been signed, perhaps the regime’s current crisis would have come sooner.

Nor should we forget the fact that Iran has recently tried to abduct and kill several American citizens on American soil; or that a number of senior US officials believe Iran is to blame for the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie last month. It’s a national disgrace that America’s politicians saw fit to break bread with the butchers of Tehran in the first place. And still too many think we can politely sit down with them again to re-negotiate the nuclear deal. I wouldn’t blame the brave men and women of Iran if they never forgave us for such short-sighted idiocy.

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Still, while the response of the West should be limited to cautious optimism, there is one other conclusion we can draw, no matter what happens: the current protests are a unique, and uniquely inspiring, phenomenon. Nowhere else in the Muslim world — and I mean, literally, nowhere else — would we see what we are seeing right now in Iran: men and women, together, standing up for each other, the men demanding justice for the regime’s murder of a woman who dared to let her hair show. It bears repeating: the men of Iran are standing alongside women as they burn their hijabs.

This is the most dramatic evidence of something I have long suspected: Iran is different. I have many Iranian women friends who are highly accomplished. They are doctors and scientists and writers and artists. When I ask them how they do it, they tell me that they owe much of their success to their male relatives’ support of their ambitions. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the fire behind the protests was lit by Mahsa Amini’s family — in particular, her father, whose remarkable courage in accusing the Iranian authorities of a cover-up serves as an emblem of the solidarity many Iranian men have with their women.

Now, there are caveats to this. This phenomenon isn’t universal across Iran, and many Iranian women suffer terribly at the hands of their families (and some women are even vicious policers of “morality”). But the fact that even some men behave like this is distinctive in the Muslim world, and their appearence alongside women in these protests is not a sight that will soon be forgotten. In other Muslim countries, women suffer as much, if not more, at the hands of their male relatives as at the hands of the authorities. Men jealously guard women’s honour, beating, imprisoning, and even killing their female family members for bringing shame upon the family.

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Schools shouldn't fly BLM flags

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This is part of the reason why Iran is so unique: not only are men standing publicly with women, but women must also be aware that they are under no threat from their husbands and male relatives, otherwise they would not dare put themselves on the front lines like this. Consider, for example, the beautiful, inspiring videos of women tossing their headscarves into bonfires before dancing joyously away, for all the world to see. If they thought their fathers or brothers were waiting back home to punish them, I doubt we would see such sights on this scale.

Meanwhile, in the West, where feminism has proved more successful than anywhere else, anti-male grievance dominates the mainstream, with solidarity between men and women replaced by a desire for polarising identity politics. As America’s feminist movement collapses under the weight of it its own divisiveness, I can’t help but find its Iranian counterpart far more inspiring: men and women standing together, speaking up for each other’s rights. How much better this is than the violently woman-hating Taliban or the petulant privilege of so many Western feminists.

In March 1979, just as the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, the American feminist Kate Millett travelled to Iran to join a protest against his plan to make hijabs compulsory for women. The demonstration ultimately proved unsuccessful. Millett was arrested and expelled from the country; Iranian women were turned into second-class citizens. Yet, as we are now discovering, their revolutionary spirit was not extinguished. Iranian feminism has stood the test of time; it hasn’t been corrupted. If only the same could be said for the West.

I thought of these children when a friend from Massachusetts complained to me about the Black Lives Matter flag flying outside her son’s school. These flags have become a common sight outside American classrooms since the summer of 2020, and my friend isn’t the only one who’s concerned. The Diocese of Worcester recently ordered a local school to stop identifying itself as Catholic over its refusal to remove BLM and Pride flags, and similar controversies have erupted in Utah and Tennessee.

My friend’s complaint was that BLM is corrupt, which it almost certainly is. Reporting from earlier this year showed that the group’s founder had been spending BLM funds on lavish real estate purchases and payouts to family members. Only last week, Shalomyah Bowers, the leader of the BLM Global Network Foundation, was accused of stealing more than $10 million for personal use.

But complaints over the organisation’s corruption miss the point. Even if BLM were a paragon of transparency, its flag should never have been flown outside an American school — for the simple reason that its core principles are antithetical to a sound education. In other words, it is not a flawed organisation with noble ideals; it is a flawed organisation whose ideals are, at best, misguided and, at worst, actively destructive, with the most disastrous results for black children.

Take BLM’s views on the family. In the guiding principles of its school programme, BLM states that it is “committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement”. That may seem like an innocuous principle, one that is unremarkable in progressive circles. But in the real world, it is hard to think of a worse idea to teach black kids. As the academics W. Bradford Wilcox and Hal Boyd have noted, the percentage of children in two-parent families in a given community is the “strongest and most robust predictor of economic mobility”. This holds for children of all races, but particularly for minorities. And yet BLM’s manifesto calls for the creation of “black villages” that “collectively care for one another” — even though black boys do much better when their fathers are around.

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Even more dangerous to children are BLM’s ideas about a “national defunding of the police”. What does defunding the police mean in practice? The short answer is: more black death. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, various cities experimented with defunding and otherwise handicapping their police forces, only to find their streets filled with blood. In Oakland, the city planned to slash its police budget in half, until murders nearly doubled from 2019 to 2021 — an extreme version of a pattern that has played out across the United States. Indeed, homicides and shootings spiked across the country in the aftermath of the Floyd riots, driven in part by police demoralisation and in part by “decarceration” policies such as bail reform advocated for by BLM.

Focusing solely on curbing the police also takes much-needed attention away from the suffering inflicted on black children and their families in predominantly black areas where violent crime is rife. Why do we hear so much from BLM and so little from, for example, the organisation Voices of Black Mothers United (VBMU)? VBMU’s website states: “While a black death at the hands of police is the subject of national outrage, the numerous black deaths that occur every day in our communities are ignored. The victims are often children, and their mothers are seldom given a platform to voice their opinions.” And as its Director, Sylvia Bennett-Stone, who lost her own daughter to gun violence in 2004, has said: “It would be devastating to any community to defund or weaken the police force.”

If police presence in black communities is necessary to stop such horrific violence, then why do BLM want to reduce it? The undeniable fact is that black lives matter and police save black lives. And black people seem to agree: while distrust for the police in the black community is high, many black people are staunchly against defunding and are deeply concerned about crime on their streets. In Floyd’s home city of Minneapolis, three-quarters of black residents believe the city shouldn’t reduce its police force.

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Add to this the psychological effect of BLM’s catastrophism and it beggars belief that schools think it suitable to fly its flag above their buildings. When young black Americans are told that their country is irredeemably racist, with bigotry baked into its very DNA, then what hope can they possibly have? Never mind the great strides of progress made by black Americans over the past two centuries or so; all of that is a lie, and we are doomed to be subjugated forever — unless you embrace their radical ideology.

Will this really help black children? Or will it teach them nihilism and despondency, and thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy where black people don’t succeed because there’s no point in even trying?

The BLM movement, then, does not represent justice for black Americans; it will not lead to a future of racial harmony. It is the enemy of black prosperity and education. America’s teachers shouldn’t be flying its symbol — they should be using it to illustrate the dangers of divisive racialism. The BLM flag is a red flag: it should be a warning, not an inspiration.

I rarely burnt actual books: we were too poor to afford a copy of The Satanic Verses. Instead, we wrote the title of the offending novel and the name of its author on cardboard and paper and set them alight. It was comical and pathetic. But we were deadly serious. We thought Ayatollah Khomeini was standing up for Islam against the infidels, bringing down the righteous fury of Allah upon a vile apostate. Had Rushdie been attacked then, I would have celebrated.

In the decades since, I have been a refugee, an atheist and a convert to the highest ideals and values of the West: free speech, freedom of conscience, the emancipation of women, and a free press. When I fled from a forced marriage and made a life in Europe, I was bewitched by the culture of freedom. But I still remember with a shudder my time as a pious believer on the verge of fanaticism. I know all too well how righteousness in the name of Islam motivates those who inflict violence on supposed infidels.

I have always viewed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie as a strange conflict between two very different figures. On the one hand, a novelist, raised in what was once secular Bombay and living in the England of Monty Python’s Life of Brian; a man in love with literature and language, who spent many years on a quest to become a published writer. Salman is an intellectual, a lover of stories, and a teller of tales. When he wrote The Satanic Verses, he was more interested in the theme of migration than in satirising Islam. He was certainly not apolitical, but he resided in the world of books and the imagination, engaging with the real world through fantasy. He did not set out to offend Muslims but simply assumed that supposedly holy events and texts were fair game for artists to play with, just as Western writers engaged freely, both positively and negatively, with Christianity.

And then there was the Ayatollah, a fundamentalist figure who had spent long years of exile in the West before returning to Iran to overthrow the despotic regime of the Shah in 1979. Whenever I read about Khomeini, I get the impression that he fancied himself a successor to the Prophet. He was both deeply arrogant and fanatically fundamentalist: a very dangerous combination. He was also a writer, though his subject matter was the Qur’an and Islamic law. Not for him the freely roaming imagination; his interest in literature was constrained by Islam.

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While Salman sought to capture the entire world in his novels, Khomeini couldn’t escape religion. Almost prophetically, Salman included a Khomeini-like figure in The Satanic Verses. A character called only the Imam, he is also an exile seeking to return to his homeland to overthrow a despot and install his own tyranny. Like Khomeini, the Imam wants to turn back time:

“History the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies — progress, science, rights — against which the Imam has set his face. History is a deviation from the Path, knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of knowledge was complete on the day Al-Lah finished his revelation to Mahound [the Muhammad figure in the novel].”

