The choice between Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull is a choice between someone who gets the major issue of our time v someone who does not. I watched Tony’s interview with Bolt on Sunday and he must have used the word “evil” three or four times in discussing what we are up against. Malcolm is so out of the picture that it is offensive to have to listen to him. His party is worth electing only because of the people he chooses not to promote. Only a shallow fool would fail to appoint Peter Dutton to the National Security Committee.

I have an article at Quadrant Online that deals with the nature of the enemy we face. It was provoked by an editorial in The Herald-Sun which expressed bewilderment about the events in Paris, how could these people do such things, literally asking what would their mothers think. This is the kind of sentiment for which there is all too much of it at the moment, which as best I can tell, is a sentiment shared by the PM. My article is titled, The War That Shall Not Be Mentioned and attempts to clarify what is going on. This is the central point:

The Islamic State is at war with us because they wish to convert us to Islam. You may think that the way the war is being waged is cruel and monstrous, but it is no more cruel and monstrous than many a war in the past. What makes this war so bizarre is that the kinds of people who write such editorials do not even know we are in the midst of a war. It is a war for control of territory, in just the same way every other war in history has been fought. They are attacking us and our civilisation relentlessly. They are attempting to achieve the same result that Nazis and Soviet communists attempted. They are trying to change our way of life into their way of life through force of arms. They are trying to take our territory from us and replace our way of doing things with theirs.

You may imagine in your slumbers that they could not possibly succeed. So let me bring to your attention Niall Ferguson’s article in The Oz yesterday on The Fall of Rome. Here are the passages that count:

In five decades the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late 5th century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows the benign influence of Rome dimin­ished rapidly in the rest of western Europe.

“The end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s phrase, came within a single ­generation.

This is the view of another historian, Peter Heather:

The Visigoths who settled in Aquitaine and the Vandals who conquered Carthage were attracted to the Roman ­Empire by its wealth, but were ­enabled to seize that wealth by the arms acquired and skills learnt from the Romans ­themselves.

“For the adventurous,” writes Heather, “the Roman Empire, while being a threat to their existence, also presented an unprecedented opportunity to prosper … Once the Huns had pushed large numbers of (alien groups) across the frontier, the Roman state became its own worst enemy. Its military power and financial sophistication both hastened the process whereby streams of incomers became coherent forces capable of carving out kingdoms from its own body politic.”

We are starting to wake to the danger, and you will know that we are finally starting to get it when even Malcolm Turnbull starts sounding the alarm. As for Barack Obama, that is something he will never do.

Niall Ferguson has an article on the fall of Rome which he discusses as a warning. It’s not a warning but a prognostication. It won’t be exactly the same, but the circulation of elites is an old story. Even if every political leader in Europe understood everything he said, and wished to reverse the tide of history, I cannot imagine what could be done. Let me quote:

A new generation of historians has raised the possibility the process of Roman decline was in fact sudden — and bloody — rather than smooth.

For Bryan Ward-Perkins, what happened was “violent seizure … by barbarian invaders”. The end of the Roman west, he writes in The Fall of Rome (2005), “witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilisation, throwing the ­inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times”.

In five decades the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late 5th century — inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows the benign influence of Rome dimin­ished rapidly in the rest of western Europe.

“The end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s phrase, came within a single ­generation.

This is the view of another historian, Peter Heather:

The Visigoths who settled in Aquitaine and the Vandals who conquered Carthage were attracted to the Roman ­Empire by its wealth, but were ­enabled to seize that wealth by the arms acquired and skills learnt from the Romans ­themselves.

“For the adventurous,” writes Heather, “the Roman Empire, while being a threat to their existence, also presented an unprecedented opportunity to prosper … Once the Huns had pushed large numbers of (alien groups) across the frontier, the Roman state became its own worst enemy. Its military power and financial sophistication both hastened the process whereby streams of incomers became coherent forces capable of carving out kingdoms from its own body politic.”

I don’t mean to be so down about the future, but it is hard to see how things could change.

A large part of the problem for the West in dealing with Islamic terrorism is the deep anti-Israeli animosity on the left. The left has built its attitudes to Islamic terrorism by defending Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in their attacks on Israel.

To admit that there is an incompatibility between the values of the West, however defined, and the values of radical Islam, is to admit that the Israelis have a valid point. The insanity of the left is that they would rather see the suicide of their own culture, see it submerged beneath the flood of Islamic radicals into our Western nations, than admit that the fight against sharia is legitimate, and that Israel, in standing up for our Judeo-Christian values, has been largely in the right.