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Given that some 1,600 Muslim extremists are likely to be imprisoned in Britain by the end of the decade, how to stop them radicalising very vulnerable fellow inmates should be a matter of urgent concern, for in future jihadism may commence, rather than culminate, in life behind bars. Should the authorities allow them to be consolidated in one place (as they and their lawyers insist) or should they be dispersed throughout the general maximum-security jail population—with the risk of their recruiting others or being subject to serious assault? The US has a similar problem because some 30,000-40,000 prisoners in American jails convert to Islam each year.37

III SOME EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVES

The current condition of Europe has triggered much alarmism, with talk of a neutralised ‘Eurabia’ on the one hand and a future Muslim Holocaust on the other, depending on whether, like Bat Ye’or or Bruce Bawer, one views Europeans as ‘wimps’ or, like the maverick Colonel Ralph Peters, as mass murderers. The latter is a popular view in a society that consumes so much material on the Holocaust. A book on the ‘Old Continent’ by veteran terrorism expert Walter Laqueur published in 2007 included the words ‘Last Days’ and ‘Epitaph’ in its title.38

In recent years the trans-Atlantic rhetoric has overheated, a fact that can only give the West’s jihadist enemies cause for hope given that Al Qaeda’s strategy includes offers of truces designed to divide and rule. Europeans don’t much like being called cowardly ‘Venusians’ slipping into abject dhimmitude in an Islamised ‘Eurabia’. One has also heard enough for one lifetime from abrasive neo-cons such as Kenneth Adelman and John Bolton who can’t quite play against typecasting on BBC television discussion shows. Presumably vanity plays its depressing role as it is easy to decline a Newsnight request for an interview just by saying no. It is similarly galling for a sophisticated people like the Americans to be defamed by ignorant Europeans (of whom there are many) as gun-toting cowboys, all the more so because for the last sixty years US commitment to Europe’s security has enabled it to divert huge resources from defence into social welfare and health programmes. Beyond this public chatter, much of it emanating from public intellectuals, US and European intelligence and police forces are quietly hardwired into one another, although the higher British judiciary sometimes actively frustrate their co-operation in the erroneous belief that that they are living in Hendrik Verwoerd’s South Africa.

There are problems in Europe, but they are not solely the crude demographic ones that pessimists routinely point to when prognosticating about ‘Eurabia’. After all, second - or third-generation Muslims will be as exposed to ambient secularising pressures as anyone else. Like other Europeans (and middle-class Iranians for that matter) they will also realise that two children are cheaper than six or seven. Religion is almost absent from public discourse about identity. This arises from a fear of offending Muslims, and from the dogmatically secular nature of some European countries. Compared to the noise generated by aggressive atheism and secularism, European Christianity is relatively timorous, although Benedict XVI occasionally surprises, with his Regensburg Address of September 2006 or his baptism eighteen months later of an Egyptian-Italian Milanese newspaper editor. A number of distinguished European intellectuals such as Regis Debray or Umberto Eco have also recently argued in favour of reclaiming and reasserting the West’s Christian heritage. On a popular level, despite spasmodic resurgences of ‘cultural Christianity’ which repeated Islamist provocations have elicited, the Churches themselves are so suffused with secular liberalism that they are indistinguishable from it. Western Christendom is an embarrassment from the deep past, although not quite yet something the Churches feel obliged to apologise for except in relation to the Crusades