Daniels In the Lions' Den

Last Saturday many thousands of Londoners — plus a small but determined corps of Americans — came to Westminster to debate the clash of civilizations. Ken Livingstone, the notoriously pro-Islamist mayor of London, had invited Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, to be the neoconservative fall guy.

Not only Mr. Livingstone, but also almost everybody else expected the professor to be eaten alive by the politician. Mr. Pipes was warned by his British friends that he was walking into a trap.

But it didn't turn out that way. The audience — eccentrically attired and coiffed, sporting cranky badges and sandals — were atypical political activists, and to judge from their questions, heavily inclined to the left. "This is liberal hell!" muttered one New Yorker, contemplating the "Free Palestine" and anti-racism stalls to which the mayor was giving house room. Yet the loudest cheers were not for him, but for the Daniel who had ventured into this lions' den.

As soon as the self-styled "young British mom" in a hijab who was seconding the mayor, Salma Yaqoob, referred to the July 7 London suicide bombings as "reprisal events," I felt the audience shudder. There was another shudder when Ms. Yaqoob refused to utter the word "Israel."

Then the biographer of Winston Churchill, Sir Martin Gilbert, rose. "My son was on the subway when these ‘reprisal events' took place on 7/7. Would you mind telling me what these reprisals were for?" Ms. Yaqoob had no answer. What could she say to him? A great historian who has done the British state some service, who happens to be a Zionist? How could she justify the killing of scores of innocent people, and the attempted murder of countless others, including his son, as a "reprisal event"?

The mayor himself seemed taken aback by the lack of enthusiasm for his side. It is fashionable to describe figures like Mr. Livingstone as "former" Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, or whatever. But there was nothing in his demagoguery to indicate that he has really changed his mind about anything for 40 years. His heroes are Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. The only difference is that instead of Marx, he now quotes Mill — though he couldn't resist reprimanding that great advocate of women's emancipation for failing to write "he or she."

Mr. Livingstone's world is one gigantic conspiracy, with American neoconservatives pulling the strings. The Cold War was, he said, a conspiracy cooked up in Washington in 1943, just as the war on terror was devised by a "nexus around the White House and Wall Street." He stopped short of claiming that the CIA had ordered the September 11 attacks, but they had certainly created Al Qaeda. The state of Israel was an American conspiracy too: It "should never have been created" but the Americans, who of course control the United Nations, set it up on Arab land because they and the British were too anti-Semitic to accept Jewish refugees in their own countries. This is pretty rich coming from Mr. Livingstone — the mayor who was censured by his own party for abusing a Jewish reporter as a Nazi concentration camp guard.

Such fantasies are as commonplace as his assertions of moral equivalence between the "crude Islamophobia" of American neoconservatives and Islamist terrorists. But when Mr. Pipes pointed out that the Americans would have been mad to invade Iraq for the sake of oil, since the predictable effect had been to raise oil prices, the mayor replied that "the people in the White House were mad" and went on to make the apocalyptic prediction that if the war on terror continued, there would be "casualties in the tens of millions." The audience did not know what to make of this, and gave the mayor a distinctly muted response.

Mr. Pipes, however, was rewarded for his sweet reasonableness — which contrasted sharply with the malevolent extremism of Mr. Livingstone and Ms. Yaqoob — with hearty rounds of applause. He got a few laughs, too, as when he told one of his critics that Hezbollah "did not get to eliminate Israel this time round — I give you my condolences." Much of the audience having never seen a real, live American neoconservative in the flesh before and doubtless surprised that he had neither horns nor a tail, listened with rapt attention to what he had to say.

In essence, Mr. Pipes had a warning for Londoners: Thanks to the multicultural policies of politicians like Mayor Livingstone, "your city is a threat to the rest of the world." He listed 15 countries in which Islamists from Britain had carried out terrorist attacks, ranging from Pakistan to America. Since last weekend he could have added a 16th — Somalia. Britain, he said, was now regarded by some experts as the biggest threat to American security.

British audiences aren't usually told this. They aren't told that "the Islamists have declared war on us," let alone have the war aim stated clearly: victory. They need to hear the likes of Daniel Pipes much more often. If the State Department won't send them over, let the think tanks do it. We want to hear them echo George Cohan's 1917 song, "Over There": "The Yanks are coming/ … We'll be over, we're coming over/ And we won't come back till it's over/ Over there."