The murderous, cowardly and unprovoked Muslim attacks on the West continue, the war for the Caliphate kills more innocents, but at all costs we must avoid the backlash. Don’t even think about it, let’s not go there – not even after London and Manchester and whatever other bloodbath is in store.

Regularly predicted but so far chimeric, the backlash is officialdom’s nightmare. We are exhorted against it after every Islamic atrocity. It never comes, even if you could be forgiven for thinking that the useful idiots of Multiculture & Diversity Inc. are more jittery about the backlash than they are about the next massacre. It never comes, but that’s not because of hand-wringing injunctions that we must not ‘tolerate hate’ (he meant vengeance) from the Chief Constable of Manchester after the murder of 22 people for whose security he was responsible. It never comes because the average Australian or Briton isn’t given to joining lynch mobs. It never comes, but that doesn’t mean it never will come.

It will come when the average citizen realises that officialdom doesn’t know what it’s talking about and is spinning him along with its mendacious talk of Islam having nothing to do with the interminable saga of murderous outrages and it all being the fault of a few fanatical deficients acting without authorisation in the name of the religion of peace (though never for some reason disowned by their pacific co-religionists). It will come when those who take their opinions from the ‘quality’ media wake up to the fact that horrific, agonising dismemberment by a nail bomb or knife or under the wheels of a truck is no longer something that happens somewhere else and to other people and can be set right by the rendition of a fatuous John Lennon song, but can and perhaps will happen to them while they’re taking their kids to private school in the Cabriolet or enjoying the Age with a latte on their way to the hairdressers’ or yoga, and, bombs being no respecters of persons, that can and perhaps will happen to the opinion-makers themselves as they commute to their barristers’ chambers or to the TV studio to explain why Islam isn’t a threat. It will come when the average citizen wakes up to the fact that is already staring us in the face, as this week’s surprise Melbourne attack underlines, that politicians and the state haven’t a clue about how to protect us. That’s when it will come, when the great passive mass of the public concludes that the only way to stop the terror attacks is to attack the attackers, and since the attackers are not there to be attacked, having in the main blown themselves into stir-fry, to attack the nearest surrogates to hand, which will be the members of the faith that launched the attackers into the arms of the celestial virgins.

Muslims, we are told, are already terrified of the backlash. So far they have had no reason to be, since at the moment the backlash exists only in the mind of those who inveigh against it. But perhaps Muslims ought to be worried that acts of violence committed in the name of their faith might yet have consequences. Muslim leaders and communities should ponder the thought that if the backlash is to be avoided it is wholly in their hands.

When was the last time you heard a Muslim leader dissociate his community from an act of terror, or weaselly Waleed Aly unequivocally denounce it? You could go further and say that there is no indication that even the most squeamish Muslim doesn’t see himself as on the terrorist’s side, even if having reservations about the methodology. True, it is hard to go against your own culture, your own people. But Muslims, if they want to live in the West in peace are going to have to. If they do not wish eventually to be treated as enemy aliens, or persecuted with shop-smashings and mosque-burnings by the kind of vigilante fanatics who even in easy-going Australia will emerge in a time of social disruption, Muslims must start disowning those among them who contemplate and commit terror.

It can be done – relatives had alerted police to their suspicions about the Manchester bomber and the London terrorists were known about too. But Muslims denouncing Muslims is the exception. It must become normal practice, to demonstrate that the primary loyalty of Muslims living in the West is to their adoptive countries, that they’re not just ‘temporary citizens’ whose real citizenship is in the dream of the Caliphate. Otherwise, the outlook is grim. When citizens decide that the Hobbesian contract is voided, and that they no longer owe allegiance to governments that cannot protect them, many will take the law into their own hands. And how can governments protect them? Does anyone seriously think that any Western government, irrespective of the efficiency of its intelligence services, can stop the next Muslim attack? The attackers are embedded in the community. How can you find them all? Only the fellow members of their communities can do that.

There is no point now in lamenting the fathomless stupidity and culpable ignorance of history of a political class that not only allowed but in the name of multiculturalism encouraged huge numbers of migrants professing a religion which, by its pretensions to world dominance could never permit them to ‘integrate’ with the infidel, to settle in a ‘Christian’ country, even one as secularised as ours. Had these politicians never heard of the centuries-old desire of Islam to conquer Western Christendom, of the Moors in Spain, of Suleiman at the gates of Vienna, of the Ottoman tide turned back at Lepanto? Or had they, but wanted the Muslims in for ideological reasons, for hatred of our Judeo-Christian tradition, to ‘dilute’ (as the unspeakable Blair’s Labour Party did in Britain) our ‘Anglo’ majority? Who knows? It doesn’t matter now anyway. We have to deal with things as they are.

At a time when our ‘intelligentsia’ is united in its apologising for Western culture and history, it is instructive that no one suggests that Islam too might look at its past and consider some apologies. No, no need, we’re told, Islam has nothing to apologise for, it’s a long-suffering ‘victim’ of the West’s cruel exploitation. Well, never mind the past. If Muslim immigrant communities do not wish to experience true victimhood they must do something about the present, and accept that they cannot simultaneously live in the West and harbour and encourage the fanatics who seek to destroy it. It is up to them.