Lies, damned lies and Africans

A few Jews die and the world goes crazy

Ishmael is 25, university-educated and one of Kenya's estimated 1.8 million Muslims, who make up six per cent of the population. He wants to know why the Jews have so much power.

It's Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, the day after the Mombasa bombing, and although it's Ramadan Ishmael has broken his fast to drink tea with me in a Nairobi cafe. He's hardly a fanatical Muslim, and he has no time for what he calls "the Al Qaeda Arabs". But still he's bothered to the point of being agitated by the fact that "a few Jews die and the world goes crazy".

I've just told him that there are only five or six million Jews in the US, and that their number is falling. How then, he asks, do they manage to control the American media, economoy and government?

I'm not sure how to respond to this, but respond I know I must. I've just read Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America" and recognised in it the same lethal combination of visceral hatred and warped logic that gave rise to Nazism and the final solution. Ishmael may be no supporter of Al Qaeda's terror tactics (unlike in London, I've come across no Kenyan Muslim who is), but his opinion of the Jews could have come straight out of a bin Laden manual.

This, for instance, is from bin Laden's self-justificatory tract: "Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy."

And again: "You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions . . . As a result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life, making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense."

Hitler and the Nazis could not have expressed it better. Ishmael and his counterparts on the white far right do not express it any differently.

On the left, however, the impression is too often given that Islamist fascism is somehow not the same abhorrent animal, the same clear-cut enemy as its white western equivalents. It is as if the oppression of the Palestinians and the misdeeds of the state of Israel blind people to the nature of the anti-Jewish sentiment in Islamist-fascist circles.

Not for them a just peace and settlement between Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. "The creation of Israel is a crime that must be erased," states bin Laden's letter. It is the final solution in Islamist-fascist guise.

There are other targets in bin Laden's totalitarianism that will be familiar to students of 20th-century fascism. "Fornication, homosexuality [and] intoxicants" are also lined up for erasure. "You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom," declares the Islamist fuhrer. "You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object."

So why, in the face of an enemy whose intentions are as clearly expressed as were those of Hitler in the 1930s, do sections of the left seem not to recognise the nature of the fight that faces us?

In part, rightly, it is the desire not to give comfort to anti-Islamic racism. In part, rightly, it is the desire not to lend credence to the idea that a war on Iraq is the way to go about defeating Al Qaeda. And in the greatest part of all, it is the recognition that there can be no lasting peace in the Islamic world until the running sores of Palestine, Chechnya, corrupt, western-backed governments and grotesque economic inequality are all addressed.

But to acknowledge all of this should not be to ignore the nature of the immediate enemy. It is as if the iniquities of the Versailles Treaty and the treatment of Germany after the first world war had been permitted to paralyse the fight against fascism in the 1930s.

Hitler told the world what he intended to do before he ever achieved power and the world chose to ignore him until it was too late. Bin Laden and his Islamist fascists have been no less clear about their aims. Which side are we on?