The eight Arabs just arrested in connection with terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow are all doctors or medical staff in a hospital, in one way or another employed by the National Health Service. The pursuit of medical careers got them into Britain without proper scrutiny and then provided a cover that cunningly shielded them from suspicion. These may well be the most educated and capable of all the Islamist terrorists revealed to date.

Their intention, clearly, is to set Muslims irretrievably against the British. Civil strife, the Islamists believe, is the necessary prelude to their victory over the degenerate infidels. In Baghdad, Afghanistan, Gaza, Pakistan, this same fantasy runs wild.

Some courage is required on the part of a Muslim to impose reality on the Islamist fantasy. Fatwas and murder prevent dialogue. But just as there once were faithful Communists whose inside knowledge of the party transformed them into informed and determined anti-Communists, so now there are jihadis whose experience has led them to expose Islamism.

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One of the strangest features of the contemporary political landscape is the convergence everywhere of the Left with Muslim jihadis and extremists. Those who once protested against the installation of cruise missiles in Western Europe, say, now demonstrate against the war on terror. Those who praised the Soviet Union as peace-loving are now busy signing petitions and publishing articles to the effect that Iran’s nuclear program and nuclear weapons (if it comes to that) are a third-world success and nothing to worry about. Anti-Americanism has made bedfellows of people whose world views and values are ostensibly incompatible.

David Horowitz was early in pointing out what he called this “unholy alliance.” Now an English writer, Nick Cohen, has tackled this subject in a book with the title, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way. His left-wing credentials are impeccable. His parents were Communists devotedly clinging to the party line, whatever it might be, and they brought him up with a “loathing” of conservatives. The Observer newspaper is the voice of the English Left, aimed at the intelligentsia, and he is its leading political commentator. He knew some Iraqi exiles, including Kanan Makiya, and from them he understood that Saddam Hussein was a fascist, pure and simple. For him, intellectuals—indeed all human beings—have to be against fascism everywhere and at all times, and that too is quite simple.

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Maurice Papon has just died at the age of ninety-six, but his name will always stand for France’s moral collapse in 1940, and that country’s inability—or reluctance—to redress matters afterwards. In his capacity as a ranking Vichy official, the documentation proves, he signed the deportation orders to Auschwitz for 1,690 Jews, 223 of whom were children, organizing sixteen trains for them, the last in June 1944 when German defeat was certain. It was also his idea to send the bill for the expense of the requisite cattle-trucks to the Jewish representative council, thus obliging the victims to pay for their journey to be murdered. One of his German superiors described him as a sincere collaborator, “co-operating correctly with the Feldkommandatur.”

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