And like Khomeini, the Imam succeeds in his quest and devours the very people who saw him as a messiah against the despot. In this, Salman understood so deeply the nature of the Iranian regime when so many then and now fail to grasp its fanatical, unbending nature. The Western response to the fatwa, as to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, was to negotiate. Then, as now, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the regime. The world of the West and the world of Islamism are totally irreconcilable. The sooner we realise that nothing will appease the fanatics of Tehran, the better able we will be to oppose them.

Just look at the wording of the fatwa itself: “I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. Whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr.” This is the language of honour and of sensitivity. Salman has blasphemed — he has insulted the honour of our precious beliefs — and so he, and many others, must die.

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The fatwa is timeless. It won’t die with Khomeini. It is eternal. This is why, when it comes to fighting Islamism, the Western tools of diplomacy and reason are useless. We are faced with an enemy that never gives up, who thinks in terms of centuries rather than months or years, and who will wait patiently for an opportunity to strike. Only by understanding these different conceptions of civilisation can we begin to undo the damage wrought by the Iranian regime and other Islamists across the world.

It is unfashionable these days to defend Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” thesis. But the attack on Salman shows the truth in it. Yes, there really are different ideas of civilisation — and yes, they are in conflict with each other. The sooner we realise this, the sooner we can recover our belief in Western civilisation, and stand up for it unflinchingly against its enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Salman would not, I imagine, phrase it in such a way, nor would he place such an emphasis on the Westernness of these values. But he is nevertheless an exemplar of them; a champion of free speech, bravely standing up for Western ideals when so many shy away from the fight. If only more people could follow his example, instead of taking the path of appeasement in the name of cultural sensitivity, the long years of murder and mayhem wrought by the Islamists on the West might come to an end.

I have lived those long years; I know all too well the threat Islamism poses. After I came out as an apostate, I was forced into a bubble of protection that still surrounds me to this day. I have 24-hour security. I still receive death threats. My friend, the sweet, vulgar, brilliant Theo Van Gogh was murdered simply for making a film with me. His attacker used a knife to stab a letter into Theo’s chest: it said that I would be next.

When I heard the news about Salman last week, I couldn’t speak. I was horrified, but I was also scared. If they could get him on American soil, would I be next? Although I choose to live with security and Salman didn’t, the attack showed how patient and ruthless the enemy is. I am writing this four days after the attack, and have slept for as many hours. Will I ever be free? Will I ever feel safe? Will my children ever feel safe?

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But this isn’t my story: it is the story of Salman Rushdie and everyone he stands for, of all the people in the Muslim world and the West who dare to challenge sacred dogmas and find themselves threatened and even murdered for doing so. For them, for us, giving into fear is never an option. As Salman wrote after 9/11: “How to defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorised. Don’t let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.”

And yet last Friday, I was scared. I felt terrorised. I was urged to go into hiding and stay silent for my own safety. For a few hours, I let fear rule my life. But still I knew deep down that freedom is a choice — and that I would keep choosing to be free, to speak and write as I please. In this way, in writing this very piece, I defy the Islamists and all others who would silence me.

Like Salman, I will continue to speak. Like Salman, I choose freedom.

A year on, how should we evaluate Biden’s declaration? Well, the Taliban has reinstalled a tyrannical theocratic government under which the precious freedoms gained by Afghan women over the past 20 years have been completely reversed. If the “best decision for America” involves trampling liberty and solidarity underfoot, then I don’t want to imagine what the worst decision would look like.

More tangibly, we were told that the Taliban would no longer harbour terrorists — Biden promised in his withdrawal speech “to make sure that Afghanistan can never be used again to launch an attack on our homeland”. And yet, as Barbara Elias warned last year, this is not a promise the president had the power to keep. Links between the Taliban and al-Qaeda were and are too deep and strong to be severed. Elias cited worrying intelligence assessments that al-Qaeda could become a real threat to the US again as soon as 2023.

Her warning was vindicated two weeks ago, when Biden announced the successful killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor as leader of al-Qaeda. Al-Zawahiri was killed in Kabul in an apartment rented by an aide of Taliban Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani. Haqqani, in turn, is the leader of the Haqqani network, a Taliban offshoot that the Wall Street Journal has called the group’s “most radical and violent branch”. The Taliban claimed they were unaware of Zawahiri’s presence in the heart of their capital, a statement that knowledgeable observers have rightly called out for its sheer effrontery.

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No doubt the truth about the current relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda will come out in due course. But the reasonable conclusion is that the two groups are still comfortably in bed with one another, and that al-Qaeda is once more using Afghanistan as a staging ground for its nefarious activities. We should welcome the killing of al-Zawahiri, of course, but his being found in Kabul gives the lie to Biden’s justification for the Afghanistan withdrawal.

In that withdrawal speech, Biden argued that “the real choice” was “between leaving or escalating”. This was a false dichotomy. America could have just carried on. Yes, perhaps Afghanistan was a very long way from becoming a proper democracy, but it would have been relatively inexpensive to keep a small force of a few thousand stationed there for a few more years, a fraction of the 100,000 troops stationed there in 2010–11. Even before the 2020 peace deal, US casualties in Afghanistan had been extremely low for years, with fatalities averaging in the low double digits since 2015. A small US force would have been more than enough to keep the Taliban out of total power.

From today’s perspective, however, it is no longer possible to view Biden’s withdrawal and the chaos that has ensued as a strategic error, however grave. You come back from errors, you reset and correct course. Instead, I have come to see the Afghanistan debacle as something more alarming: the result of a complete lack of strategy, or even the basic contours of a plan. What we have seen over the past year has been nothing other than chaos disguised as policymaking.

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At home, for instance, Biden took office promising to reunite a polarised nation. That went out the window last Monday, when Donald Trump’s residence was raided by the FBI less than 100 days from the midterms elections — allegedly over violations of an obscure record-keeping statute. Since then, prominent Republicans have accused the administration of parallel systems of justice, drawing comparisons with Third World countries. Who can blame them? The FBI barely made a case of Hilary Clinton’s lost cache of emails and an at-home secret server, and while federal prosecutors are investigating Hunter Biden for potential tax fraud (to say nothing of the shenanigans documented on Hunter’s infamous laptop), no one has yet seen fit to raid the First Son’s home.

Even more remarkable than the raid itself are the reports that Biden was not aware of it before it happened. Sending FBI agents to occupy the home of a former president — and Biden’s potential opponent in 2024 — is an unprecedented step. It will be politically explosive even if the bureau turns up evidence of wrongdoing, which is no guarantee given that the press, the Democratic Party, and various agencies of the US security state have investigated Trump’s alleged criminality again and again to little avail. That such a potentially destabilising step could be taken without Biden’s knowledge is almost literally unbelievable. If true, it would mean that the president is barely in charge of his own government.

This absence of a plan is also evident in Biden’s handling of Ukraine and Taiwan. Although the president deserves credit for the massive aid he has sent to Ukraine, he has repeatedly risked escalating the conflict with off-the-cuff remarks that contradict official US policy. During a visit to Poland in March, he seemed to call for regime change in Russia, inadvertently threatened to use chemical weapons, and appeared to tell American troops that they would soon be fighting in Ukraine. These comments were later clarified or “walked back” by Biden’s gaggle of minders, raising questions about whether Biden himself is the one making the decisions.

Then there was Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan. When reports of the trip began to circulate, so too did the speculations about why she was going at such an awful time. Did Biden approve of Pelosi’s trip, or was she going against his wishes? The latest reporting suggests it was the latter. If she had been backed by Biden, then, as Thomas Friedman put it, Biden would have been signing off on “something that is utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible”. Instead, it seems that Biden was simply unable to stop Pelosi from doing whatever she wanted.

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What explains this potentially tragic comedy of errors? Perhaps, in part, it is a result of the Democrats’ desperate need to distinguish themselves from Trump. If Trump was unwilling to risk war over Taiwan, then Team Biden must be ready to go there. But wanting to come across as different is hardly a vision.

Trump’s personality made him unfit for office, and the events of January 6 have left a stain on America. But the Trump administration had some real foreign policy achievements under its belt, not least the breakthrough Abraham Accords. When Trump brags that neither the war in Ukraine nor the crisis over Taiwan would have happened if he had been re-elected, he is credible. For all his colourful personality, there really was a Trump domestic policy vision and a foreign policy doctrine.

The same cannot be said of his successor. A year on from the Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden’s doctrine remains nebulous and disjointed, to the extent it doesn’t appear to exist at all. More and more, the Afghanistan disaster epitomises his entire administration — chaotic, ill-planned, and papered over with high-flown rhetoric that has little to do with the reality on the ground.

***

Editor’s note: This piece was written before Salman Rushdie was attacked on Friday — a subject which Ayaan will be addressing in her next column.

In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. warned in God and Man at Yale of his alma mater’s inability to prepare its students for the real world. Its subtitle, The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”, hinted at the already existing tendency for administrators to hire academics who only teach ideas they deem acceptable. Scepticism was banished: to Buckley, political radicals were subverting American society by indoctrinating their students with atheism and collectivism. Yet he remained an “epistemological optimist”, hoping that sense would prevail both in the Ivy League and across the nation.

More than 70 years later, that sense has manifestly not prevailed. Take the case of Roland Fryer. A hugely gifted and until recently celebrated black professor of economics at Harvard, he was suspended for two years without pay following the most tenuous sexual harassment claims. Many suspect the real reason for his humiliating treatment was his research showing that African Americans are not disproportionately the targets of lethal violence by the police. There were, Fryer wrote, “no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account”.

