Almost hourly news stories appear in the media pouring out alarm and despondency about the ever-widening spread of Muslim terrorists throughout all sections of British society, most sensationally, of course, in the NHS.
Even in The Spectator there is a piece this week headlined, 'Jihad amid the dreaming spires', urging Oxford dons to do more to warn pupils against their sinister wiles.
Having been a reporter in Washington in the early Cold War years, all this is eerily reminiscent. For that was the time when Senator Joe McCarthy launched his 'Reds under the bed' witch hunt, the demoralising effects of which the United States has not yet fully recovered.
During that period, Britain, unlike America, kept its head. There were no 'reds under the bed' scares here. We kept our cool, possibly too much
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Peregrine Worsthorne
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The US has not fully recovered from the demoralising effects of Senator McCarthy’s witch hunt
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so, since Cambridge spies were allowed to remain in place for far too long. It could be that this memory has caused the pendulum to swing dangerously too far the other way.
I say dangerously because fear is a disastrous counsellor. Just as it led the West to seriously exaggerate the dangers from Soviet communism, so it could again regarding Islamic fundamentalism.
Irish sympathisers abounded in Britain during the IRA years. There were pubs in all our major cities where Republican songs could be heard and not only on St Patrick's Day. Believe it or not, there was one such pub in Fleet Street much patronised by the fiercely Unionist Daily Telegraph leader writers, of which I was one.
By turning a blind eye, the authorities drew the sting. Had they intervened, the trouble would have only got worse. 
FIRST POSTED JULY 11, 2007
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