Peter Preston, writing about last week’s blood-curdling speech by the Director-General of MI5…

Does Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller truly believe that the cult of Osama is some passing, youthful fad that will one day be gone, like David Cassidy’s fan club? Will it somehow be swept away by new boy bands or iPods? Not exactly, it seems. We must all stand up for our core values, “equality, freedom, justice and tolerance”, she says. We must therefore confront “the powerful narrative that weaves together conflicts from across the globe, presenting the west’s response to varied and complex issues, from longstanding disputes such as Israel/Palestine and Kashmir to more recent events, as evidence of an across-the-board determination to undermine and humiliate Islam worldwide”.

Code-crackers will note that she lists those issues and disputes alphabetically. “Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kashmir and Lebanon are regularly cited by those who advocate terrorist violence as illustrating what they allege is western hostility to Islam.” They should also note that she goes way back before 9/11, which means before Baghdad and Kabul, too – to the 1990s, when al-Qaida was blowing up Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and killing hundreds of innocent Africans. So these “roots” go very deep.

And where, in any meaningful sense, can they be reckoned to start? Not in Kashmir, against a Hindu enemy; nor in Chechnya, unless Putin has become an honorary pillar of “the west”. Did Washington dismember Yugoslavia? Is Tony Blair about to sabotage the birth of a Muslim Kosovo? No, the loose threads of this tapestry lead inescapably back to what she calls “Israel and Palestine”. Maybe bringing peace to the Middle East after over half a century of vicious strife wouldn’t bring total generation shift, the lessening of a fury, the erasure of hatred. But it would be a beginning, a symbol, a chance to start afresh…