Confronting The Challenge of Islamic Fundamentalism
Address to the Jewish National Fund of Australia at their Annual
Dinner at the Palladium at the Crown Hotel, Melbourne, on
Sunday, 28 May 2006
by Winston S. Churchill
Governor, yr Excellencies, Mr. President,
Members of JNF, Ladies & Gentlemen,
It is both an honour and a pleasure to be your guest in Melbourne tonight, and to have
the privilege of addressing this important assembly of the Jewish National Fund of Australia. May
I say how delighted I am to be back in Melbourne – the last time was nearly 40 years ago when I
had the huge privilege of speaking at the feet of that great and most lovable Australian & friend of
my Grandfather’s, Sir Bob Menzies who, as Chancellor of the University, had invited me to deliver
the Moomba Oration in 1968 or ’69!
Last year we commemorated the 60th Anniversary of the end of World War II, and with it
the Liberation of the Concentration Camps of Europe. That should remind us all of the continuing
importance of the fight against anti-Semitism. We like to think that we are today living in a kinder,
more tolerant age than our forebears. Nonetheless, racial and religious intolerance, hatred and
persecution – the scourge of our times – are never far away. They manifest themselves in so
many ways – in bullying at school, obscene graffiti sprayed on graves or public buildings, verbal
abuse and, at their most extreme, murder, mass-murder, including suicide bombings, and
genocide.
Of course the problem goes far wider than anti-Semitism. It extends to innumerable other
racial and religious groupings beyond the Jews. In the 1990s in Rwanda, the Tutsis became the
victims of genocide on a horrendous scale at the hands of their Hutu neighbours; in Srebrenica in
July 1995 some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were massacred by the Serb army, under the very noses
of the UN protecting force.
In recent months Christians have been massacred by Muslims in Pakistan. At this very
moment in Darfur, the Christians of Southern Sudan are being slaughtered by the Muslim
Janjaweed militiamen in a brutal exercise of ethnic cleansing, while just last week Australian
troops have had to be rushed to East Timor to quell the vicious racial violence that has broken out
there.
Of course, all decent, responsible people, wherever in the world they may live, whatever
god they may or may not bow down to, unreservedly condemn such actions. But condemnation
alone is not enough. We must all play our part in combating intolerance & racism, including antiSemitism, wherever it rears its ugly head, and redouble our efforts to extirpate this cancer that
afflicts almost every land and which, tragically, shows no sign of abating.
For more than 40 years I have reported and observed the Middle East scene. As a young
war-correspondent twenty-six years of age, I found myself in Israel in mid-May of 1967. I
happened to be with David Ben-Gurion, former Prime Minister of Israel, interviewing him at dawn
one morning in his suite at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem when – as I recall about 6:50 am –
Kol Israel interrupted their programs to announce that President Nasser of Egypt had closed the
Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping – cutting, at a stroke, Israel’s oil lifeline. Ben-Gurion, with a
gesture of the hand, ordered his assistant to switch off the radio and, shaking his great mane of
white hair gravely, declared with sorrow:
“This means war. I am very frightened. Not for Israel, for she will survive – we cannot
afford otherwise – but for the younger generation. It is always the best of their generation
who never return.”
Thereupon the great man led me out onto the balcony overlooking the Holy City of
Jerusalem, where the first rays of the morning sun were striking the city’s golden domes, cupolas
and spires. Taking me by the arm, he proceeded to give me a succinct lesson in Jewish history:
“Mr. Churchill before you, you have the City of David – 3,000 years Jewish. But do you
see the road that leads down the valley? Follow it and it will lead you to Hebron, the City
of Abraham – 4,000 years Jewish!”
It was a magical moment and one that I shall always treasure.
A week later, with Nasser making blood-curdling threats as to how he would wipe Israel
off the face of the earth and drive the Jews into the sea, war preparations in Israel were in full
swing. In Tel Aviv thousands of graves were being dug in the public parks in anticipation of large
scale civilian casualties. Public appeals were made for blood, to which I, among thousands of
others, responded. Among all, except the highest echelons of government and the military – who,
alone were privy to Israel’s war-plan – there was a deep-rooted fear that, with all the Arab nations
mobilising against her, Israel might lose the war – a prospect too terrible to contemplate.