Though published well before the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 decided that the police were state-funded agents of racial oppression, Fryer’s research nevertheless made him enemies in the academic world. Though he was only following the evidence, he had offended the progressives who now dominate the university’s governance and culture. On Fryer’s return to campus after two years of exclusion, the Harvard Crimson newspaper had only this to say: “Fryer should not return to Harvard classrooms.” Similar stories can be told about other illustrious institutions. Joshua Katz, a tenured Classics professor at Princeton, was not merely suspended but fired this year over a long-ago relationship with a student. Given the investigation into his behaviour was based on selective evidence, it seems likely his real crime was daring to criticise Black Lives Matter.

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If universities once made promises to teach their undergraduates how to think, they now aim to teach them what to think. Students are now taught that disparities between groups are always the result of discrimination; the US is irredeemably racist; racism is everywhere; invisible power structures of structural oppression are equally ubiquitous and need to be dismantled; meritocracy is a myth; colour-blindness is a misleading concept; a focus on individual rights distracts from the real struggle. Gone are those such as Roland Fryer who sought to inquire freely into the most important questions facing society today through well-gathered evidence and rigorous logic. Hounded out by a vocal minority of thin-skinned students and zealous administrators, they are replaced by progressive conformists.

It was with these issues in mind that, last week, I taught five classes on freedom of speech at the new University of Austin. UATX is intended to be a free-thinking, free-speaking alternative to existing universities, and our summer school was aimed at attracting current undergraduates from precisely those places. But while one could have forgivingly expected at least some of these students to be scared of questioning progressive orthodoxies, the reality couldn’t have been more different.

These students were hungry for knowledge, eager to learn and to excel — and yet many of them hailed from established institutions such as Dartmouth, Brown, Berkeley. Others came from overseas: the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of British Columbia in Canada. My class was an equally diverse group of students: three women, one transgender person, and seven men. One student was of Moroccan origin, another of Indian ethnicity. On paper, they were a diversity, equity and inclusion officer’s dream.

However, far from protesting that the US was a “structurally racist” society oppressive to supposedly marginalised communities, the students I met were eager to be of service to their country, culture, and society at large. Not one was in the slightest bit woke.

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Yet what they taught me in the five sessions we had together was the near-absence of critical thinking and free inquiry in their respective universities. Even the Frenchman said there was very little debate in the Sorbonne. The American students suggested that most of their peers were just like them: eager to learn, debate, and compete — all in a civil manner. What they worried about was a minority of students, professors and administrators who spoil the experience of college for everyone by grandstanding, virtue signalling, and enforcing the tenets of progressive orthodoxy. Those in student government and student media certainly didn’t represent the majority, they said. Their union policies and mantras spoke only to the small group inside their autocratic bubble.

It was clear from my conversations with the students at UATX that the elite educational institutions are doing the next generation a fundamental disservice. If we are to teach the leaders of tomorrow how to think — how to ask probing questions rather than repeat dictated answers — we need a fundamental re-evaluation of the modern university. It’s clear these institutions are still in high demand — just look at Harvard’s ever-increasing application numbers — but that doesn’t mean they are fulfilling their function.

Harvard’s motto is a single word: Veritas. Yale’s is Lux et Veritas. But truth is the first casualty of progressivism. And as for light, there is a great deal more heat generated by the endless identity politics of the modern campus. Still, I came away from the UATX summer school feeling relieved. Young people — some of them, at least — don’t want indoctrination. But the only way to get back to “advancing learning and perpetuating it to posterity” is to found new universities. Let’s not forget: even Harvard was a start-up once.

It is hard to believe that more than 30 years have passed since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses — longer ago than the fall of the Berlin Wall. I also experienced the combustion created when art meets Islam, back in 2004.

Over that summer, Submission, a 10-minute film that I co-created with Theo van Gogh, was aired on the taxpayer-funded VPRO channel in Amsterdam. I had pulled four very explicitly misogynistic verses out of the holy book, which Theo then inscribed on the bodies of women who acted out the selected verses. After a series of threats, Theo was murdered by a radical Islamist fanatic. Warned that I would be next, I went into hiding.

Dutch society got the message: Submission was pulled and since then nothing of any significance critical of Islam’s founding father or holy book has been aired or exhibited by any mainstream Dutch outlet. Two years later, the message was driven home in another small European country when Flemming Rose, the editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, solicited drawings of the prophet Muhammad after a Danish school teacher wrote a children’s book on the prophet but could find no illustrations for it. After Rose published them, both he and one of the illustrators, Kurt Westergaard, received credible death threats.

The controversy over The Lady of Heaven — a drama about the daughter of the prophet Muhammad, Fatimah — is the latest illustration of the extreme difficulty, not to say danger, of mixing art and Islam. In all three cases, the central concern was over how European countries should accommodate a Muslim minority in Europe without sacrificing freedom of speech. On one side were those who believed Muslims should adapt to the places they now chose to call home; the other side preached that we should exercise patience and compassion.

Yet in all three cases, the debate was hijacked by a minority of Muslims who were willing to use brutal force to terrorise society into silence — threatening infidels and blasphemers, plotting attacks, beheading people and blowing things up. Most political and intellectual leaders in Europe were frightened. They would issue condemnations of the violence, followed by silence. Few expressed uncompromising defences of free speech. Most were inclined to suggest that free speech did not include the right to offend religious believers. This is a fatal caveat — as the staff at Charlie Hebdo discovered in 2015. It’s a lesson Samuel Paty was also forced to learn, after he showed Charlie Hebdo cartoons to his class in a Parisian suburb. It was enough to ignite the flames of Islamist intolerance: an 18-year-old Russian-Muslim refugee of Chechen origin beheaded Paty with a meat cleaver.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In my book Heretic, I argue that there are three sets of Muslims. Islam is a single core creed based on the Qur’an, the words revealed by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, and the Hadith, the accompanying works that detail Muhammad’s life and words. Despite some sectarian divisions — principally the ancient schism between Sunni and Shia — this creed unites all Muslims. All, without exception, know by heart these words: “I bear witness that there is no god but Allah; and Muhammad is his messenger.”

But today there is a contest within Islam for the ownership of that credo and all it entails: Muhammad and his prophethood, his family, his book, and his moral code of practice. In the early days of Islam, when Muhammad was going from door to door canvassing his idea of one God, he used the tool of persuasion through preaching to convert the Arab polytheists. This was when he was in Mecca. Those Muslims of today who love tolerance, charity, and an acceptance of the other use as their moral reference the Muhammad of this period. I call them the “Mecca Muslims”.

However, after ten years of trying this kind of persuasion, Muhammad and his small band of believers had won over no more than 200 believers. So they moved to Medina, where unbelievers were still invited to submit to the one God, Allah — but if they now refused, they were harassed, threatened, and murdered. A big spectacle was made of these brutal tactics. Muslims of today who kill, terrorise and threaten while screaming “Allahu Akbar” are replaying that script from Medina. These are the “Medina Muslims”.

The Mecca Muslims are repelled by the wanton violence of the Medina Muslims. However, they shrink away from debating them, leaving the arena of winning hearts and minds to the radicals. As a consequence, Mecca Muslims who can’t handle the dissonance either leave Islam, as I did, or, much more commonly, tacitly accept the dominance of the Medina Muslims.

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There is, however, a third group of Muslim dissenters: the “modifying Muslims”, who know it is hopeless just to keep declaring that Islam is a “religion of peace”, in defiance of successive bouts of Islamist violence. Most of these Muslim dissidents are reforming believers — among them clerics who have come to realise that their religion must change if its followers are not to be condemned to an interminable cycle of violence, intolerance and backwardness.

One such cleric is Yasser Al-Habib, the author of the script for The Lady of Heaven. Al-Habib is a Kuwaiti cleric, a Twelver Shia who rejects the Iranian government’s pretensions to lead the Shia world, and the leader of the Mahdi Servants Union, a UK-based Shia group. Clearly, we are not talking here about secular liberals like Theo van Gogh, Flemming Rose or Charb. I doubt Yasser Al-Habib and I would find much common ground in the unlikely event of our meeting.

Nevertheless, the making of The Lady of Heaven should be seen as a milestone — a significant one, in my view – in the process of Muslim reformation. They picked a woman as their heroine, after all. That in itself is remarkable.

Islamic reform is a minefield, as every Muslim who has ever hinted at the desirability of adapting scripture knows. Yet after decades of the most barbaric violence committed in the name of their faith, some Muslims have had enough. They do not want to leave their faith as I did. They want to haul it into the modern world. This is how I view the Muslim makers of The Lady of Heaven: the central message of their film is that Islam was originally intended — in Mecca — to be a religion of peace.

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With discussion no longer taboo, European governments and societies now have to make their minds up about the category of Muslim leaders they wish to support. And so far, they are making the wrong choice. Take the most ardent proponent of a ban on The Lady of Heaven, an imam named Qari Asim, who was a government adviser on Islamophobia and deputy chairman of the anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group. For far too long the British government has consulted and even partnered with duplicitous clergymen like Mr Asim. They represent the non-violent but no less sinister arm of the Medina Muslims, the proponents of dawa — radicalisation that stops short of explicit calls for jihad, but points in that direction. Time and again, in every row over free speech, these people get exposed for who they are. And yet politicians continue to be duped. It took the British government until the weekend to dismiss Asim from his official roles.

None of this is to say that The Lady of Heaven is a good film. But that is not really the point. The Satanic Verses is not Rushdie’s best book. The cartoons in Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo were not great works of art. Nor, to be honest, was the film I made with Theo van Gogh.

