Note to Al Qaeda: The British government is away from its desk. Normal service will be resumed in September. Please desist from further attacks on London until the prime minister, the home secretary, the foreign secretary, and just about every other minister returns from vacation. Bloodcurdling threats etc. may be left on the Downing Street voicemail.

I admire Prime Minister Blair’s nonchalance. His insistence that neither terrorism nor anything else must be allowed to interrupt his family life belongs to a noble British tradition. Sir Francis Drake’s response to the sighting of the Spanish Armada was to continue his game of bowls, adding: “There is plenty of time to win this game, and to thrash the Spaniards too.”

During the Blitz of 1940-41, on the other hand, both Winston Churchill and King George VI made a point of remaining in the capital during periods when it was under aerial bombardment. The top floor of the former Shell Building on the Strand by the Thames, where the publishers Penguin now have their offices, has a balcony to which Churchill, having dined next door in the Savoy Hotel, would ascend to watch London ablaze. Unlike Hitler, who hid in his bunker, Churchill preferred to take the risk.

The present terrorist campaign has not created any real sense of solidarity between the government and the governed. Mr. Blair has left a B-team in charge, which seems to have no idea what the public expects of them. Government on autopilot equals political correctness plus appeasement.

The home office minister, Hazel Blears, has just held the first of eight meetings with representatives of the Muslim community, this one in the northern town of Oldham. For “security reasons,” the locations and timing of these meetings have been kept secret until after the event, thereby obviating part of their purpose. If the only Muslims that the minister meets are those carefully selected and vetted by officials, she is unlikely to get the full picture. It is also a measure of how far terrorism has already altered our way of life that the public cannot be admitted to occasions of this kind.

But the real objections to this exercise are more basic. Ms. Blears says that the purpose of her meetings is to persuade the Muslim community that antiterrorism measures, such as being stopped and searched by the police, are not targeted at Muslims. The minister is at great pains to insist that such powers must be used in a “non-discriminatory” way, which means no “profiling” of suspects, racial or otherwise. She says that she is going around the country solely to listen to the concerns of Muslims, and her message is purely one of reassurance.

I have three problems with this. How can the police be expected to identify terrorists and prevent further attacks without concentrating mainly (though not exclusively) on young Muslim males, most of whom will be of Asian, Middle Eastern, or African origin? Why, at a time when the whole nation is facing a new and dangerous terrorist campaign at the hands of Islamist suicide bombers, is the main effort of the British state devoted to reassuring Muslims? And why is the Muslim community being reassured anyway, when the message that it urgently needs (as a few brave Muslims have acknowledged) is that it must stop sheltering terrorists and giving them moral support?

It is true that figures for “hate crimes” (or “faith crimes,” the even more loaded expression now adopted by the authorities) against Muslims have risen sharply since the July 7 bombings. So far, almost all of these crimes are verbal abuse or minor assaults on people and property, including mosques, but their impact on Muslims should not be underestimated. The Jewish community in Britain has been deeply unsettled by the upsurge of anti-Semitism in recent years, including acts of desecration of synagogues and cemeteries that go beyond anything so far suffered by British Muslims. The irony will not have been lost on Jews that these attacks, which were in many cases perpetrated by Muslims, on a community that is above reproach, have elicited a far less vigorous response from the government.

Looking down on London from Parliament Hill this week, I could not help reflecting on the vulnerability of even the greatest cities. Something of that vulnerability is echoed in the Latin, French, and German words we still use: “urbs” (a walled town); “burg,” “burgh,” or “borough” (a fortified place); “cite” (the walled cathedral precinct in a medieval town). The abstract notion of citizenship, “civitas,” evolved into the idea of a community or state, and ultimately into the word the Enlightenment coined to describe our common heritage: “civilization.”

Without citizens, able and willing to uphold the law, there can be no city and no civilization. The Romans meant something similar by “humanitas.” Today, the enemies of Western civilization are also the enemies of humanity, for without that civilization, the vast majority of humanity could not exist.

Europe in general, and Italy in particular, makes much of its classical roots and civilized values. So it will be interesting to observe what this amounts to in the case of the Italian judiciary, which is now deciding whether one of those suspected of bombing London should be extradited from Rome to Britain. It seems that the suspect known as Hussain Osman (his real name is believed to be Hamdi Isaac) may be able to take advantage of a new law, designed for Mafia godfathers, that enables terrorists to escape extradition and even receive a new identity if they agree to collaborate.

It was incompetent of the British to let this man escape to Rome in the first place. But his interrogation is a matter of deadly urgency. If Italian judges refuse to send Mr. Osman to face trial in London, it would be yet another indication that Europe is no longer prepared to lift a finger to defend the civilization it claims to embody.