World War III: a state of denial.

Five years after high-jacked planes slammed into the New York's World Trade Center murdering 3,000 people, much of the world remains in denial that, on September 11, 2001, World War III was declared.

The denial continues here in London too where, fourteen months ago, 52 Londoners were slaughtered by four British-born suicide bombers. Yet Mayor Ken Livingstone sees no contradiction in openly embracing Yusuf al-Qaradawi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who advocates the establishment of an international Islamic state through jihad and suicide bombing.

Nor is Livingston alone. Many prominent Brits, though less extreme in their politics, are aligned with him along what is now the crucial divide in British politics--those who "get it" and those who do not.

Today, those who don't "get it" see Prime Minister Tony Blair (and President George W. Bush), not Islamic terror, as the cause of much of the trouble in the world. Thus, the political consensus in Britain--led by the leftist BBC and most politicians across all three parties--openly derides those who view the threat posed to Western civilisation by militant Islam as the defining issue of the 21st century as "stark, staring bonkers." And news reports that Hezbollah sleeper cells have been ordered to prepare to carry out terror attacks on London and other European cities to protest the recent Israeli bombardment of Lebanon are therefore ignored.

Ditto for the history of Hezbollah, the Shiite Arab terrorist group in Lebanon created in the 1980s by Iranian mullahs. After murdering Americans at the US embassy in Beirut, and blowing up 241 U.S. marines, Iran's mullahs took control of Syria in the 1990s, turning it into a puppet terror state and transforming Hezbollah from a local terrorist army into a sophisticated global terrorist network. Since then, these Shiite mullahs have reached across the great Sunni-Shia religious divide and established close ties with Sunni terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. They have also taken control of the Brotherhood's Palestinian branch, Hamas, and forged close military ties with nuclear-armed states such as North Korea. And they have pioneered the terrorist arts of airplane hijacking and suicide bombing along the way, while waging an increasingly successful propaganda war against America, Israel, and the West, among Muslims in the Middle East and far beyond it.

Yet most Brits still consider Hezbollah-sponsored activities as an unconnected jumble of unfortunate events. Which leaves Tony Blair virtually isolated in his genuine conviction that all these dots are connected; that Islamofascism is the force behind the conflict in Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon; and that vicious persecution of Jews, Christians and moderate Muslims is part of the program.

Never was Blair's solitude more apparent than at his monthly press conference on the morning of August 4, when only hours earlier Iranian president Mamoud Ahmadinejad called yet again for the complete eradication of Israel.

"How helpful is that?" quipped Blair, his exasperation apparent, as if to ask journalists attempting to savage him: "What's it going to take for you people to 'get it?'" To get what the blind won't see but is terrifyingly obvious to even the partially sighted?

But the scales are not about to drop from most Western eyes anytime soon, it seems. As the consensus of the blind grows ever stronger, there is no sign that the West is about to awake from its sustained trance. Such is the world's state of unreality, decadence and fear, that al-Qaeda can leave a crater in Manhattan, Hezbollah and Hamas can provoke Israel to its heart's content, and few in the West will acknowledge this conflict for what it is--a world war that's been going on for a minimum of five years.

Another, more spectacular, attack might do it, of course. But, given the somnambulence that persists long after 9/11 and the subsequent bombings of Bali, Madrid, London and Mombai, and after the parade of kidnappings and video-taped beheadings by "militants" dressed as postmodern grim reapers, I doubt it.

Why the blindness? By systematically eradicating Christianity from its heart, the West has morally disarmed and blinded itself, thereby destroying itself from within while inviting conquerors from without.

As for the would-be conquerors--a strange coterie of bedfellows who include Islamofascism, communism, socialism and secularism--they have one thing in common: all are enemies of Christ.

Paula Adamick is a professional journalist. She writes from London, England where she publishes the monthly Canada Post.