London falling: signs of weakness in Britain's war on terror.

WHEN the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone (formerly known as "Red Ken" because of his activities on the far, far left), learned of the bombings in his city that killed more than 50 people, he expressed his horror that ordinary working-class people should be killed in this brutal fashion as they went about their daily lives. This suggested that had the bombers been a little more selective in their targets--had they killed, say, 50 lawyers, bankers, or even Jews as they went about their daily lives--the mayor would have been considerably less horrified. Intentionally or not, he was challenging the bombers to be more careful next time.

These future bombers might also be forgiven for supposing that the mayor's opposition to terrorism is less than rock solid. In the 1980s, when the IRA's bombing campaign was randomly killing significant numbers of ordinary working-class people, Livingstone saw fit, as a member of London's city council, to give a platform to Gerry Adams, of the public-relations arm of IRA terrorism. And more recently, he invited to London and then publicly embraced a Muslim cleric banned from his native Egypt, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who has been outspoken in his support of suicide bombing in Israel.

An Islamic extremist would conclude from this that the mayor is weak, vacillating, and susceptible to the sentimental argument that any cause promoted by very extreme means--and suicide bombing is almost as extreme as any means could be--must have some moral justification.

But the extremist would not see Livingstone as his only potential de facto ally in Britain. Prime Minister Tony Blair himself is very far from being implacable. Shortly before the last election, in the course of which his party had recourse to anti-Semitic iconography regarding the Jewish leadership of the opposition party, and was discovered to have corrupted the voting system to increase the weight of male Muslim votes in certain districts, his wife, a prominent lawyer, argued a case in court for a teenaged Muslim schoolgirl who claimed the right to wear full Islamic dress in school. Mrs. Blair could hardly have been unaware of the oppressive social meaning of this costume for untold numbers of Muslim females, but the election looked like it was becoming close and her husband needed the Muslim vote. Thus an extremist would conclude that, if ever Mr. Blair were faced with a choice between losing office or abandoning a principle, he would choose the latter, and could therefore be bombed into acquiescence. Personally, I do not take such a dim view of Mr. Blair as that, but I can see how somebody might do so.

An extremist looking at British society, quite apart from the personalities of its political leaders, might likewise conclude that it was ripe for the plucking. The multiculturalism upon which the liberal elite so preens itself would not appear to the extremist to be an expression of generosity and broadmindedness, or of a scholarly interest in the way other people live and see the world. He would know perfectly well, of course, that no liberal multiculturalist has any real intention of learning Arabic in order to read the Koran in the original, or Pali in order to read Theravada Buddhist scriptures, even if he would genuinely like to eat Moroccan tomorrow and Sri Lankan the next day.

On the contrary, he would see this multiculturalism as just another sign of weakness and decadence, as a loss of faith in the multiculturalist's own culture, institutions, and traditions. He is no multiculturalist himself, even if in practice he inhabits two worlds and wears a baseball cap and sneakers while denouncing the West: for he is not so much bringing a dish to the cultural banquet, as prescribing the whole diet.

The extremist will see weakness, vacillation, and doubt everywhere he cares to look. In Birmingham, the city's second-largest mosque was called for several years (including those immediately after the first Gulf War) the President Saddam Hussein Mosque. Far from protesting, or demanding that it be renamed, the city council gave it a subsidy to increase its car-parking facilities. Again, he would not see this as broadmindedness, or as a sign of the robustness of British democracy: He would see it as a symptom of a society that is prepared to do nothing to defend itself.

The extremist would know perfectly well that many Muslim fathers repeatedly flout the law of the land by refusing to send their daughters to school, but also that they flout it with impunity, because the educational authorities are unwilling or afraid to confront them on the issue. And they would likewise know that the fiercest Amazons of the feminist movement, who work themselves into a fury over invisible glass ceilings and the use of male impersonal pronouns, maintain the most timid of silences when it comes to the matter of forced marriages of Muslim girls contracted under threat of death, a phenomenon that is known to exist throughout Europe among people of Pakistani, Somalian, and Moroccan descent.

The less charitable interpretation of this silence is that today's feminists, being a species of the liberal genus, defend themselves against the unpleasantness of cognitive dissonance--caused by the holding of two contradictory facts or hypotheses in the mind at the same time--by simply ignoring the phenomenon that would cause such dissonance. If they acknowledged the seriousness of the oppression that many Muslim women experience in their own country, they would have to abandon either their feminism or their multiculturalism; and since both are important for their self-image as brave and fearless opponents of what they believe to be the status quo, they simply refuse to look.

The more charitable interpretation is that they were and are afraid; and fear, while certainly not glorious, is at least a normal and understandable motive. No one, after all, has the right to demand heroism of another person. And, as the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam demonstrated, at least some male Muslims are serious in their determination to preserve their sex's privileges. The feminists intuited the dangers of tackling such people, and have kept mum.

Mr. Blair announced at a press conference that, henceforth, the rules of the game had changed. But this would only have confirmed the impression of the extremist as to how weak and decadent the British had been; and, of course, weakness and decadence are not shaken off in a moment. There is hope yet for the extremists.

When Mr. Blair reveals that preachers of hatred and would-be destroyers of Britain--at least, those who do not hold British citizenship--will no longer be tolerated, he is admitting that the country of which he has been prime minister for the past eight years has tolerated, and indeed welcomed, such people. What is the extremist to conclude? Not that the country and its culture are tolerant to a fault, but that they have a death wish and that it would take little to finish them off altogether--with just a few bombs in the subway perhaps.

Mr. Blair, with his mania for change and modernization, his aversion to anything smacking of tradition, and his hatred of what he calls "the forces of conservatism" (as if nothing of value existed in his country before his providential arrival in power), has also contrived to give the impression that the country and its culture lack all confidence in themselves as the bearers of anything of worth, and are therefore vulnerable to coercion and intimidation.

The entire political and intellectual climate of Britain over the past few decades, with its self-regarding and self-satisfied set of trivial little orthodoxies--to which Mr. Blair subscribed, if not wholeheartedly then at least wholemouthedly--has done nothing to discourage Islamic extremism, and done much to encourage it. The reproaches to Britain of the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf--that it had long been a refuge for Islamic extremists, despite receiving warnings of the dangers--were just and apposite. If the July 7 bombings did not rouse Britain from its multicultural daydreams, nothing will. But the danger, as always with Mr. Blair, is that he will increase his government's powers without increasing its effectiveness.

Mr. Daniels is a doctor and writer in England. Among his books is Utopias Elsewhere.