Welcome back and a happy new year! Today, we start by tipping non-Europeans off about an alarming trend that threatens to introduce to Europe the divide between Christians and Muslims north of the Sahara that has been long endemic to its south.

Bood, our reliable French associate, noted a number of European broadcast documentaries, interviews and news briefs related to the plight of Christian Arabs in Muslim countries on European ('continental' rather than British) television over the last festive fortnight.

The United Kingdom has been relatively insulated from stories of Christian-Muslim conflict. We saw little of the material that seems to have dominated European newsrooms, except as footnotes and occasional stories in specialist sections, although this will surely change with time.

Although British evangelical Christians have been much exercised by Sudan, notably Baroness Cox, British public life has not been stirred to the same degree as American politics. The US has a substantial Southern Baptist constituency, often African-American, that sees Islam as a slave-trading and violent religion whose sharia law offends against every principle of biblical justice.

And this is the point. African Christians well out-number English Anglican Christians and are far more socially conservative. In the UK, there are only 1.8 million or so Catholic and Anglican regular church-goers (slightly more Catholic than Anglican, thanks to Polish migration). Although there are many other non-conformist and pentecostalist churches, the numbers still do not add up to much in a population of around 60 million.

Moreover, these populations are often aging outside the big two churches and the family approach to church is less communitarian than overseas. There are few communities in the UK that can be said to be coherently and geographically Christian in the way that you might find in Africa and the Southern States.

Most English churchgoers reflect their culture by being essentially liberal, seeing the local church as part of a community where their religion is worn rather lightly. English middle class Catholics are notorious for ignoring church teaching on contraception and blind eyes are turned to abortion (and homosexuality) much to the frustration of the Cardinals.

The African churches, Southern Baptists and hardline Evangelicals within the Anglican Church not only do not turn a blind eye but attitudes are probably hardening. A core issue is homosexuality within a communion that does permit marriage. 

As attitudes harden and as the lobby develops for helping Africa by redistributing Western resources, a bloc emerges which is as intransigent about its perceptions of human rights as the Islamist perception of sharia. And so we have some very strange alliances on both sides. 

The alliance between hard-line Marxists and Islamists that emerged out of a common hatred of American imperialism between 2001 and 2003 appears to have beached. A counter alliance now comprises an equally odd combination of Zionist secularists, Christian evangelicals, the Catholic Right and 'America-firsters'.

This network has developed a counter-narrative to that of the anti-imperialists - of an aggressive and cruel Islam seeking to destroy Christianity and of a West which is based on Judaeo-Christian values and needs to fight harder to preserve them against enemies within and without.

To be fair, most European Christians still think in terms of 'defence' and it is only a minority of a minority of a minority who want to take the 'war' into enemy territory.

But when 'defence' comes to include the defence of Israel (as it increasingly does) or the defence of Christians in the Sahel through troop deployments, then the narrative comes right up against the belief that such 'defence' is merely the latest round in a series of offensive manouevres against Islam.

With so many narratives around, one wonders if we might adapt Baudrillard and ask whether international relations are turning into a collection of fairy stories, a sort of Arabian Nights for political action. 

A counter-narrative of even moderate Muslims often hinges on a plot by the West to destroy Islam and of the intentional cultural extermination of the Palestinians in an analogy with what the West did to the Amerindians and the Tasmanians.

Despite the best efforts of the Christian-Zionist and Islamist (let alone anti-imperialist) storytellers, the British remain quite fixedly indifferent to any grand narrative, preferring to follow the line of someone who should really have been an Englishman, Voltaire, in cultivating their private gardens.

There is, of course, a British Government narrative, expressed this weekend in Foreign Secretary David Miliband's policy of progressive intervention (some might call it 'subversion') in Muslim lands.

This model uses British political officers, like latter-day imperial district officers, to persuade local Muslims of the virtues of moderation in troublespots like Basra, Afghanistan and now Pakistan. In effect, as we have written elsewhere, this a massive extension of West Midlands community policing. 

