How the West humiliated the Muslim world

George Bush has had what seems on the surface a good idea. Sensational news indeed! It is that instead of using 'shock and awe' tactics to spread democracy and freedom to the Islamic world, the West should try harder to win hearts and minds, as we did successfully against the communists in the Cold War.

Easier, I fear, said than done, because whereas communism was a secular creed based very much on reason - which could be and was argued out of existence - Mohammedanism is a religious creed based on revelation, a much harder nut - no insult intended - to crack.

Bush's answer to that, of course, is that the West's concern is not with the Muslim faith itself - how could it be with so many western citizens now members of that faith - but only with those Muslims who, while condemning terrorism, refuse to lift a

The once-proud Persian Empire was routinely exploited by the great powers during the world wars

finger to stop it. It is here that the West runs into difficulties, by refusing to recognise the degree of humiliation to which the Muslim world, within living memory, has been consistently put.

Take, for example, the once-proud Persian Empire, which during the two world wars was routinely exploited by the great powers. Even as late as 1956 one of the British arguments for invading Egypt, as I recall with acute embarrassment, was that we could not rely on the pilots of 'wog' ships (whose ancestors had built the pyramids!) to navigate the Suez Canal.

Western assumptions of superiority were indeed unforgivable. That is why even Muslim moderates today - such is their anger and resentment - want to see us suffer, and it will take more than arguments, or even belated apologies, to assuage these deep and terrible wounds.