Paul Thomas: West's tolerance and freedom under threat

Even before eight rounds in the back of the head replaced "Ullo, ullo, ullo" as the London bobby's calling card, it was clear that mystical jihad terror threatens the Western way of life on more than one front.

It is no longer a question of whether our freedoms and values will be circumscribed and compromised; it's a question of how much. Maddening inconvenience and ID cards will amount to getting off lightly.

The jihadists despise democracy and its by-product, live-and-let-live tolerance. If they can force the West into significantly scaling down or abandoning these freedoms, they will have won a major victory. They will have exposed the transience of modernity and our lack of commitment to the core values and principles of Western civilisation.

Yet rush-hour suicide bombings paralyse societies and gnaw away at the most important freedom of all - freedom from fear.

Faced with the choice between liberty and security, the public may opt for the latter and politicians are likely to go along with that. The state is never averse to expanding its powers and, faced with a crisis, politicians yearn to "do something", even when the most sensible response is steady as she goes.

And for its part, a twitchy public will seize on anything - grandstanding, deckchair shuffling, counter-productive heavy-handedness - as evidence that something is being done and a reason to believe that it is once again safe to catch the train.

This week Mohammad Bouyeri, a Dutchman of Moroccan descent, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of film-maker Theo Van Gogh. Van Gogh made a film portraying Islam as a misogynous religion that condones violence against women.

He was unrepentant, to put it mildly: "I should cut everyone's head off who insults Allah or his prophet."

It recalled the 2002 assassination of the populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn's political rise was propelled by his opposition to immigration.

He wasn't for sending people back to where they came from but he certainly didn't want any more, arguing that Holland was already overcrowded. He also attacked Muslims' attitudes to gays and women and questioned their willingness to assimilate and embrace Western ideals.

He was often compared to France's xenophobic demagogue Jean Marie Le Pen and certainly paddled in some murky waters. However, the rest of his agenda - euthanasia, gay rights, legalisation of drugs - was the stuff of conservatives' nightmares.

A flamboyant homosexual, Fortuyn perceived immigration and multiculturalism as a threat to the cause closest to his heart: sexual freedom. For many liberals, however, the race issue is paramount and non-negotiable.

London's mayor Ken Livingstone, who has often been too left-wing for his own Labour Party, was pictured in the wake of the London bombings embracing the "moderate" Muslim leader Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

This, apparently, is what qualifies as moderate in the current climate: al-Qaradawi favours female circumcision but doesn't think it should be obligatory, opposes terrorism except when directed against Israel, and favours the stoning of gays but only in Islamic states.

Andrew Fraser, an associate professor of public law at Sydney's Macquarie University, has called for Australia to withdraw from refugee conventions to avoid becoming "a colony of the Third World". He also seems to believe that Africans are predisposed towards criminality and claims Higher School Certificate results point to the emergence of an Asian ruling class.

Macquarie's Vice-Chancellor called on Fraser to take early retirement because his comments had made foreign and ethnic students "feel uncomfortable". The Australian Council of Civil Liberties accused the university of infringing on free speech.

As this assault on our way of life intensifies, it is important to resist the lure of wishful thinking and to keep in mind exactly where these people are coming from, as they say.

The attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon are to this war what Pearl Harbour was to the war in the Pacific. On September 11, 2001 the Taleban were in power in Afghanistan, providing a safe haven for al Qaeda, oppressing women, and destroying 2000-year-old wonders of the world.

Meanwhile in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was going about his business of looting the national treasury, redirecting United Nations aid into his Swiss bank accounts, and annihilating anyone who could possibly threaten his hold on power - and their families and their neighbours and their neighbours' families. Regime change was little more than a neo-conservative day-dream.

Liberals tend to distrust American power and loathe George W. Bush. Confronted with a combination of the two, some drift towards the position that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, support for the murderous Iraqi insurgency being a case in point.

The jihadists have no time for such sophistry. The West and everything it stands for is their enemy and will remain so long after the troops come home.