But the mere fact that Muslims in 2022 would venture to release a film about the Muhammad’s daughter is an encouraging step in the ongoing Muslim reformation. This is a movement that all Western governments should support — just as they should ignore without apology all those who cry “blasphemy”, and prosecute anyone who attempts to use violence to deter artistic interpretation of their religion.

It would be wrong to say that the death of two teachers and 19 children in Uvalde has reignited a national debate over guns and gun control. It had already been reignited ten days earlier — by another mass shooting in Buffalo. Instead, the Texas shooting has only further polarised that debate, encouraging both sides to double down on their attempts to use senseless killings to justify their own political beliefs.

We hear the familiar arguments for stricter gun controls. We hear the usual counter-arguments for arming teachers. Senator Ted Cruz has called for single-point entries to schools. The exact opposite has been proposed by security expert Graeme Wood, who wants more exits so that students can escape. Last Friday, at the National Rifle Association (NRA) meeting in Houston, Donald Trump claimed that the country needs “a top-to-bottom security overhaul at schools across our country” to prevent active shooters. Meanwhile, outside the event, protestors (including Democratic politician Beto O’Rourke) held the NRA responsible for the exceptional frequency and scale of gun violence in the United States.

Political consensus, it would appear, seems a distant prospect. On Monday, the Canadian government banned the sale of handguns and proposed legislation that will require most owners of “military-style assault weapons” to turn over their rifles to the government. On the same day in Washington, President Biden was asked if talks between Republicans and Democrats would produce bipartisan gun legislation. He responded: “I don’t know.”

With America’s politicians evidently incapable of meaningful action on the central issue of access to firearms, it seems we have little option but to focus on other ways to prevent school shootings. Chief among these is fixing America’s failing mental health system. Texas Governor Gregg Abbott certainly appears to have learned this the hard way. After the Uvalde shooting, he demanded: “We as a state, we as a society, need to do a better job with mental health.” Yet there was also a certain emptiness to his words: a month before the attack, Abbott transferred $211 million away from the state’s Health and Human Services Commission, which oversees mental health programmes.

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Consider this. Before Salvador Ramos dropped out of high school, there were clear indications that something was wrong. Students who knew him observed that he had changed from a quiet kid with a few friends into a hostile aggressor. While he did not have any reported mental health issues, the warning signs were there, particularly in his online behaviour. On Yubo, a social media app which includes livestream videos and chatrooms, Ramos was nicknamed “the Yubo school shooter”. He harassed girls in chatrooms, threatening to rape, murder, and kidnap them. On TikTok, a classmate told The Wall Street Journal, Ramos posted a video where “he was seated in the passenger seat of a car holding a bag with what appeared to be a dead cat in it”. The same behaviour surfaced on Instagram, where he posted pictures of him self-harming.

One doesn’t have to be a psychiatrist to understand that Ramos was unwell. Nor should it surprise us. Since the Columbine shooting in 1999, a disturbing number of school shooters have suffered from mental health conditions. Ethan Crumbley, who killed four students in Michigan last year, is planning an insanity defence. Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who shot up a high school in Santa Fe and killed 10 individuals in 2018, has been deemed unfit for trial several times by authorities and remains at a mental health facility. Nikolas Cruz, the shooter at Parkland’s Stoneman Douglas High School (also in 2018), suffered from depression, ADHD, and autism. Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 — still the deadliest school shooting in American history — reportedly had Asperger’s syndrome and OCD. One L. Goh, who attacked Oikos University in Oakland in 2012, killing seven, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and deemed unfit to stand for trial. Steven Kazmierczak, the shooter at Northern Illinois University in 2008, was also diagnosed with schizophrenia. Seung-hui Cho, the shooter at Virginia Tech in 2007, was diagnosed with severe anxiety disorder with selective mutism and a major depressive disorder. The list goes on.

None of this is to suggest that poor mental health necessarily descends into violence. But there clearly are those whose illness manifests itself in the form of violent fantasies, and we need to have a better system for providing them with care and alerting the proper authorities.

The most obvious starting point would be improving America’s mental healthcare facilities. Take Texas, the state with the most school shootings since 2012. Texas’s mental healthcare is ranked dead last in the United States, according to Mental Health America, which measures both access to mental healthcare and the percentage of people with mental illness who do not have health insurance. It also ranks last regarding teenage access to mental healthcare. Texas is constructing a new psychiatric state hospital in Houston, but there is plainly a long way to go: since the Fifties, the number of state-run mental hospital beds in Texas has decreased by 95%.

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But building new facilities will be nothing more than a sticking plaster unless our cultural approach to mental health also changes. In late 2021, the US Surgeon General declared a youth mental health crisis, reporting that between 2009 and 2019 suicidal behaviour among high schoolers was on the rise, “with 19% seriously considering attempting suicide, a 36% increase from 2009 to 2019”. McKinsey reported that “Gen Zers, ranging from middle-school students to early professionals, are reporting higher rates of anxiety, depression and distress than any other age group”.

Yet rather than asking why this is happening, our culture prefers to celebrate mental health conditions. Couched under the umbrella term “neurodivergence”, a plethora of psychiatric disorders are viewed as something to be idolised rather than cured: why bother to treat mental disorders when you can post about them on TikTok instead?

Well, after two mass shootings in just ten days, the cost of this trivialisation is becoming clear. The nightmare that unfolded in Uvalde might have been prevented if our society treated violent mental illness more seriously as a potential threat. The failure was more than just the ease with which the killer obtained a weapon and gained access to the school, or the sluggishness of the police response. It was a failure to identify and to treat a disastrously sick young man.

On May 25, 2020, a black man was murdered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by a white police officer. The incident was filmed by onlookers and posted on social media; suddenly, the whole world could see what American racism looked like. It was devoid of compassion. It was deadly. It cloaked itself in a white man’s uniform.

Two years later, almost to the day, there was a mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Thirteen people were hit; ten were killed. Eleven of the victims were black; the suspected killer is white.

Racism almost certainly explains the attack in Buffalo. Payton S. Gendron, the suspect who broadcast a livestream during the attack, claimed he had been plotting an ambush since January. Police have since revealed that he is not from Buffalo and that he travelled for three and a half hours to the supermarket, which sits in the ZIP code with the highest proportion of blacks in upstate New York. Officials are investigating “a manifesto” he allegedly wrote, in which the author describes himself as a fascist, a white supremacist and an anti-Semite.

On the Saturday the shooting took place, I was in Dallas at a conference attended by a range of distinguished African Americans, ranging from Glenn Loury to the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The key question we addressed was the following: what is holding back black America? The answer, it quickly became clear, had little to do with the phantom of systemic racism.

We started by acknowledging the huge progress that blacks in America have made since desegregation in 1964. We have had a black president who won landslide elections and remains popular. We have two black Supreme Court justices. We have black billionaires, academics, media personalities, actors and comedians.

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None of which is to say that America is any sort of utopia for black Americans. We also acknowledged the racial disparity in education, housing, crime and broken families. We expressed horror that while blacks make up only 12% of the population, they account for 55% of homicide cases.

What explains this disproportionate representation of black Americans? Taken in isolation, the tragedies in Minneapolis and Buffalo appear to suggest that answer lies in the behaviour of racist police officers and white supremacists. Given the nature of the atrocities, perhaps this conclusion is inevitable. What happened in Buffalo, for instance, can only be described as horrific: the cold, calculating shooting; the loss of life; the heinous views of the suspected shooter. How can we view such an atrocity and not let it overwhelm our judgement? How can we not conclude that such evil merits nothing sort of societal change?

Yet if the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that monocausal explanations are almost always misguided and, as a consequence, almost always ending up harming the vulnerable. As the Black Lives Matter movement mobilised following the murder of George Floyd, America descended into anarchy, fuelled by riots and slogans about systemic racism. When activists demanded that police departments be defunded, local stations were not exactly closed down, but they were intimidated to the point that many stopped serving in black neighbourhoods. The consequences of this swiftly became evident: in the same year that BLM fever seized the country, at least 8,600 black lives were lost to homicide, an increase of more than 1,000 on the year before. Thrown into a frenzy by their overzealous conviction that white racism is the root cause of all evil, BLM turned a blind eye to the large number of black Americans who were being killed, or who found themselves forced to live in neighbourhoods terrorised by gangs.

There were no protests or demands for meaningful policies to make black neighbourhoods safer. Rather, the movement’s organisers busied themselves by throwing parties at their $6 million Los Angeles mansion and deciding how to spend the $90 million received in donations. Why save black lives when you can while away your time spending more than $37 million on grants, real estate, consultants, and other expenses?

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Still, at least that information is now available. Patrisse Cullors, a BLM co-founder, recently dismissed calls to make public BLM’s finances, describing the prospect of filling out an IRS Form 990 as “triggering” and “deeply unsafe”. Of course, it’s all too easy to dismiss her disingenuous victim fantasies as farce. But it is not just personal accountability that is missing here: ideological scrutiny is also effectively avoided, as critics are inevitably accused of being racist. Take, for instance, Roland Fryer, the celebrated African American economist at Harvard. He debunked the persistent narrative that the police kill more black than white Americans. For that, as well as his criticisms of education policy, he was effectively cancelled by his university. His research was deemed traitorous — and looking at the response to the Buffalo shooting from black activists and Leftist politicians, it is clear a narrative that trumpets the suffocating impact of racism still prevails.

