I’m getting very fed up of hearing from Cameron, Obama, MIliband, Clegg, Hollande, Merkel, the Archbishop of Canterbury and every public figure in the West you’ve ever heard of that the army of terrorists known as Islamic State, presently slaughtering thousands in Syria and Iraq and systematically beheading Western civilians, has nothing to do with Islam. IS has everything to do with Islam. In fact IS is the section of Islam most faithful to the command of Mohammed to force conversions on pain of execution. Islam expanded and spread by waging war and terror from its very beginning.

This “religion of peace and love” has got a CV. Here is a summary of its imperialistic incursions and attempted conquests over the last 1300 years:

In AD 732 a Muslim army of as many as 200,000 men was defeated by the Christian Charles Martel at Tours. If that battle had been lost, all Europe would have fallen to militant Islam .In 1565 the relief of the Siege of Malta, by a Christian alliance, ensured that the Mediterranean did not fall into Muslim hands and so give them a toehold in southern Europe

Then came the Battle of Lepanto on 7th October 1571 when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Spain (including its territories of Naples, Sicily and Sardinia), the Republic of Venice, the Papacy, the Republic of Genoa, the Duchy of Savoy, the Knights Hospitaller and others, decisively defeated the main fleet of the Ottoman Empire.

There was that other 11^th September – 1683 when Christian armies under Jan Sobieski arrived at the gates of Vienna and defeated the last substantial Muslim incursion: the last, that is, before the one which we face at present.

It is not as if we were not told about perpetual jihad. Among a great many warnings was that issued by Professor Marcello Pera, former president of the Italian Senate soon after 9/11:

“In Afghanistan, Kashmir, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ossetia, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Palestinian Territories, Egypt, Morocco and much of the Islamic and Arab world, large groups of fundamentalists, radicals, extremists – the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brothers, Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Armed Group and many more have declared a holy war on the West. This is not my imagination. It is a message they have proclaimed, written, preached, communicated and circulated in black and white. Why should I not take note of it?”

It is not as if the current murderous Islamic insurgency were limited to one isolated region. From West Africa to Pakistan, barbarism is the reality. In Nigeria, Boko Haram, – which means “education is forbidden” – murders thousands, captures hundreds of schoolgirls and holds or sells them on as sex slaves. Boko Haram has also seized and destroyed 185 churches. In Mali and other parts of Saharan Africa, A Q’aeda rules, as it does in the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen particularly and in Iraq. In Algeria, through Tunisia and Libya, the jihadists are prominent. In Somalia Al-Shabaab is a similar threat. In Syria we find the Al Nusra Front, the most murderous of them all, apart from IS. Shia terror gangs based in Iran, or backed by the Ayatollahs there, emerge to subvert, to burn, rape, pillage and murder. Afghanistan and Pakistan are plagued by the Taliban

As Professor Pera asks: are we somehow not meant to notice?

In his book The New Leviathan (1942), R.G. Collingwood, Waynflete Professor of Philosophy at Oxford,  describes Islam as “the first barbarism.” He adds:

“With the logic of its position as a barbarism, it has no option but to aim at the conquest of the world. No agreement with any other body politic is possible. Like all barbarisms, it does not believe with any firmness of conviction that any body politic other than itself exists at all: with the characteristic of barbarism which is called fanaticism, it craves to be surrounded by a completely empty world, a world containing only itself and God.”   

And that empty, spoilt world is exactly what we see wherever Islam prevails.

Collingwood describes the Islamic ideology: “There is one thing that Islam in its whole history has done. It is a negative thing, as whatever barbarism does must be: a feat of destruction.They yearn for the death of martyrs for it leads them to paradise, while we cling to life and fear death.”

That is exactly what one of the leaders of Al Q’aeda said not long after 9/11: “We shall win because you love life, while we love death.”

And they are winning: by military insurgency, shocking cruelty, burning, looting and murdering; by infiltration, because we have lost control of immigration; and by their hugely greater birth-rate.

I wish our leaders would recognise what has been in front of their eyes for decades. I wish they would admit that there is a war on and fight it. The Muslim insurgents, terrorists and the latest would-be caliphate want to kill us.

For ourselves, it is one thing to die fighting a just war. It is a far worse thing to be killed without putting up any resistance.

Forget the absurd differentiation between “Islamic” and “Islamist,” for these are one and the same. Lay aside nonsense words such as “Islamophobia” and cease the policy of pre-emptive self-abasement.

Or we shall all die of our euphemisms and political correctness – and sooner than you think.