Tomorrow on the interviews blog we will publish all of Peter Hitchens' answers to ten recent questions posed by ConservativeHome visitors. Most of Peter's answers are substantial but one answer, in particular, to a question posed by 'MagicAldo', ran to 2,000 words. MagicAldo's question and Peter Hitchens' answer are therefore published below (with Peter's permission) as a Platform piece.
Peter Hitchens is a columnist on the Mail on Sunday and recently started his own blog.
MagicAldo: "Peter, your "realistic" foreign policy stance has maintained an admirably consistent focus on the national interest sadly lacking in many of the arguments of the new internationalists. But I've never heard you actually confront the issue of Islamic terrorism head on. Is it a threat to the British national interest? How should the UK respond, if not by way of destabilising regimes that support it? Is there not a pattern of events and ideology across the world that represents a lethal threat to the West? Are there no lessons to learn from 9/11 and the appeasement of the Clinton era?"
FROM EDWARD HEATH TO TONY BLAIR POLITICIANS HAVE APPEASED TERROR
"Several issues are involved here, hence the very long answer. The first is over Israel, the real cause of the dispute between the Western (ie Christian) world and the Muslim world. I have written and spoken often and at length about this, and my position is that the policy of 'land for peace' is directly comparable to 1930s appeasement in that it is both weak, unwise and ultimately certain to fail. This is the central question. One could argue for centuries over whether the Balfour Declaration was a good thing. But it would not change the fact that a Jewish state now exists in the Middle East or that its extinction would be a grave blow to civilisation and probably fatal to the standing and power of the European and North American nations. The 'land for peace' policy has handed over a great deal of strategic territory in return for unreliable promises, and has convinced the Arab world of our ultimate weakness under pressure.
Then there is the issue of terrorism. From Edward Heath's 1970 release of Leila Khaled (under US pressure) to the British, Continental European and then American recognition of Yasser Arafat as a legitimate politician, the Western powers have signalled that they will ultimately give in to terrorist threats, thus making terror the favoured weapon of anyone who seriously seeks to alter the policy of a major Western power.
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