Defend our way of life peacefully - Brussels terror attacks

AGGRESSIVE, fundamental Islam is as incomprehensible and as impenetrable to the liberal Western mind as suicide bomb attacks on busy transport systems be they airports or subway stations.

The intolerance, the religious bigotry, the violence, the childish absurdity of black-or-white Sharia law and the vile subjugation of women by extreme — and that adjective is always necessary — Islam are an affront to the values we hold dear and, twice in the last century, made almost immeasurable sacrifices to defend.

Yesterday’s savage attacks in Brussels are just the latest expression of that incoherent hatred channelled into coherent campaigns of terror, of planned but random killing, in pursuit of a political cause. That cause is entirely dependent on the oxygen of publicity generated by the latest bloodbath inflicted on ordinary people guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Without that oxygen and the justified expressions of outrage, some of it extreme — and, right on cue up steps the odious Donald Trump — the disaffected and disinterested of the French banlieues or the semi-ghettoes like Molenbeek in Brussels might have a very different relationship with radical Islam. They would be, as many Europeans are to Christianity, aware but uncommitted, passive, and largely inactive.