It took an Ezer Weizman, the most recent head of the Israeli Air Force, to be bullish about
the situation as it presented itself in the first few days of June 1967, with the entire Arab world
mobilising and, as they supposed, moving in for the kill. Well do I recall him telling me, over
breakfast in the Tel Aviv Hilton with his gung-ho jocularity: ‘The Arabs have surrounded us again
– poor bastards!’
But, among the rank & file, there was deep anxiety, even fear. My Israeli reservist
escorting officer, a lawyer in his mid-forties, recently married with a small daughter, told me in all
earnestness that, in the event that Israel was being defeated, he would have no hesitation killing
his wife and daughter, rather than let them fall in to the hands of the Arabs. It would indeed have
been a second Masada.
For my part, I found myself wondering what I – a Goy and a Brit – should do in that event,
given that I was from a foreign land and had no direct involvement in the quarrels of the Middle
East – beyond a Grandfather who had been a signatory of the Balfour Declaration! Without
hesitation, I concluded that I would grab whatever weapon might come into my hands and fight at
the side of the Israelis. From that moment onwards, though I avow the right of the Palestinians to
have their own independent state within the confines of Biblical Palestine, which has been their
homeland over the centuries, I have counted myself a Zionist, firmly believing in the justice of the
existence of the State of Israel.
In 1973 my intelligence was no better than that of the Israeli Government and the Yom
Kippur War found me a prisoner Westbound aboard the QE2 committed to a two-week lecture
tour of the US. By the time I got back to Israel General Sharon was on the West side of the Suez
Canal with the Egyptian Third Army in his power. I sent him an urgent message asking him to
call. An hour later I was still waiting when I had to leave to have Dinner in a Palestinian fish
restaurant in Jaffa with General Motti Hod, Commander of the Air Force in ’67. I briefed the
switchboard operators at the Tel Aviv Hilton to forward any telephone call to the restaurant.
Half way through Dinner mein host, the Palestinian, called me to the phone. I went
behind the bar & took the phone off the hook. A booming voice came on the line, causing me to
hold the phone at arm’s length: ‘Winston, This is Arik!’ adding with overtones of Scipio Africanus
‘Arik from Africa! Winston, We have Peace! A piece of Egypt, a piece of Lebanon, a piece of Syria
& a piece of Jordan!’ There you have it: the Sharon vision of Peace! There is no denying that he
was God’s gift to journalists!
Turning to the situation in the Middle East today, the recent declaration by the Iranian
President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that the Holocaust never happened, and that Israel is a
‘tumour’ to be ‘wiped off the map’, can only be a matter of the gravest concern, linked as it is with
his decision to remove the UN seals from Iran’s nuclear research facilities and press ahead with
its programme to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
Of course there is no shortage of people on hand to reassure us that the Iranian
President does not really mean what he says – just as there were those around in the 1930’s who
made clear that, of course, Herr Hitler did not really mean what he had written in his book, Mein
Kampf! Whether the government of Israel will buy such reassurance, only time will tell! But
somehow, knowing Israel, I doubt it!
It is by no means impossible that this reckless action by the Iranian President will provoke
an Israeli, or even American, air-strike to take out Iran’s budding nuclear capability, as the Israeli
Air Force so brilliantly did in 1981 with Saddam’s Osirak reactor, named after the Egyptian
mythological God of Death. In such circumstances the political temperature in the Middle East
would go stratospheric; Iran might sink a couple of super-tankers, closing the Straits of Hormuz
and the price of oil could well go through $200 per barrel.
That of course would be a huge inconvenience to people around the whole world and will
predictably call down on Israel & the US a caterwaul of condemnation. But that might not be the
worst of outcomes. The alternative – too terrible to contemplate – might be the destruction of the
state of Israel & a second Holocaust!
