An important speech....

Douglas Murray, author of "Neoconservatism: Why We Need It", recently gave a speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference in the Netherlands on "What We Are to do About Islam?"

Relativism has one over-riding consequence, and that consequence is the history of Europe over the last forty years. Giving equal attention and respect to all-comers, not only can relativists (the politically correct) not defend their own, they end up drawing a parity across cultures, faiths and behaviours which diminishes the good, and elevates the malignant. When we stare in disbelief at tolerance of the intolerable and the slow turning of that tolerance into acceptance and then acquiescence in evil, we are seeing Europeans acting out the last stages of nihilist philosophy. It is a way of looking at – and acting in – the world which will ruin Europe if we do not rid ourselves of it. Ridding ourselves of our rotten thought-world is the first step (and one in which everyone can take part) towards protecting ourselves from the threats which face us. It is one of the practical ways in which citizens can fight a war which is so far waged and triumphed in only by our military.

Without such a concerted effort, those among Europe's young who are attracted to the Islamic faith will grow. For converts are at present attracted to Islam because they see in it a rigidness they do not at present see in other faiths. They are attracted to a faith which brooks no compromise because they have been brought up in a society in which everything is compromised.

These converts are, though, I believe, nothing more than a sub-strand of "Last Men" – the "Last Man" notion we see in Nietzsche and Fukuyama - the man who lives at the end-stage (though not necessarily the end-time) of human progress. Living under the system of representative governance – always the end-point of human aspiration - there is yet a type of Last Man who cannot bear the lack of struggle, cannot live without struggle and who as a result struggles for the sake of struggle. When there is nothing left to struggle against, he struggles against liberty, against democracy and against freedom. Now the majority of struggling Last Men are presently found among the left who support dictators over democracies, those people whose relativism has brought them full circle back to a support for authoritarian tyranny. But a much smaller section of Last Men are the converts. When we hear of Western converts from Last Men to Muslims, we are witnessing the breaking away of people who never wanted to be part of the system they were fortunate enough to live under.

But I confess that I cannot see the life of the burka and sharia appealing to many brought up outside of Islamic societies. The exceptions, where extreme Islam is able to get a grip, only really occur among those who already have serious deficiencies and inadequacies - convicts, criminals and the unstable such as the Belgian woman Muriel Degauque who last year travelled to Iraq and blew herself up in a thankfully unsuccessful attempt to kill American soldiers. It's worth reminding ourselves what a surreal and spectacularly sad case that is. We have now lost hundreds of troops from the coalition of the willing, who have given their lives in the noble and selfless cause of freeing Iraqis from brutality and tyranny. And here was a girl also from the free West, travelling to Iraq under the hallucinatory power of fundamentalist Islam not to free people, but to impose on them a tyranny which she herself had never experienced. She left a free country to go out and impose tyranny on a people struggling for freedom. A more pathetic and wicked example of the rebellious Last Man can hardly be imagined.