But the facts are the facts. As Professor Fryer explained in Dallas at the weekend, there are racial differences in the use of non-lethal force by police officers, with blacks largely at a disadvantage, but not in officer-involved shootings. In his speech afterwards, Shelbey Steele, the author of White Guilt, summarised the implications of this reality: despite the fact that some racism does still persist, America remains the best country in the world to be black. We all applauded when he said that. It should not have been a sensational remark. And yet it was.

Everyone in that room understood, as the attack in Buffalo demonstrated, that certain individuals are motivated by a loathing for black people. But this shouldn’t define us, let alone the country we live in. For black Americans to progress, we need to cast off today’s dependency on white guilt for recognition and support. What is the way forward if you accept that blacks in America are free? It is to have the courage to live that freedom. It means holding ourselves accountable for our behaviour. It means learning to shape our destiny regardless of skin colour. And it means ignoring the divisive rhetoric propagated by those such as  Patrisse Cullors, Kamala Harris and Ibram X Kendi.

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In Texas the day after the Buffalo attack, a shootout between five Hispanic men at a crowded flea market left two dead and three wounded. Roughly two hours later in California, a 68-year-old Asian gunman walked into a Taiwanese church and opened fire, killing one person and wounding five others. This is what crime looks like in America. It is chaotic, disordered and irreducible: the skin colour of its victims and perpetrators is far from fixed.

Racism, then, is not the whole story. In fact, racism has never been the whole story. Yet faced with an election year and an uphill battle to retain the House and Senate this November, perhaps it is unsurprising that so many Democrats are keen to turn the Buffalo shooting into another George Floyd moment: an excuse to deflect difficult questions, and to turn politics into a binary realm of Good and Evil. Once again, we’re told, either you’re with us or you’re a racist — even if being on the side of Good means exploiting the misery of others.

In 1918, Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic administration passed a piece of legislation it hoped would accelerate the end of the First World War. The new law didn’t directly concern the military — nor was it a revolutionary act of foreign policy. Rather, its target was ordinary American citizens.

Passed shortly after the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act made it a crime to “wilfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States”. In other words, it was intended to stifle dissent. And by all accounts, it was immensely effective: it was used to convict 877 people between 1919 and 1920.

In the century since it was passed (and swiftly revoked), the Sedition Act has largely been viewed as a legislative artefact, an embarrassing quirk that’s best forgotten. In recent weeks, however, its spirit appears to have been rekindled by another Democrat President — one who may not be at war, but nonetheless finds himself under siege. Late last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the creation of a sinister-sounding new unit called the Disinformation Governance Board. When asked to justify its formation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki explained: “It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities, and I am not sure who opposes that effort.”

And so the mask slips. As became clear in the following days, the Board has been established to legislate fake news and mistruths out of existence, as if they were draughts of toxic air, wafting out of laptops and cell phones into the eyes and ears of unsuspecting citizens. It’s hardly surprising that the Board was swiftly condemned as the ill-disguised attempt at state censorship it is.

The main clue to its true mission was the person chosen to lead the unit: Nina Jankowicz, a government specialist in “disinformation” who has an unhealthy record of disseminating disinformation for the Left and then singing about it, Mary Poppins-style, on TikTok. In 2020, for instance, she dismissed the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation and a “Trump campaign product”. In October last year, she claimed that parental concerns about the teaching of critical race theory in schools were merely “one of those hot-button issues that the Republicans and other disinformers, who are engaged in disinformation for profit… have seized on”.

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Given her past comments, it’s hard not to view her appointment by Joe Biden — indeed, the creation of the Board itself — as anything other than a cry of desperation. The midterm elections, when congressional seats are contested, are fast-approaching. For weeks now, most commentators have been predicting calamity for the Democrats. And it’s not hard to see why: America’s post-pandemic economic recovery has stalled; gas prices have soared; inflation is above 8%; violent crime, especially homicide, remains at a disturbingly elevated level; and America’s Southern border is seeing record illegal crossings.

Faced with such a crisis, the rational thing for Democrat leaders to do would be to review their policies on these kitchen-table issues and change course. They could, for instance, invite their former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers back to advise the President on the economy. They could reassess ill-considered climate policies, such as the closure of the Keystone Pipeline and the regulatory war on fracking. They could even re-examine their naive programmes on crime and punishment, from defunding the police to putting felons back onto the streets. As for who could lead this course-correcting effort, there are ready-made centrist Democrats, such as Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, waiting in the wings.

But this is not where the party is today. The most influential voices are still on the far-Left, in the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez corner of the tent. And the Democratic Socialists want to double down on their madcap agenda — party and voters alike be damned. How they achieve this is where Jankowicz comes in. The Democrat’s progressive wing knows it will never win over the American public by relying on the mundane methods of political campaigning. Its only hope is to frighten, censor and indoctrinate voters into accepting their agenda.

This explains the ill-judged idea of a Disinformation Governance Board. It also explains the hysterical Left-wing response to Elon Musk’s bid to take over Twitter. Having established such a stranglehold on social media in recent years, to the point that the last Republican President was effectively cancelled from the Internet while still in office, the Democrats are appalled by the thought that free speech might be restored to one of the major platforms.

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Yet the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board marks a clear turning point, signalling the consolidation of state-sanctioned censorship. Once “disinformation” has been identified, we are told, “DHS then shares factual information related to its mission to potentially impacted people and organisations”. DHS has insisted that the Board does “not have any operational authority or capability”, while Psaki stated that “the mandate is not to adjudicate what is true or false online or otherwise”. But how else is it to identify disinformation and combat it with “factual information”?

This is, of course, a facsimile of the playbook adopted by media companies during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Remember when Twitter started warning us not to pay attention to such “disinformation” as the hypothesis that the Covid coronavirus was leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan? Or when highly qualified medical scientists were threatened with cancellation for arguing that lockdowns were doing more harm than good? With every passing day, these arguments look more convincing. Yet for more than a year they were regularly denounced as “disinformation”. And for more than a year, they were effectively silenced. Given the option of deploying such an effective political weapon, is it any wonder that the Democrats are now drawn to its use?

Of course, not everyone in the Democratic Party supports what is being attempted here. As Jim Himes, the Democratic Congressman for Connecticut’s 4th District, has observed, “the government has no business saying that this is disinformation and this is information”. Even President Wilson himself quickly recognised that for all its practical, short-term benefits, the Sedition Act was having a poisonous impact on American democracy. It was swiftly repealed in 1920; a year later, Wilson offered clemency to the vast majority of those convicted under the act.

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Of those who were prosecuted under the Sedition Act, most belonged to the pacifist Left. Yet the Democrat advocates of the Disinformation Governance Board appear to have forgotten this, along with the age-old problem of censorship’s use as a political tool: it’s incredibly helpful at crushing dissent — until you find yourself on the receiving end.

Could the Democrats be about to learn this the hard way? It’s looking increasingly likely that, come 2024, a Republican will be returned to the White House — with that Republican likely to be Donald Trump. Forget angry parents tweeting about Critical Race Theory. If Trump wins a second term and takes control of the Disinformation Government Board, then the Democrats really will have something to worry about. And if that does happen, they will only have themselves to blame.

Reports of such atrocities always strike a chord across Western Europe and North America. They played a key part in mobilising popular sentiment against Germany in 1914. They were crucial in persuading the United States to intervene in the Balkans in the Nineties. Every time, they have encouraged us to conceptualise war as a moral struggle between good and evil.

The invasion of Ukraine has been no different. It has become common for commentators in the West to compare Putin’s Russia to the ultimate evil actor of modern history, Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is portrayed as Captain America.

Even Joe Biden appeared to endorse this Manichean contrast during his recent trip to Warsaw, describing the conflict as a struggle between the light and the dark: “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia, for free people refuse to live in a world of hopelessness and darkness.” The Pope also used similar language on his trip to Malta last weekend, declaring that “from the east of Europe, from the land of the sunrise, the dark shadows of war have now spread”.

I don’t disagree. When an invading army uses rape as a weapon of war and mercilessly bombs civilians in a theatre, what better word than evil can we use? Likewise, even if he is only human, Zelenskyy’s leadership has undoubtedly been heroic. Yet there is a problem with framing the war in Ukraine — and every struggle that came before it — as a battle between light and darkness. It may be a powerful rhetorical device, but it clouds our understanding of who is fighting and, ultimately, can prolong and intensify a conflict.

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Consider the fact that, even as the West frames the war in Ukraine as a struggle of good against evil, the Kremlin is doing exactly the same. Putin has repeatedly portrayed the invasion as a “special operation” to “denazify” the region. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, even blessed the invasion as “God’s truth”, a necessary measure to bring together the people of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

While this rationale for invading Ukraine is patently false, it would be foolish to whitewash the far-Right elements in Ukraine’s politics and military. Yes, President Zelenskyy himself is Jewish, and a clear majority of Ukrainians favour a Western, democratic orientation for their country. But there is no use denying the existence of far-Right groups in the Ukrainian opposition, such as the Svoboda party, which has unabashedly anti-Semitic leaders. Likewise, the Azov Battalion, which has been heavily involved in the fighting to defend Mariupol, was founded by a far-Right nationalist. Though now a unit of the National Guard of Ukraine, it has not managed to evict its neo-Nazi and white supremacist members — as American soldiers involved in training Ukrainians before the war discovered to their consternation.

I unequivocally support Ukraine in its struggle for freedom from the Russian knout. But these are hard truths that the West needs to face, not least because ignoring them plays into Putin’s hands — a dishonest discussion is exactly what he wants.