The associated British narrative emphasises a benign and vaguely superior Britain making everyone see reason, love each other and be tolerant, as if no-one had any reason to get angry about their conditions of life or to seek to escape to a richer land. 

Our electorate allows our Government to continue with this fantasy so long as it does not increase taxes or actually use the massive powers it is accumulating for use in a crisis against its own people.

The one voice, outside the nuttier elements in the mosques and the Tory Party, speaking for a vision closer to that which dominates great tracts of US politics and is now emerging in Europe is that of the Bishop of Rochester.

His claim (this weekend) is that 'Islamic territories' are being carved out in the UK, into which no Christian could safely go. There may be some truth in this at the local level in some cities, but it is an extreme claim at a national level.

Such claims threaten to follow the European Right into a confrontational position towards a religion that will grow simply because migration permits it to grow.

Catholicism and Judaism grew, with similar fears of ghettoisation and crime, on the back of first industrial and then imperial opportunity.  Our current situation is little different.

It is quite simple - if you don't want Muslims in your cities for cultural reasons, then don't permit migration and accept the consequences both in terms of economic growth and the long term costs of servicing an aging population. 

And accept the consequences in terms of disturbed neighbouring nations existing without safety valves and hungry for the resources that they can see over the sea. 

The only way out, if you want to take an offensive approach to Muslim aspirations, is a reduction in materialism and massive expenditure in armaments and security - which latter adds yet another set of special interests to the growing 'hawk' alliance, the military, factions of the intelligence service and old cold warriors and NATO-freaks.

If some faith-based communities are happy to consider this option as 'spiritual', not minding about increased defence spending and consequent high taxes in order to get things done, then the electorates in modern liberal democracies do not. 

The further logical consequence is that right-wing faith-based analyses will eventually follow many Islamists into questioning liberalism and eventually democracy - or at least making it secondary to questions of identity and 'culture'.

Which brings us back to Europe and the re-emergence of a faith-based religious right that has been severely embarrassed for two generations about its participation in the fascist experiments of the interwar and war years.

Then, priests ran countries (notoriously Slovakia) and even murdered (notoriously Croatia) but now, having made their peace with the Jews, hardliners from the religious Right have a new enemy that can mobilise the masses - Islam.

The problem for faith-based actvists in a liberal society is that most religious people are, in fact, tolerant and easy-going. The hard-liners are a minority of a substantial minority. 

So, alliances are necessary. The media in particular needs to be won over. And one logical alliance is with an old enemy - the liberal intelligentsiya - on the basis that my enemy's enemy is my friend.

We are seeing a strange situation where elements from the Catholic authoritarian Right and from the radical libertarian movements are converging to find common cause in fearing the consequences of 'swamping' and of Muslim political influence on culture. They can both conveniently ignore other points of dispute like abortion and homosexuality as 'matters of conscience'.

Dutch liberals in particular can be ridiculously provocative (we used to call it ‘bad manners’ in my day) with the latest stupidity being an ‘artist’ (a label which simply comes to mean ‘person who can get away with anything if they cloak it in meaningfulness’) who photographs gay men wearing masks of the prophet – yawn!

In fact, this artist makes some reasonable intellectual points about sexuality and Islam, but the art itself is simply political vanity masquerading as something important. The creative, especially gay, establishment, still fighting old battles within Western culture, falls into line without considering the degree to which it is being culturally solipsistic and uninteresting.

Part of an essentially liberal media community is thus becoming attracted to a human rights agenda that is one of protecting faith-based minorities under siege.  A series of assumptions follow.

Israel becomes good (as bastion of secularism and tolerance) and Saudi Arabia becomes bad or worse (not only as feudal and allegedly corrupt but also as alleged spreader of wahhabi ideology). 

