When the UN Security Council gets round to considering what sanctions to impose on Iran, Council chairmanship will have passed to plucky Denmark.

If There’s Hell Below, Is This Where We Shall All be Spending Xmas?
Civitas 02-03-2006 David Conway

The rapidly escalating war of Mohammed’s turban may yet serve to establish the reverse of Karl Marx’s famous adage that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce.

Despite the ferocity of the current posturing of outraged Muslims throughout the world over the continued unrepentance of a Danish newspaper for having last September published irreverent cartoons of Mohammed, the true significance of the current rumpus seems to have eluded the world’s media. This is that it presages a far worse coming conflagration.

At best, what it heralds is full-scale conventional war in the Middle East, with much spillover in Europe and America in terms of Islamist terror bombings there. At worst, we await a full-scale nuclear Armageddon.

What makes me inclined to make such a rosy prognostication?

Well, consider the following penumbra of events that surround the current rumpus.

First, there is the curious delay between the first appearance of the cartoons when they provoked only modest local disturbance in Denmark by comparison with the global fury they are currently provoking.

What has changed in the meantime to account for the escalation in the scale and intensity of the reaction?

Two things have occurred. The first of these is more directly connected with the cartoons than the second, but in reality, it is but an epi-phenomenon of the second. The second event, although, superficially, only remotely connected with the cartoons, is the real reason they appear to have provoked such a belated escalation of outrage. It also holds the key to why the current rumpus presages something far, far worse.

The first event was a tour of the Middle East last December undertaken by a group of Danish imams to publicise the cartoons. With them, however, they reportedly took, not only the offending cartoons originally published but several other far more offensive ones that, apparently, they had themselves been responsible for producing. In other words, the outrage over the cartoons has been deliberately engineered by a fabrication of the grounds for it.
But who wanted or caused the heat to become so turned up and why at that this particular moment?

The clue to the answers to this second question lies in a second event almost certain to occur to today, if it has not already happened by the time this blog gets posted. This is the likely decision today in Vienna by the International Atomic Energy Agency to report Iran to the UN Security Council for continuing with its programme of nuclear research. If that decision should occur, when the UN Security Council gets round to considering what form of sanctions to impose on Iran, guess to whom chairmanship of the Council will have passed. You’ve got it... plucky little Denmark.

Suddenly, the pieces fall into shape. The rumpus suddenly escalated, complete with fabricated offensive cartoons, to so enflame Muslim opinion that Denmark could be intimidated directly through a threatened Muslim boycott of its goods, or indirectly by the EU fearful of a wider boycott, into voting in favour of Iran.

Whatever the Security Council eventually may decide over sanctions against Iran, it is unlikely to deter that country from continuing to develop the technology needed to manufacture nuclear weapons, Prospect of its acquisition of them is likely to trigger a nuclear arms race in the region, as well as, sooner or later, oblige Israel or the US to make some pre-emptive strike against it to prevent its programme from reaching completion.

At best, such a strike will succeed, but not without precipitating a conventional war in the Middle East the repercussions of which will not escape Europe in the form of suicide bombings. At worst, pre-emption will fail, Iran will acquire nuclear weapons, and, with a President of that country as gung-ho as its current one, we all receive tickets for a one-way trip to oblivion.
It is not a thrilling prospect for sure. But that is all the more reason why the West needs to remain strong, united, and resolved to resist the challenge of militant Islam. If Europe has recently been made more so than it has been of late, it has to thank for that, paradoxically, the malicious militancy of the mullahs and imams whose fabrication of the grounds of the current crisis has given the West a second wake-up call to the true scale and nature of the current danger that it faces to which all too many Europeans failed to have become alerted by the first wake-up call given on September 11th.

This is the first blog I have written for Civitas about which I hope and pray that the analysis of current events offered in it is completely wrong. As the author of a book published in 1987 which to an often incredulous audience at the time bid, as its title put it, ‘A Farewell to Marx’, and who subsequently predicted in another later book a tragedy like the London suicide bombings, I am truly deeply fearful that I am not.