US calls for democratisation are seen as a form of imperialism and even those Arabs sympathetic to them feel it

US calls for democratisation are seen as a form of imperialism and even those Arabs sympathetic to them feel it wiser to keep their views to themselves.Which is where Turkey comes in. The point about Turkey’s application to join the EU is not that it doesn’t pose problems of its treatment of the Kurds. It does, and those may get worse before they get better if the PKK has its way. The aim must be to contain and isolate.Washington’s “plan” to use regime change in Baghdad to spread democracy through the Middle East can be pretty much discarded now. There will always be people who seek glory or gain through the bomb and the hostage. On that at least Bush is right: you cannot ever finally win the war on terror.

Although politicians like to dismiss such outrages as Beslan as “mindless” and “senseless”, they are not that. Such brutalities are carried out partly as a means of self-glorification by people who feel otherwise powerless and partly as a means of provoking a reaction which in turn ratchets up the vicious cycle of violence and repression. The one hostage-taker said to be seized alive by the Russian security forces said as much to his captors. Their hope, he was reported as saying, was that the take over of the school might bring about a general conflagration in the region.The question for the world, within as well as without Muslim communities, is the same question as always with terrorism: how do you encourage the forces for moderate change and meet the concerns and ambition of ordinary people and thus isolate the groups seeking revolution and power through violence.

They are in favour of the “total war on terror” version of history that would put each act of outrage and civil strife into a single basket called “global terror”. Of course, both would deny that this is a Christian-Muslim divide, but the effect of their actions and their rhetoric is quite clear. Across the world, and within the Muslim communities of Britain and the rest of Europe, the invasion of Iraq, the suppression of separatism in Chechnya, even the threats of intervention in Sudan, are taken as part and parcel of a Western determination to dominate the Muslim world and its resources.Which is, of course, exactly what the terrorists and extremists want. Europe, as the wider world, is on the threshold of a conflagration that could either descend into an all-out confrontation between the West and the Islamic world or move to some kind of accommodation that rolls back the concept of “global war” and breaks up conflicts into specific issues with specific causes and specific solutions.We know which side Presidents George Bush and Vladimir Putin are on.

This is probably the very worst time for the European Commission to decide on Turkey’s application to become a member of the European Union. The massacre of Beslan has hardly served to dissuade the many in Europe who are deeply doubtful about the idea of letting a Muslim country into a Christian, western grouping. Nor has Turkey’s Islamist government’s decision to revive the old laws making adultery a criminal offence or the outbreak again of fighting between the Turkish army and security forces and the Kurdish separatist PKK.
When Frits Bolkestein, the outgoing internal market commissioner, commented this week that Europe was in danger of being “Islamised” by the huge influx of people that would come with Turkey’s accession – adding, with a grandiloquent flourish, that “the liberation of Vienna in 1683 would have been in vain” – he was only voicing what many of his colleagues in the Commission and many politicians in France, Germany, Austria and the new entrants from Central Europe already feel.And yet this may also be the best time to tackle just such fears. Impeach them!simoncarr75 hotmail
More from Simon Carr. And yet neither Mr Willetts nor Mr Howard can make the case in Parliament to excite our electoral passions. They should be able to make voters so angry that our brains explode with a dull, wet thump. It’s a crime against democracy.The Sketch calls for the Conservative Party to be impeached! Capital punishment is still on the books somewhere, for very serious examples of indolence.