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For proof, we need only look at his careful attempts in recent years to portray himself as a defender of the Christian faith. Often wearing a cross around his neck, he frequently visits monasteries and swims in the freezing Lake Seliger to mark Epiphany. He also relishes taking swipes at the excesses of Western “woke” progressivism. His campaign has been so effective that, unbelievably, some on the American Christian Right support his invasion of Ukraine, proclaiming him the last bastion of the true faith and upholder of traditional values.

But Putin’s Russia is not the Christian idyll they fondly imagine. While the West often views Russia as a European nation-state that just happens to be very big, it is actually a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire. There are, for instance, approximately 25 million Muslims in Russia, making up 18 per cent of the country’s population. The complexities continue, as Russian Muslims are themselves not homogeneous, ranging from Sufis in Chechnya to Tatars in Crimea.

Why does this matter? Because it illustrates that, when it comes to war, sweeping generalisation is the tool of the despot. Despite his posturing as an Orthodox emperor in the Tsarist tradition, Putin is directing a colonial army with many Muslim soldiers against Christians in Ukraine. Lists of captives and casualties from Russia reveal that Muslims are significant participants in the fight. As The Washington Post reported, “about one third of [Russian] casualties are soldiers with non-Slavic, mostly Muslim names”. There is, after all, a reason why Chechen strongman and Putin loyalist Ramzan Kadyrov labelled the fight against Ukraine a jihad.

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Yet Putin’s fabrications suddenly become irrelevant, no longer worthy of discussion, when the invasion of Ukraine is reduced to a Manichean conflict between good and evil — even when these fabrications are used to justify something as enormous as the war itself. As satisfying as it may feel to frame the conflict in this way, the West will never defeat Putin’s alternative reality by creating its own. He is not the devil: he is a despotic leader who draws his authority from an imperial fantasy. Exposing this fantasy — no hard task — is far more likely to topple him in the long term than painting him as Hitler.

Of course, there is good and evil in this war. But this is also a war between a fledgling nation-state and a receding empire. It’s messy, complex and scarred by history. Vladimir Putin wants you to think otherwise — but let’s not play his game.

A few days before her hearing, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I 500-yard women’s freestyle race was won by an athlete named Lia Thomas. Looking at the medal presentation photographs afterwards, you don’t have to be a biologist to see that something is amiss. Huddled together on the right-hand side, on the number three podium, are three young women. The number two position is empty. To the left stands the winner, on the first place podium: to my eyes, a strapping lad, albeit in female attire and with long hair. I clearly have no hope of a place on the Supreme Court.

Lia Thomas, born William Thomas, has undoubtedly had an impressive swimming career. William started competing from the age of five, was All-American in high school and went on to follow in his older brother’s footsteps by swimming for the University of Pennsylvania. For three years, William was one of the stars of the men’s team.

But in 2018, William declared that he was, in fact, Lia and, in May 2019, began taking hormones to suppress testosterone. Thomas has not yet “fully transitioned”, and still has male genitalia. However, last year Thomas was allowed to switch to Penn’s female swim team and has since competed as a woman. Thomas recently told Sports Illustrated,“I am a woman, just like everybody else on the team”, adding: “There is no such thing as half-support, either you back me fully as a woman or you don’t.”

Now, there are some in the swimming community who do “back” her. Erica Sullivan, a biological woman, represented the US in the Tokyo Olympics and finished third behind Thomas. Before the race, she wrote in support of Thomas, claiming that sportswomen have a lot more to worry about than trans women competitors — such as sexual abuse and harassment, unequal pay, and a lack of women in leadership roles.

By and large, however, Thomas’s competitors and their parents aren’t willing to ignore the biological repercussions of that victory. Reka Gyorgy, a fellow swimmer who finished 17th in the qualifying heats, just one spot away from the final race, has written a letter to the NCAA stating that Thomas’s win “was not a specific athlete’s fault. It is the result of the NCAA and their lack of interest in protecting their athletes.”

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A fellow Penn female swimmer complained that Lia walks around the women’s locker room exposed, making teammates feel uncomfortable. “It’s definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,” she explained. Meanwhile, parents complain that the team is divided and “everything has fallen apart.” Such is the outrage that Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has been forced to wade in; this week, he signed a proclamation declaring the “rightful winner” of the race to be Emma Weyant, who came in second.

I have no prejudice against men who wish to identify as women. Nobody chooses to undergo surgery or take body-altering medicine on a whim. The transgender community deserves our support in the face of any and all abuse. None of this, however, means that biological women should be forced to accept the participation of trans women in their sports competitions. As law professor and former athlete Doriane Coleman has explained: “Compared to females, males have greater lean body mass (more skeletal muscle and less fat), larger hearts (both in absolute terms and scaled to lean body mass), higher cardiac outputs, larger hemoglobin mass, larger VO2 max (i.e. a person’s ability to take in oxygen), greater glycogen utilisation, and higher anaerobic capacity.”

The same applies to trans women who have gone through male puberty, regardless of any hormones they are taking, as many developments from puberty are permanent. As a report on male-bodied athletes by the International Women’s Forum makes clear, there are more than 3,000 genes that contribute to muscle differences between human males and females. “Genetic differences cannot be eliminated by reducing testosterone, and these differences may create different muscle responses to training between even those men and women who have the same concentrations of testosterone.”

This isn’t some fringe view: even the New Yorker agrees, noting that “males who have gone through puberty have, on average, more cardiovascular capacity, greater muscle mass, higher tendon mechanical strength, and denser bones… In many sports involving timed races, men are roughly 10-12% faster than women.” Lia Thomas proves this point, winning the NCAA 500-yard comfortably with a time of 4 minutes and 33.24 seconds. Though finishing at 65th overall when competing in the men’s 500-yard freestyle, Lia leapt to finishing first when competing against women.

The encroachment of male-born athletes into the female arena is not new: various controversies over female athletes deemed too masculine have played out over the past century. During the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for instance, officials forced American runner Helen Stephens to undergo a humiliating genital examination after she was accused of being a man. And well into the Sixties, female athletes were forced to participate in “nude parades” and undergo chromosome tests. Such measures undoubtedly degraded the very women they were intended to protect; yet as the case of Lia Thomas demonstrates, the sporting world is yet to conjure up a reasonable solution to the transgender question.

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In January, the NCAA announced a “sport-by-sport approach to transgender participation”, dropping its previous rule that all trans women could participate in women’s sports after just a year of testosterone suppression. Instead, it would now allow each individual sport to determine their own regulations. USA Women’s Swimming quickly responded with a new system that would have permitted trans women to participate only after three years of T-suppression, and added a panel examination to see if a trans woman had “physical developments” that might confer an advantage over biological women. But the NCAA struck down the new regulations, claiming that the late-stage rule change was “unfair” and had “potential detrimental impacts” on swimmers such as Thomas.

There was — surprise, surprise — little discussion about the “unfair” consequences the reversal would have on the other women competing. But should we be surprised? One sport after another now accepts trans competitors, from New Zealand’s weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who competed in the 2020 Olympics, to CeCe Telfer, who won an NCAA Division II track title in 2019. If this trend continues, it’s not inconceivable that biological women may find themselves squeezed out of sport altogether. What’s the point in a girl even trying to excel when, sooner or later, a trans woman could come along and deny them victory?

Yet there may be a solution: the Paralympics holds the key for how we can move forward. This isn’t to make any comparison between transgender people and those with physical disabilities — it’s merely to observe that it is possible to hold different sporting competitions for those with different innate physical characteristics.

At the heart of the Paralympics lies a fair and equitable approach to allowing athletes to compete against each other. All competitors are assessed by a panel of experts who examine both physical and technical limitations. The merits of the process are obvious: it stops able-bodied individuals from identifying as impaired and competing against those with limitations.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Why not develop similar events for trans athletes, allowing individuals such as Lia Thomas to compete with appropriate peers? If Thomas meant it when she said that “I’ve always viewed myself as just a swimmer”, then this solution would enable her to do just that, while also accounting for the aspirations and rights of biological women. For trans men, too, it would also be an attractive option, given they currently stand little chance of sporting success.

The alternative — allowing Thomas to continue competing against women — is simply untenable. Thomas has already expressed interest in competing in the Paris Olympics in 2024 for the US women’s swim team. And without the kind of system I am proposing, she might well make it, shattering the hopes of  biological woman who deserves that place.

“I want to swim and compete as who I am,” Thomas said in a recent interview. It’s a sentiment I suspect is shared by many of the female swimmers she has competed against in recent years. Along with them, I look forward to cheering her on in the Trans Olympics.

Today marks three weeks since Putin launched his invasion and already thousands have been killed — perhaps significantly more, if the latest estimates from Mariupol are to be believed. There are mass graves, bodies strewn in the streets, desperate attempts to survive by melting snow for drinking water.

We have all marvelled at the Ukrainians’ bravery as they fight to defend their country and people. But the price of their heroism has been terrible suffering. Right now, the United States and its Nato allies are focused on targeting the Russian economy with sanctions, as well as sending weapons and other forms of military aid into Ukraine. Both efforts must continue. But there is also a dire need to help civilians no longer in the country — those who have decided to flee the daily barrage of missiles, bombs and bullets.

This week, the UN estimated that more than 2.8 million people have now escaped. With Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 60 required to remain and help with the war effort, most leaving are women, children, and the frail, running from the relentless shelling of their cities and villages. More are expected to leave in the coming weeks: the UN’s High Commission for Refugees has estimated that 12 million people still inside Ukraine will need help.

