Has the West gone soft? Some days it sure feels that way, especially here in Europe. Hardly a day goes by without some symptom of decadence or manifestation of weakness.

Last week, for instance, the government of The Netherlands finally made up its mind on how to put an end to the death threats that forced one of Europe’s bravest and most prominent critics of Islamofascism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch legislator, into hiding. Did they prosecute the Islamist clerics who have been baying for her blood? No – they drummed her out of the country, on a trumped up charge that she had obtained Dutch citizenship under a false identity – a fact that she herself had admitted years ago. At the news that she had accepted a job at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Dutch ministers breathed an audible sigh of relief to be rid of a troublemaker. So this is what the nation that was once, in the days of Spinoza, a haven for free speech and religious toleration has come to: get butchered like Theo van Gogh, shut up about the jihad, or go into exile. The kind of double-crossing Dutchmen who betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis have once again, it seems, got the upper hand in Amsterdam.

Such craven appeasement of terrorism is of a piece with the revelation in the London Times this week that the French, German, and Italian governments have all paid ransoms, amounting to a total of at least $45 million, to free hostages abducted in Iraq. Other states likely to have paid ransoms include Sweden, Romania, Turkey, and Jordan. Though some of the kidnappers are criminals rather than terrorists, the former are happy to sell their hostages to the latter, and frequently do. Most of this money has gone to finance the insurgency. So European governments are indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and British soldiers, plus thousands of Iraqis. Not surprisingly, the new Iraqi government is trying to clamp down on this shameful and deadly human traffic, but it is time that President Bush and Tony Blair named and shamed their fickle friends in Paris, Berlin, and Rome.

Here in Britain, the authorities make occasional gestures to keep the lid on Islamism. Yesterday, for example, a “nationwide” antiterrorism operation was mounted by the police, with eight suspects arrested, mainly in Manchester. But high-profile stings like this are no substitute for a policy of zero tolerance directed at Islamist organizations that openly preach Jihad. According to official sources, there are an estimated 16,000 British Muslims engaged in terrorism or providing active support. There has been no serious attempt by the leaders of the Muslim community to repudiate these extremists, thousands of whom have been trained in Al Qaeda camps and hundreds of whom are eager to become human bombs at any time. Nor have the government or the rest of the political and media establishment dared utter a word of criticism of the Muslim leadership.

No, most British politicians, like their Continental counterparts, have other priorities. On Monday the man who hopes to replace Mr. Blair, Tory leader David Cameron, gave a speech in which he repudiated, not appeasement of terrorism, but – the legacy of Margaret Thatcher: “It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money, and it’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB – general wellbeing,” he declared. Forget the fact that thousands of our fellow citizens, not to mention the Ahmadinejads and bin Ladens of this world, are scheming to blow us to kingdom come: “Improving our society’s sense of wellbeing is … the central political challenge of our times.”

True, Mr. Cameron’s speech took a hammering from the tabloid press, which did not fail to note that a man with two grand houses and the odd million to spend on making one of them “eco-friendly” can well afford to be so dismissive about money. But the Tories are ahead in the polls now, and they clearly believe that the voters won’t punish them. More than anything else, Conservatives want to be cool. It may be accidental that this anti-Thatcherite speech coincided with the BBC’s controversial TV satire on the Thatcher era, The Line of Beauty, complete with pornographic scenes of Tory politicians having homosexual affairs in prime time. But it is no accident that Mr. Cameron delivered his effusions at a conference organized by Google entitled “Zeitgeist”.

Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was not to be outdone. This week he denounced the excessive wealth of soccer stars, because at a party for the England World Cup team several celebrities donated large sums to charity. “For one person to spend $100,000 on an evening out while another earns $200 a week is just not right,” Mr. Williams said. His solution is higher taxes, though he did not explain how exactly confiscatory taxes on the rich would help those on $200 a week. Mr. Williams, like many churchmen, has still not grasped the point that, for those such as sporting celebrities with easily transferable skills, taxes are largely voluntary. There are, of course, some things money can’t buy: not even Tiger Woods can, like Mr. Williams, live in a medieval palace just across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament.

This catalogue of highfalutin nonsense would not be complete without a contribution from the Prince of Wales. When he is not castigating the rest of us for being too hard on Islam, Charles is often promoting “complementary” medicine. It is not least thanks to royal advocacy that acupuncture, osteopathy, homeopathy and aromatherapy are now available on the National Health Service. This week a number of eminent doctors and scientists questioned whether spending millions a year on such treatments was a sensible use of taxpayers’ money. Charles wasted no time in defending such “alternative” therapies as “a powerful healing force for our world.”

So here we have three pillars of British society – the leader of the Conservative Party, the primate of the Church of England, and the heir to the throne – whose chief preoccupations are, respectively, the lack of “general wellbeing,” the evils of capitalism, and the virtues of quack cures. Not one sees the clash of the Islamic and Western civilizations as even a problem – indeed, both the Archbishop and the Prince think the real problem is our “Islamophobia.”

So you can see why some of us Europeans look enviously across the Atlantic to hear the voice of common sense. But the two American voices that the British media invited us to hear this week were those of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, both hyperventilating about global warming. Oh dear.