But, while facing realities however harsh, it is also important to use a phrase beloved of
my Grandfather, to ‘grasp the larger hope’. Out of the present seemingly bleak situation, it is by
no means impossible that, in the coming weeks & months, the newly elected Hamas Government
of Palestine may be forced to confront the reality of the permanence of the state of Israel and
move to recognise its existence, within the pre-1967 boundaries, while abandoning its previous
insistence on a ‘Right of Return’, for those Palestinians displaced in 1948. That would appear to
be the wish of the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas and, were it to happen, the end of the
60-year war between Palestinians and Israelis over how to divide the Holy Land, could be in
sight.
What blessings would not flow from such a historic development, not just for the peoples
of Israel and Palestine, but for the wider Middle East! Indeed nothing could do more to disarm the
present worldwide hatred, presently directed not only against the state of Israel, but against the
United States and her allies.
I wish to congratulate the JNF of Australia on your important initiative to raise funds to
relocate half a million Israelis from the narrow coastal strip adjacent to Tel Aviv, to the under
populated region of the Negev. This is a project that is not only environmentally desirable but –
given the great vulnerability of Israel’s densely concentrated population to a potential nuclear
attack – strategically sound. While hoping for the best, it always makes good sense to prepare for
the worst.
As you may imagine, I am deeply proud to be Winston Churchill’s grandson and to have
the immense privilege of bearing the name of the man who, more than any other individual,
turned the tide of war in the greatest and most terrible conflict known to man. You may say I am
biased – which of course I am – but I firmly believe that, but for Winston Churchill, Great Britain
would have surrendered to Nazi Germany in that fateful Summer of 1940, when all effective
resistance to the Nazi power in continental Europe was coming to an end.
Though the situation seemed hopeless, Churchill, in the words of that great CBS Radio
reporter, Edward R. Murrow – made famous by President John F. Kennedy – ‘mobilised the
English language and sent it into battle’. Telling his fellow countrymen that he had ‘nothing to
offer but blood, toil, tears & sweat,’ he persuaded them to fight on for eighteen months alone, but
for the strong, unstinting support of Australia, Canada and the other Dominions of the Crown.
It would be wrong to say that Winston Churchill won the War, but what is true is that – but
for him – the war would have been lost by default. It would have been impossible for America,
when eventually she awoke from her reveries, to launch a D-Day style Liberation of Europe from
more than 3,000 miles across the Atlantic.
In such circumstances it is entirely possible that, to this day, the Nazi swastika would be
flying over Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and over all the capital cities of Europe,
as far East as Moscow. The world would indeed be a very different place, and there would be
many of us who would never have survived to see our children and our children’s children.
In 1993 I had the privilege of being invited to address a commemoration of the 50th
Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising at London University. Following my speech, a very
beautiful lady of a certain age, approached me:
‘Mr. Churchill, at the time of the Uprising, I was a girl of just 12. We had all been herded
into the Ghetto – supposedly for our safety. But then people all around us started to disappear,
we knew not where – we were all very frightened. We had one of the few radios in the Ghetto
and, whenever your Grandfather was due to broadcast on the BBC, my family & our friends would
gather round. I could not understand English, but I knew that if I and my family had any hope of
coming through this war alive, it depended upon that one, strong, unseen voice.
We were all taken to Treblinka and then to Bergen Belsen. I was the only member of my
family to survive. I was liberated by British forces in 1945 – in fact by the gentleman you see at
my side, who is today my husband!’
It was a profoundly proud, yet humbling, moment! I had some idea how much my
Grandfather meant to the Brits, and even to the Americans but, until that moment, I had no
understanding of just how much he meant to those living in Occupied Europe, most especially to
the Jews.
But today a new challenge confronts us: Extremist Islam has declared war on the rest of
the world, as we see from their ruthless attacks – overwhelmingly targeted at innocent civilians –
with the outrage of Nine-Eleven, the bombings in Madrid, in Bali, in London and, most recently, in
Jordan.
Meanwhile the Fundamentalists are doing all in their power to mobilise against us the
large Muslim communities living in our midst. There today are an estimated 7M Muslims in North
America; nearly half a million in Australia, while in the European Union, the Moslem community is
estimated at 20M, including nearly 2M in Britain.
