The reason a ragtag, bloodthirsty bunch of barbarians – radical islamists – offer an existential threat to the most powerful nations of the world is our absurd disunity.

That is, a substantial number of people in the prosperous, powerful west stubbornly refuses to condemn these people for the no-account grubs that they are, and worse, encourages and fawns on them, while apologizing for imaginary slights offered to them.

Standing up to islamists is just a matter of commonsense, because these cutthroats having nothing to offer except the ignorance and barbarity of the dark ages. Nothing else. So Seeing off radical Islam should not be hard. In fact it should be dead easy.

But we have one hand tied behind our back. While a significant part of the response is fear, malevolent contrariness or appeasement, the rest of us fight ineffectively, and the collective response of the most powerful nations of the earth is a kind of feeble panic.