I look at this morning’s front page: “Arab Spring spawns new generation of UK terrorists”. Are we supposed to be surprised by this? I was called all the rude names under the sun for mocking these velvet revolutions in Egypt and Libya. All those bright Westernised kids on their mobile phones preaching the gospel of “democracy”, while the serious revolutionaries – the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, Salafists, Sunni fundamentalists and other armed-to-the-teeth totalitarians – were biding their time.
It brought back recollections of our Romantic poets’ enthusiasm for the French Revolution. Coleridge, Southey and their barmy ideas of a utopian “pantocracy”. And above all, weary Willie Wordsworth’s approbation, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; and to be young was very heaven.” He changed his tune in 1793 when the reign of terror broke out and Madame Guillotine toured the land, cutting off heads, under the auspices of “The Committee for Public Safety.”
Why has it taken the Western media so long to wake up to the fact that there is a fundamentalist religious and political uprising in a score of countries? And that this is an existential threat to the West? Why do The Guardian and the Today Programme and the rest of the ignoramus bien pensants laud the “activists” in Syria, as if the terrible events taking place there are so easily polarised between nice rebels and nasty Assad?
Events in Libya have already turned sour with attacks on British officials by the same people we were aiding and abetting just a few months ago. Egypt is firming up ties with Iran. No wonder the Israelis have posted tanks on the edge of the Sinai. Yemen is a no-go area for everyone who is not a paid-up member of al Qaeda.
Meanwhile this hideous reactionary revolution across north Africa and the whole of the Middle East is being appeased by Western statesmen who are really the successors of Baldwin and Chamberlain. And no one dare criticis