The scale of the problem confronting Europe today is epitomised by France, which has a
Muslim community of some 6M, or 10% of its population. But, taking the population aged 20 and
below, that figure rockets to 30%, such is the birth rate among the immigrant communities. In
other words, within one further generation, France will have become an Islamic country – a truly
awesome prospect.
It is clear that the writing is on the wall for Judeo-Christian Europe, as we have known it
over the past 2,000 years. Why are the alarm-bells not ringing? Can it be that we would sooner
commit national suicide than risk being labelled ‘politically incorrect’? Can anyone imagine a
comparable situation in reverse being tolerated in Saudi Arabia? The answer is so self-evident, it
needs no response.
As if that were not enough, the United States is pressuring the EU to grant Turkey
admission to the European Union – something that, at a stroke, would cause the Moslem
population of Europe to soar from 20 to 100M. I have a high regard for the Turks, who have long
been loyal members of NATO, but that would be an act of consummate folly. It is high time
someone summoned up the courage to tell Washington to mind its own business.
It is deeply worrying the extent to which – unlike all other categories of immigrants – the
Islamic communities are reluctant to bond with their fellow countrymen & women, while
harbouring a separate, indeed alien agenda of their own. While the US imports its bombers from
Saudi Arabia, and Spain from North Africa, it is a deeply disturbing feature of the 7/7 attacks on
London that our bombers were home-grown – a fact that should cause us to ponder, swift & hard,
just where we have gone wrong. America & Britain are now experiencing what Israel has lived
with for years: the curse of the suicide bomber.
While on Australian soil, I wish to pay tribute to your Prime Minister, John Howard.
Unique among Western leaders, he has had the courage to stand up for those values – freedom,
democracy, liberalism & tolerance – that inspire our Western democracies, bluntly endorsing the
view that those who would prefer to live under Sharia law, rather than Parliamentary law, should
pack their bags & go.
That said, with large Islamic communities already established in each of our countries, it
is vital that we recognise that the majority of Muslims in our midst are loyal, law-abiding citizens
and we must ensure that – in our pursuit of the men & women of terror – we do not alienate the
Muslim community as a whole, for their help is vital if we are, eventually, to excise this cancer of
terrorism in their midst.
Intriguingly the dangers of extremist Islam were foreseen by Winston Churchill all of 85
years ago, as I discovered to my amazement, while compiling my most recent book NEVER GIVE
IN! The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches.
Churchill is of course well known for his gift of prescience and, specifically, for being the
first to warn of the menace of Hitler & Nazism as early as 1932, and of the Soviet threat in his
famous Iron Curtain speech of 1946 in Fulton, Mo. But how many know that he also warned the
world of the dangers of Islamic Fundamentalism? I certainly did not!
On 14 June 1921, hard on the heels of the Cairo Conference, at which he presided over
the re-shaping of the Middle East, including the creation of modern day Iraq, he warned the
House of Commons:
‘A large number of [Saudi Arabia’s King] Bin Saud’s followers belong to the Wahabi sect,
a form of Mohammedanism which bears, roughly speaking, the same relationship to orthodox
Islam as the most militant form of Calvinism would have borne to Rome in the fiercest times
of [Europe’s] religious wars.
The Wahabis profess a life of exceeding austerity, and what they practice themselves
they rigorously enforce on others. They hold it as an article of duty, as well as of faith, to kill
all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women
have been put to death in Wahabi villages for simply appearing in the streets.
It is a penal offence to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette
and, as for the crime of alcohol, the most energetic supporter of the temperance cause in this
country falls far behind them. Austere, intolerant, well-armed, and blood-thirsty, in their own
regions the Wahabis are a distinct factor which must be taken into account, and they have
been, and still are, very dangerous to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina…..
In Churchill’s day, of course, the viciousness and cruelty of the Wahabis was confined to
the Saudi Arabia peninsula, and their atrocities were directed exclusively against their fellow
Muslims, whom they held to be heretics for not adhering to the Wahabi creed – but not anymore.
