Douglas Murray

Immediately after the 7/7 bombings the then police-chief Brian Paddick told a press conference: 'Islam and terrorism do not go together.' Now, after Woolwich, the Prime Minister has said, ‘There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.’ Even after all these years our leaders continue to make this terrible mistake. Politicians or police chiefs must not make theological pronouncements. Though undoubtedly guided by good intentions, their line does not help but in fact exacerbates a problem – on all sides. There is a civil war underway in Islam which has gone on in some fashion since the religion’s founding.

Similar attacks in recent years include the beheading of a Dutch film-maker, Theo van Gogh, on a street in Amsterdam in 2004 and the killing of French soldiers by Mohammed Merah in Toulouse. Over recent years, those who have warned that such attacks would come here have been attacked as 'racists', 'fascists' and — most commonly — 'Islamophobes'. A refusal to recognise the actual threat (a growingly radicalised Islam) has dominated most of our media and nearly all our political class. Watching this roll out has made me — and most other ordinary people — feel sick. It should always have been obvious where such idiocy and denial would lead. It leads to Woolwich. It leads to a British soldier being decapitated in our capital city in broad daylight.

One of the most striking divides in the left/right political debate is this. Those on the right disagree with people on the left. They find left-wing opinions misguided, incorrect or otherwise wrong. But they tend not to assume that their opponents are evil. This favour is rarely reciprocated. The Harvard professor and historian Niall Ferguson is the latest to suffer from this. In a discussion in California last week, he was invited to comment on John Maynard Keynes’ notorious observation, ‘In the long run we are all dead’. Ferguson mentioned somewhat flippantly that Keynes may have been more indifferent to the future because he had no children, because he was gay. For this he is now being denounced as an anti-gay bigot.

I am pleased that Peter Oborne concedes that his co-author David Morrison was ‘foolish’ and ‘clumsy’ in his statements. Perhaps Morrison was indeed attempting ‘to be as accurate as he could about what he understood to be the facts’. But that is a statement about the understanding of Mr Oborne's co-author, not a statement about the facts. I still cannot see how anybody who accepts that President Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier could have said what Mr Oborne’s co-author said last week. To recap, over at the Telegraph last week David Morrison said: ‘I have never come across a statement from Ahmadinejad saying that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

Has President Ahmadinejad ever denied the Holocaust? David Morrison, co-author with Peter Oborne of a new apologia on the Iranian ‘government’, appears to think that he has not. In a bizarre and disgraceful interview with the Telegraph, alongside his co-author, Morrison recites the main claim of their book – which is that the Iranian regime is not pursuing nuclear weapons. Oborne’s Telegraph colleague Con Coughlin too kindly skewers that claim as ‘delusional’. But even more alarming than that conspiracy theory of theirs is Morrison’s claim (uncorrected by Oborne, the Telegraph’s chief political commentator) that he has ‘never come across a statement from President Ahmadinejad saying that the Holocaust didn’t happen’.

I have been in the US over recent weeks, during the period of the Boston bombings and the hunt for the perpetrators. It may surprise some British readers to know that although American public debate is undoubtedly wider and more robust than in Britain, even America displays denial and deflection when it turns out that the culprits are radical Islamists. I think of this as ‘Toulouse syndrome.’ Much of the reaction to Boston is very reminiscent of what we saw last year after the shooting of seven people in France. From the first attacks on French soldiers until after the third shootings at a Jewish school, both national and international news focussed on the possibility that the lone gunman had been a far-right extremist.