What this kind of remark by Sir Hugh Orde demonstrates is not merely the that the dullness, or mediocrity, of such minds is no longer merely amusing, fit for some updated Dunciad, but that, when such minds are found among those whose task it is to protect us, that Dullness translates into physical danger.

What is most needed is  to find people who can grasp why such a recommendation -- to "talk to Al Qaeda" as if Al Qaeda alone were the problem, or as if talking would produce anything other than a list of demands to be met, merely the first installment in what necessarily is an inexhaustible list of such demands, and should any of those demands be met, this will not be taken, as it would in Western or non-Muslim man, as a sign of compromise to be met with an equal willingness to yield, but rather as a sign that Allah's people, the best of peoples, are on the march and unstoppable, a triumphalist reaction that this hapless policeman does not understand because he does not understand, lacks possibly the time, possibly the wit, possibly both, to understand, what Islam is all about.

What is required, one comes to realize, is first of all a campaign  to educate Infidels not merely as to the texts and tenets of Islam, but to something less mechanical, subtler, and more important -- education into how Muslims see themselves and see non-Muslims, that is the psychology of Islam, what can be called the attitudes and atmospherics of Islam, what is left when particular Qur'anic passages or Hadiths  or details of Muhammad's life have been forgotten or perhaps never learned, but the mere growing up in an environment -- a state, a society, a family, suffused with Islam -- or even just an awareness that one "is a Muslim" and therefore one "must" think and act as Muslims must (an astonishing phenomenon, the mere labelling or self-labelling causing many to behave zombie-like as agents of a doctrine they may never have thought about, are not deeply immersed in, and may even be quite vague about), -but they know one big thing: that they "are Muslims" and so blindly comply with what they are told Muslims must think and what Muslims are told to do. For many of them, astonishingly, that is quite enough.