Today the combination of the oil wealth of Saudi Arabia and the supine weakness of the
Saudi royal family which – as the price for not having their own behaviour subjected to scrutiny
and public criticism by these austere, extremist clerics – has bank-rolled the Wahabi
fundamentalist movement, and given these fanatical zealots a global reach to their vicious creed
of hatred and extremism. The consequence has been that the Wahabis have been able to export
their exceptionally intolerant brand of Islamic fundamentalism from Mauritania and Morocco on
Africa’s Atlantic shores, through more than two dozen countries including Bosnia, Chechnya,
Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East, to as far afield as the Philippines and East Timor in
the Pacific.
This is the stark challenge that today confronts the Western world and I fear it will be with
us, not just for a matter of years, but perhaps even for generations. Whether the decision to
invade Iraq was right or wrong, wise or foolish, is immaterial. The reality is that Iraq today is the
epicentre of the Islamic militants’ assault on the West. They are determined that democracy shall
not succeed in Iraq. For our part, we cannot allow it to fail.
Even before the recent serious developments in Iran, siren voices could be heard on
Capitol Hill, raising the cry: ‘Bring the Boys home!’ I tell you: nothing could be more disastrous
than if, at this juncture, the United States were to cut and run. It would, at a stroke, undermine
those forces of moderation we are seeking to establish in power, betray our troops as they fight a
difficult, but necessary, battle, and break faith with our gallant soldiers who have sacrificed their
lives to establish a free Iraq.
Gravest of all, we should be handing a victory of gigantic proportions to our sworn
enemies. Let no one imagine that by pulling out of Iraq, the threat will simply evaporate. On the
contrary, it will redouble, it will come closer to home and our enemies will have established in Iraq
the very base that, by our defeat of the Taliban, we have denied them in Afghanistan. We shall
see a desperately weakened United States, with its armed forces undermined and demoralised,
increasingly at the mercy of our terrorist enemies.
Precipitate withdrawal is the counsel of defeatism and cowardice which, if it holds sway,
will immeasurably increase the dangers that today confront, not just America, but the entire
Western world. It is something for which we shall pay a terrible price in the years ahead. When
great nations go to war – and they should do so only as a last resort – they must expect to suffer
grievous losses and must commit to war with an unconquerable resolve to secure victory.
In Iraq the United States has lost some 2,500 men and women, Britain 111. Compare
that to the first day of the Battle of the Somme – 1 July 1916 – when the British Army in a single
day, nay, before breakfast, lost 55,000 men killed, wounded or missing in action. Did we talk of
quitting? Did we, heck!
What has happened to the mighty United States? Is she going soft? Are the elected
representatives of the American people really ready to surrender to those who threaten their
homeland – indeed their civilian population – with death and destruction? I pray that they are not,
and I call to mind the words of my Grandfather, addressing the Canadian Parliament on New
Year's Day 1941, in which – referring to the British nation dwelling around the globe, but it applies
equally to our American cousins today -- he declared:
'We are a tough & hardy people! We have not travelled across the centuries, across the
oceans, across the mountains & across the prairies, because we're made of sugar
candy!'
In conclusion, I would remind you all of Winston Churchill’s words to the House of
Commons on becoming Prime Minister in May 1940, which applies every bit as much to the
situation that confronts us today.
You ask: What is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is Victory. Victory at all costs,
Victory in spite of all terror. However long or hard the road may be; for without Victory there is no
survival.”
Provided we have the courage to stay the course, I am convinced that we can and shall,
in the end, prevail, both in Afghanistan & in Iraq. Any alternative is too terrible to contemplate. Let
us fight the good fight – and let us fight it together! How pleased my Grandfather would be to
know that – 40 years on from his death – the Anglo-American alliance is still strong and that
British, Australian & American soldiers tonight as we are gathered here, stand shoulder-toshoulder in Iraq and in Afghanistan, confronting the peril of the hour! Long may we stand
together! God bless Australia! And God bless both the State & the people of Israel!
END