Anything involving ethnic clashes within the 'umma' is not seen contextually and locally but as a reified Islam, a force like communism, intrinsically engaged in some project of destruction. It was in this context that we noted the four documentaries in the space of a few weeks, just when many audiences would be most attuned to their Christian heritage:-

• ZDF, the German State International Network, reported on the plight of the Chaldean Christian Iraqis threatened by Muslims in Mosul
• Spanish EFE reported on Egyptian Copts, placed under pressure from the Muslim Brotherhood
• RAI 2 (a mere footnote in the British media) in Italy reported on the murder of a second priest in an Eastern Turkish city (although not by an Islamist but by a radical nationalist)
• Arte, the important Franco-German network, reported the fears of the 3,000 Christian Palestinians in Gaza under Hamas.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in doing these reports. This and worse things are happening not only in the Middle East but in Africa and South Asia. From a Western perspective, vile injustices are perpetrated not only against Christians but women and homosexuals. Slavery still exists in pockets of Islam. The charge sheet of Islam as cultural enemy continues to grow.

But does it? 

Closer analysis suggests that, in most cases, the violence or oppression are matters of disadvantage or poverty, the social conditions owe a great deal to the way the West broke up traditional cultures and economies in the past or decisions that were made by civil servants in Western capitals, the problems are not endemic but localised and are no worse than conditions in Europe sixty years ago and currently in parts of the Balkans, and the vast bulk of Muslims (like Christians) go about their business without hysteria or cruelty.

Bood reports that religious authorities are now raising questions that have been muted over the last few years: "We in Europe allow mosques to be built. When will Christian churches be able to be rebuilt in Muslim countries?" or "Why should we bend our mores to fit migrant Muslim religious requirements?

Again, let us look at the logic of this. It suggests that Europe should stop the building of an infrastructure for Islam in Europe and/or it should use its superior power to defend the rights of Christians in the Middle East. 

And yet Europe claims the superiority of tolerance and has more resources. It can afford to allow the building of an infrastructure for Islam so long as new migrants accept (which they generally do) liberal democracy.

The radical right-wing logic, often suspiciously geared around a reverse-crusader narrative of defending Israel at all costs as 'bastion of values', is for authoritarianism at home and imperial war overseas. Some people who live and plot in the dark just will not lay down - like demons from hell, they rise whenever invoked by fear and anxiety or by just plain stupidity.

Bood, whose opinions are not otherwise necessarily those in this posting, detects a pattern of growing resentment among the "native" population that is now being promoted by the right wing political parties, by very specific segments of the Catholic and Protestant communities and what it calls "the underhand activities of religious pundits". 

This bodes ill for the future. The demons are at play once again.

Pace the Bishop of Rochester whose right to speak out is widely accepted, there is no current sign of similar extremism in the UK. There is no real mass constituency for an attack on Islam until the Archbishop of Canterbury (who is ‘liberal’), the Catholic Church (which is still mindful of its guest status in the country) or the Evangelicals (who are a minority of a minority, without links to the traditional churches of the East and preoccupied with Africa) speak out.

Currently, the Bishop of Rochester is the only churchman who appears to be taking a ‘European’ line although we know that there is a similar mentality ripe to emerge from the neo-conservative wing of the Tory Party and waiting only for America to elect Mr. Giuliani to come out in its full flowering. 

The Party's security advisory network has some suspicious informal connections to some very right wing networks connecting neo-conservatism, the Israeli Right and certain factions of the Western security infrastructure who place ideology before common sense.

However, these networks are still secular and the instincts of the UK media, whose liberal class has not had to defend its values against priests since the seventeenth century and never seriously against fascists and communists, also remains secular to the core.

Although many working Brits might be persuaded to a fairly rightwing line on migration and Islam if left to themselves, the British liberal establishment, even in its neo-con manifestation, remains opposed both to priests in politics and to restrictions on the movement of labour. 

It should be noted that Tony Blair only felt able to assert his faith after losing office and the new Leader of the Liberal Democrats has claimed atheism (unthinkable in America) without any negative effect on his political position.

Put two cultural priorities, liberal secularism and traditional free trade, together and British opposition to the authoritarian aspirations of Middle Europeans can be assumed for the foreseeable future.