Careless Talk Costs Lives

The saintly Rev Peter Mullen of Reform on Rasputin's view of 9/11.


Would Dr Williams argue that the brave men who fought back against the terrorists in the fourth aircraft to crash were in the wrong? He reckons that the terrorists had no choice: “We have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving no other option.”

This is a high-grade sample of the drivel we have heard these past three years from those in the West who despise the civilisation which is their inheritance. Of course the suicide bombers had “other options”: not every impoverished Muslim thinks the only answer to his problems is to destroy New York. If the atrocity were not the terrorists’ fault, what next? “We begin to find some sense of what they and we might together recognise as good.” Really? But it is impossible to make common moral cause between democratic freedom and the rule of law on the one hand and nihilistic killing on the other.

Dr Williams is praised as a man of superior intelligence. But there is no intelligence in Writing in the Dust, only romantic faux naivety. As his writings reveal, he is an old-fashioned class warrior. He dislikes our Western way of life and romanticises the Islamic world as much as Marxists used to romanticise the USSR. This wouldn’t matter much in normal times, but these days we live on the edge of destruction.

Great stuff, Dr Mullen. But I think the bishopric may be some way off.