European countries have already taken moderate steps to accept refugees. The Schengen zone has dropped visa requirements, requiring only a biometric passport to enter. The EU has granted the right to stay and work in the EU for up to three years. But more needs to be done.

First, the West can prove its continued support of Ukraine by conducting a large-scale humanitarian airlift to save those trapped in encircled cities such as Mariupol and Kharkiv, or captured ones such as Kherson. Getting them out and to a safe country should be the top priority. We attempted this in Afghanistan last year; there’s no reason we shouldn’t do the same now.

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Once these people have left, we need to ensure they can reach host countries across Europe, especially the wealthier northern European countries. For years, the European Union has constantly spoken of the importance of “burden sharing”. Now is the time for it to demonstrate it knows what the term means. As things stand, the burden on Poland — there are 1.8 million refugees there — is too great. This is a crisis for all Europe, and should be treated as such.

In 1992, after fleeing a forced marriage in Somalia, I spent 11 months living in an asylum-seeker centre in Lunteren, the Netherlands, with individuals from around the world. One group in particular stood out: those from the former Yugoslavia. Given the proximity of the conflict to the European Union, those running from the Balkan states were bussed into the centre from the border. I cannot recall another refugee group being treated this way, but it sets a clear precedent that asylum seekers escaping a European conflict should be provided with transport to reach safety.

Once there, Ukrainians deserve protection and accommodation. Those who fled in the first weeks of the conflict often had friends in foreign countries who provided them with housing. But as the scale of evacuees continue to rise, that is no longer the case. People today are desperate: a family may have a suitcase between them, but no plan for what comes next. This is where European governments need to step in.

And so far, they are failing. This week, the British government announced its Homes for Ukraine scheme, which will pay volunteers £350 a month tax-free for opening their homes to those fleeing the conflict. The response was undeniably heartening: more than 100,000 people signed up in the first day. But even with the best of intentions, such enthusiasm can’t hide the fact that the proposal is nothing more than a gimmick, designed to fill headlines rather than remedy the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

Ukrainians don’t need shelter, safety and accommodation next week, or the week after. They need it today. Every European country should be expediting this process. With the recent passage of the European Commission’s “Cohesion Action for Refugees in Europe” proposal, which allocates €10 billion humanitarian aid for Ukrainians, there is no reason we can’t immediately guarantee accommodation for those fleeing.

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If we don’t, in the coming weeks they could be forced to substitute one type of inhumane barbarity for another. Already there are reports of trafficking gangs waiting near the border for young women and children. One man has been detained in Poland, suspected of raping a 19-year-old refugee he had ensnared with an offer of shelter. Another was heard attempting to lure in a 16-year-old girl before authorities intervened. In the UK, meanwhile, the National Crime Agency estimates that there are at least 6,000 modern slavery offenders in the country. “We can be certain that some of this number will be seeing the Homes for Ukraine scheme as an opportunity to turn a profit,” one expert has warned.

This must not be allowed to happen. Young Ukrainian women must not end up in red-light districts across Europe because they fled their homes and fell into the wrong hands. Nato and the EU may not deem it appropriate to support the Ukrainians with a no-fly zone — but surely we can protect them from being further dehumanised by opportunistic criminal syndicates. It is the least we owe them.

And then there is the need for a long-term plan. It is all very well offering citizens a wad of cash to take in refugees, but what comes next? For those entering Europe, the sooner we reintroduce them to a normal life the better. Asylum-seeker centres are often like human holding pens — they provide food, shelter and basic healthcare. But, as I discovered in the Netherlands, life as a refugee is a waiting game. Typically, refugees spend their days waiting for paperwork to be approved, waiting to be allowed to go to school, or waiting to be allowed to work.

It is cruel and dispiriting to keep any human in this condition of uncertainty — and especially so with the people fleeing Putin’s bombs. Once the Ukrainians arrive, we need to rush them into language and skill-building classes immediately. We need to help them find jobs and put their children in schools. This is the only way they will be able cope with the mental and emotional trauma that is the aftermath of the war.

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But we must also start planning for their repatriation, closely tied to the swift rebuilding of Ukraine. After all, most of the refugees will want to return to their homes, if they can, as soon as possible. With the mass destruction of cities and towns, significant investments — nothing less than a new Marshall Plan — will be needed to rebuild the country.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the West has failed Ukraine time and again. They were persuaded, in 1994, to give up their nuclear weapons in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. They’ve been strung along for years with the promise of joining Nato and the EU. And they were left to fend for themselves when Putin started to amass tanks on their doorstep.

The only moral course for the West now is to stop making hollow promises — and to start supporting the refugees. Perhaps it is too late to save their country, but it is not too late to save them. Every day the invasion continues, Ukraine shows the West the cost of freedom and the courage needed to take on tyrants. It’s now our turn to step up and start bearing some of that cost.

Soft-power tools are honourable and often pragmatic methods of conflict prevention and, at times, resolution. Just look at America’s Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War, or the foreign aid provided today by the wealthy West to smaller and poorer nations.

However, as we are now seeing, it is deluded to conclude that evil men can be stopped by soft power alone. In the days since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Europeans have been reminded of the necessity of having a well-funded and well-trained military. It has also become clear that we need to abandon our irrational energy policy, which imagines meeting Europe’s energy needs exclusively from ‘renewable’ sources.

Nevertheless, a key battlefield in the conflict playing out in Ukraine continues to be overlooked — and that is immigration policy. This is, of course, nothing new: just as soft power has been divorced from hard power, so immigration policy has been divorced from national security, even though it has been a destabilising factor in Europe for at least a decade.

Both sides of the immigration equation — the push and pull factors — dramatically affect Europe’s national security. The unyielding flow of immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia remains a source of civil unease. Social cohesion and national identity have become incendiary issues in polling stations across Europe. Intolerance towards immigrants is high and extremist parties remain popular. At the same time, radical Islamist extremism and the constant threat of terrorism still linger.

Add to this the burden on local resources — on housing, healthcare, education and policing — and it’s hardly surprising that the status quo exacerbates resentment towards immigrants, while undermining trust in the political class. It is no accident that Putin and other adversaries have been using misinformation and disinformation to support anti-immigrant parties and other groups on the far-Right.

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What is less well-known, however, is how immigrants have become a tool of war — one that is increasingly deployed by cruel, inhumane autocrats such as Putin.

Since the start of this conflict, at least half a million Ukrainians have crossed into neighbouring countries; according to the EU’s latest warnings, that figure could rise to seven million. To put that in perspective, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, roughly 1.5 million Ukrainians were displaced. But even then, there was no exodus to the EU; the refugees simply relocated to other regions within the country.

This time, however, it’s unclear if Putin will leave any Ukrainian territory for them to flee to. And make no mistake: this is all part his plan. Indeed, Putin has become the world’s leading advocate of hybrid warfare. In 2016, US General Philip Breedlove, Head of Nato forces in Europe, recognised this, warning that “Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponising migration from Syria”.

Yet in recent years, it’s been in Libya that Putin has pursued his most fierce — and secret — weaponisation of migrants. There, Russia exploits its increased presence by collaborating with militias to foster and facilitate crippling migrant flows into Europe. By deploying Russia’s ‘private’ military companies in the region, Putin all but controls the most significant routes for mass migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe — and therefore has the power to cripple economies and sow societal division.

Take Khalifa Hafar, the commander of the Libyan National Army — a nominal national force that is really an amalgamation of local militias. Hafar is currently trying to rebrand himself as Libya’s next President, but in reality is nothing more than a Russian-speaking warlord who benefits from the support of at least 1,500 Russian mercenaries associated with the Wagner Group.

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What would drive Putin to dirty his hands in the chaotic, tribal world of North African politics? As Mark Grey, Adjunct Professor at the U.S. Army War College, has observed: “Large tribes control vast territories in the region, operate beyond the control of nation states and ignore borders. Just as Italy pays militias to curtail migration from western Libya, Russia can pay tribes and militias to just as easily encourage and facilitate migration as control it.”

The impact this has on the West must not be ignored; and neither must the failure of our leaders to recognise it. Europe needs immigrants and immigrants need Europe. Years ago, as this mutual need became apparent, European leaders could have developed a rational system to manage the issue. Instead, they found themselves unable to escape an ideological impasse: one moment, they issued virtue-signalling declarations of solidarity and compassion for immigrants; the next, they made panic-stricken concessions to populist parties. How else should we characterise Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 wild reception of Syrian refugees, followed just a year later by her €6 billion EU deal with the President of Turkey after he threatened to open the floodgates?

For too long, Europe has maintained a contradictory stance towards mass migration from poor countries, lurching from compassionate rhetoric about asylum seekers to the development of an elaborate and ineffective system of migration management. But as the recent days — indeed, the recent years — have shown, with the advent of hybrid warfare and the abuse of migrant flows as a weapon to blackmail Europe, it is time not only to review minor features of the existing system but to overhaul the entire framework.

What needs to happen is not easy, but it is clear. Some of the measures we should take have dominated discussion for years, but are yet to garner widespread political support. For instance, for all the outcry they inspire in Western countries, border walls and fences do have their uses. When used appropriately, they not only deter crime syndicates and people traffickers, but also aggressive autocrats such as Putin. If EU countries had a functioning immigration system, the Kremlin’s use of hybrid warfare would be rendered ineffective.

More crucially, we need to simplify the international and European treaties that govern migration flows and those seeking asylum. And as the current crisis demonstrates, this requires the West to integrate immigration policy into the broader national security agenda. It should be an issue for the defence departments, rather than interior and justice civil servants. Whether we like it or not, mass immigration is now a military weapon. And it should be treated as such.

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Obviously, this won’t be remedied overnight. But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has created a unique opportunity to question all the sacred cows of European policy. Four short months ago, it was unthinkable to have a serious conversation in Germany about the retention of nuclear energy. Now, faced with the stark reality that energy is inseparable from national security and the foolishness of having to depend on Putin, we are witnessing a welcome change in attitude.

The same must happen with immigration policy. Yes, there must always be a place for compassion — and it’s encouraging to see the EU and UK welcome Ukrainian refugees where they can. But if we really want to incapacitate Putin, that won’t be enough.

Immigration is now one of his most effective weapons. It may once have been unthinkable to overhaul international and European treaties to address this. But a new and harsh reality dictates otherwise.

I suspect that Putin is all of these things. But none of that matters to the Ukrainians who find themselves living on Europe’s new Eastern Front because, more than anything, the Russian President is simply… “lucky”.

He’s lucky: lucky that the current leaders of the Western world are plagued by ineptitude, lucky that they can’t formulate a coherent response to his menacing of Ukraine, and lucky that none of this will change anytime soon. If ever there were a good time to carry out aggressive mischief like invading — or just destabilising — Ukraine, it is surely now.

Ultimately, this is a tale of division, one that starts with voters at home and concludes with the collapse of Nato. The Trump administration had already raised the alarm about the way key European countries — in particular Germany — do not contribute enough to their own defence. And in the years since, Western attempts to foster military unity have been marked by chaos. “Stab in the back!”, was the verdict of one national newspaper after Australia decided to renege on a submarine deal signed in 2016 with France, in favour of buying nuclear-power subs from the US.

An embittered EU responded with talk of creating a European army, hailing the “strategic autonomy” it would provide. But this is fantasy. Brussels is hardly the geopolitical powerhouse it thinks it is: the EU can scarcely maintain its own border force — let alone deploy a fully equipped fighting force. And looking at America and Britain’s shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, it’s hard not to conclude the same about every Western country. Their people were left behind; their leaders left fumbling to explain the almighty mess.

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Yet for Putin, perhaps the obvious division within the West — the one that really allows him to act with impunity — relates to energy and the environment. No doubt climate change is a real and pressing problem. The rational approach to coping with it is through long-term investments designed to improve existing technologies such as nuclear fission and to develop new ones such as nuclear fusion. In the meantime, there are encouraging ways to make our use of fossil fuels more efficient and less polluting.

However, this is not the approach favoured by today’s leaders in the West, who have all but embraced Greta Thunberg’s worldview. Fracking is pretty much impossible in Europe. Nuclear power has been shut down in Germany. And the European Commission has set out a variety of measures to raise the cost of carbon. What happened next was entirely predictable: a manufactured energy crisis, a cost-of-living emergency, and the threat of social unrest. And for Putin, there was a bonus: the increased reliance on Russian natural gas through projects such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Yet there is another, less obvious source of division within the West that has fuelled the Ukrainian crisis: Covid-19. No Western democracy has managed to minimise excess mortality without significant restrictions on individual liberty. At least in some cases — such as Australia and New Zealand — the restrictions kept mortality down. But in Britain and North America, people have had to endure the worst of both worlds: high mortality and heavy restrictions.

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Only now, just as these countries should be putting on a united front, are the longer-term repercussions coming into view. In the UK, voters remain incensed to learn that lockdown rules against parties were repeatedly broken. In Canada, a protest against a rule that requires cross-border truckers to be vaccinated against Covid has thrown the supposedly liberal government into a spasm of illiberalism.

Given the unrest springing up across the West, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the approval ratings of its political leaders have been sliding over the past year. Consider the leaders of the “Five Eyes” group of Anglophone countries that not only share classified intelligence but are also widely regarded as its core. Their most recent approval numbers are remarkable — not least because the hapless Joe Biden comes top: Joe Biden, 41%; Justin Trudeau, 40%; Scott Morrison, 39%; Jacinda Ardern, 35%; Boris Johnson, 25%.

Of course, today’s Western leaders are unpopular for a host of reasons. Plagued by weakness, they have alienated large sections of their electorate — both by yielding to progressive policies and flirting with increasingly draconian policies. And as we are now seeing, this weakness has been magnified onto the global stage.

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Yes, the Anglosphere and eurozone may give the impression of a united front — not a day goes past without some politician warning that Putin will face the harshest sanctions ever seen if he invades Ukraine. But all these threats ring hollow. Nothing our leaders say will dispel the sense that we are being led by a group of King Lears: “I will have such revenges that all the world shall… I will do such things… What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be the terrors of the earth.” Their words are empty — and that is precisely why they seem destined to fail as a deterrent.

So we can still hope that Putin will relent and spare the people of Ukraine the scourge of war. We can also hope that the Chinese and Iranian governments will not follow Putin’s example in the coming months and years. But we should also hope, just as fervently, that the next time we get the opportunity, we elect more capable leaders than these weaklings.

It’s easy to read Jeffrey Cohen’s account of being held hostage in a Texan synagogue at the weekend as an uplifting tale of bravery and accomplishment: it tells of a terrifying stand-off with a deranged, gun-wielding attacker, brought to an end after nearly 11 hours when a rabbi threw a chair at the assailant and managed to escape with two other hostages (another had been released earlier in the day).

Thankfully, the only person killed that day was the terrorist, 44-year-old Malik Faisal Akram. Rabbi Charlie Cytron Walker had nothing but praise for the recent security training provided to the synagogue by the FBI and Colleyville Police Department. It had prepared them for the situation and saved their lives. Other residents spoke of how the community came together. The attack’s conclusion was deemed a triumph of humanity; it was, in effect, something to be celebrated.

And yet the truth couldn’t be more different. Yes, there is still much about the Akram that remains unclear: a debate is still raging over his motivations, and whether he was inspired by Islamist ideology or whether the state of his “mental health” is to blame.

But two conclusions can already be drawn — and both are deeply concerning. The first is that the attack should never have been allowed to happen; the second is that such acts of violence are likely to become more frequent.

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During the Obama years, terrorist attacks seemed almost routine. But for much of the past several years, we’ve seen their frequency decrease in the United States, largely thanks to the defeat of Muslim terror groups and the disillusionment of many young Muslims with radical Islam.

In that period, as Akram’s attack demonstrates, we have let our guard down. And the Islamists have noticed. They’ve taken this quiet time to regroup, raise money, recruit extensively, and grow stronger. It is classic Islamist dawa strategy.

Law enforcement is tight-lipped when it comes to confirming whether Akram fits into this narrative. But that should not prevent us from questioning how America became so complacent. How else could a suspected Islamist from the UK with connections to Tablighi Jammat enter the US without anyone blinking an eye?

Convicted criminals are usually denied entry to the US, but Akram was granted a tourist visa simply by lying on his application. With the stroke of pen, he erased his long criminal history, which included serving prison time, on three separate occasions, for harassment, theft and attacking a family member with a baseball bat. By ticking a box, he managed to expunge from history the fact that he had been under investigation by MI5 as a possible Islamist terrorist threat as recently as 2020. He was welcomed into America where he could travel freely and somehow allowed to purchase a gun.

Yet this is more than a failure of mere complacency; it is the clearest sign yet that the structures and institutions we had in place following 9/11 to counter Islamism have all but eroded.

This is largely down to a failure of leadership. To the world, the United States has spent the past decade nurturing an image of weakness and chaos. Common among jihadis is the idea that the American spirit is waning and Islam is ascending. Nothing could have bolstered this argument better than the Trump administration’s decision to make peace with the Taliban, and the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

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Elsewhere, America’s political elite responded by further hamstringing their country: overseeing the politicisation of the very institutions responsible for counter-terrorism. Instead of directing our talent and resources towards justified threats, our agencies prefer to chase “domestic terrorists”, including those supposedly hiding out in school board meetings, and “white supremacists”, claiming that they represent “the most lethal threat to the homeland today”. The Obama administration even shifted away from the term counter-terrorism, instead preferring the vaguer term “countering violent extremism”. How can we expect anti-terror officials to do their job when “terrorism” itself has become a taboo word?

What makes this doubly concerning is that this problem is no longer confined to America. Rather, what we confront is a general crisis within Anglo-American societies, particularly within our respective intelligence communities. The attack may have unfolded in Tarrant County, Texas, but its seeds were sown in Blackburn.

There, British security services concluded that Akram did not pose a threat to society. There, the local community failed to speak up when he started to display multiple signs of radicalisation: he became estranged from his family, suddenly turned very religious, embraced Wahhabism, and travelled to Pakistan twice in the same year. For all their differences, the UK and the US have one thing in common: woefully and willingly unprepared anti-terror organisations.

With the chaos unfolding in Westminster right now, it seems unlikely that substantive change in Britain is on the horizon. But in the US, with midterm elections looming, and with a Congress more focused on the threat of Islamist terrorism, rebuilding the infrastructure needed to prevent terrorist attacks is within the realm of possibility. And given the bar is now so low that someone like Akram can enter the country, buy a gun and storm a synagogue, any change is likely to be an improvement.

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So yes, we should absolutely celebrate the fact that the rabbi and his congregants survived last weekend’s attack. But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that Malik Faisal Akram was a one-off. Nor should we pay heed to those who over the weekend were so ready to downplay the role of anti-Semitism in Islamist ideology, as if Akram had picked a synagogue for his attack on a whim.

There are, I fear, many more like him out there. Both the US and the UK need to be more prepared. Next time, we might not be so lucky.