Listening to the results of America’s midterm elections yesterday, I became aware of a constant background accompaniment to the BBC commentary — an almost imperceptible undertone. It was the sound of gloating.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines gloating as thus: “To gaze with intense or passionate satisfaction (usually implying a lustful, avaricious or malignant pleasure).” Yes, malignant pleasure just about sums up the European elite’s reaction to the discomfiture of the Republicans — and especially toward the president. The hatred of the Bush administration is so deeply ingrained in Europe that the question of what the Democratic victory actually means for America and the world is barely of concern to the continent’s residents. All that matters to them is that President Bush and the neocons have lost control of the legislative branch of government.

But are the Europeans gloating too soon? Whatever the consequences for American foreign policy, the midterm elections do not change the reality of the war on terror. Even supposing that a Democrat-controlled Congress were to demand a timetable for withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, the global jihad will not go away. Islamism still has to be confronted, outwitted, and defeated. And America is the only country strong enough to do it.

Once reality sinks in, liberal triumphalism, both inside and outside America, will quickly fade. The victory of Senator Lieberman signals a new mood of realism about the war among Democrats, which Europeans have ignored.

With hindsight, we can now see that the president’s declaration three years ago of victory in Iraq was premature — but not nearly as premature as the gleeful declarations of impending defeat that are now heard in Europe.

A stark reminder of the gravity of the threat this week was the trial of Dhiren Barot, the British Al Qaeda terrorist who was trained, in the words of the judge, “to bring indiscriminate carnage, bloodshed and butchery first in Washington, New York and Newark, and thereafter in the U.K. on a colossal and unprecedented scale.”

This was no idle fantasist. The Scotland Yard counterterrorist chief who tracked Barot down dismissed the notion that he was “some sort of loner” and called him a “formidable opponent.” The police were forced to decode thousands of encrypted computer disks and to investigate 4,000 garages and lockups to gather evidence.

The judge, who sentenced him to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve at least 40 years, described Barot as “determined, highly intelligent and extremely dangerous.” He used university libraries to research the architecture of his targets — which included the New York Stock Exchange, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund — and worked closely with the most senior Al Qaeda leaders. His proposals included radioactive “dirty bombs” to contaminate entire cities, a plan to detonate gas in underground car parks, and inundating the London subway by destroying a train under the Thames.

Barot was only identified and arrested thanks to a global intelligence operation. If it had not been for information extracted from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of September 11, in Guantanamo Bay, Barot would probably never have been caught and his diabolical schemes might well have been carried out.

Who was Barot? A Hindu by birth, he was born in India but raised in Britain. His background was prosperous — his father is a banker — and his conversion to Islam was kept secret from his family. Like countless other young British Muslims, he was radicalized by the notorious Abu Hamza. The hook-handed, one-eyed preacher is now in prison, but his appeal against his conviction for inciting murder is before the courts.

The idea that terrorists like Barot are motivated by “grievances” or, as Tariq Ramadan, a professor at Oxford University, told the BBC this week, because “Muslims feel under pressure” is simply laughable.

What the Barot case shows is that the war against terror needs to be fought with even greater determination. Retreat from Iraq or Afghanistan, further concessions to the Palestinians, attempts to bribe Iran or Syria would all be interpreted by the Islamofascists — rightly so — as proof of the West’s lack of stomach for the fight.

A new film, “Obsession,” apparently offers striking evidence, much of it culled from Arab TV footage, that in radical Islam the West faces a threat every bit as dangerous as that of the Nazis.

I have yet to see this film, but I gather that it highlights the historical links between Nazism and Islamism. In particular, it documents the close relationship between the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Adolf Hitler.

Until the emergence of Yasser Arafat, Haj Amin was by far the most celebrated Palestinian leader. Ironically, he owed his position to a Zionist Jew. Herbert Samuel, the British high commissioner in Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s, allowed Haj Amin — then only in his early 20s — to emerge as the self-styled “grand mufti” of Jerusalem in 1921 in succession to his brother. Samuel knew that Haj Amin was violently hostile to the British because of their support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Yet he tolerated Haj Amin, who masterminded the Arab revolt of 1936, in which thousands died.

Having escaped to Lebanon with the help of the French, Haj Amin helped to foment the pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in 1941. The British crushed the coup, and Haj Amin fled to Berlin, where he was received by Hitler and all the senior Nazi leaders. The führer and the mufti apparently discussed the Holocaust at a time when even most Nazis knew nothing about it. Haj Amin was even taken on a tour of Auschwitz. His contribution was to recruit a Bosnian Muslim division for the S.S. and to urge Hitler to break the “Judeo-Anglo-Saxon stranglehold” in North Africa.

At the end of the war, accompanied by his Gestapo minder, Haj Amin found refuge in a comfortable villa near Paris. Despite the fact that the Americans, British, and Yugoslavs all wanted to try him as a war criminal, the French government saw him as a useful pawn in the post-war power struggle for control of the Middle East.

According to David Pryce-Jones in his new book “Betrayal: France, the Arabs and the Jews,” the mufti told the French that the British and the Americans were in the hands of the Jews. Smuggled out of France, Haj Amin went to Cairo in 1946 and then to Lebanon, where he arranged for the assassination of King Abdullah of Jordan. This evil man, who (in the words of the great historian Elie Kedourie) led the Palestinians to “utter ruin,” is the direct link between the Nazi and Islamist forms of totalitarianism. Saddam Hussein and his Baathists were a secular variation on the same theme.

Let the liberals gloat. The war on terror will go on because there is no alternative. It takes two sides to end a war, and the Islamists are not yet ready to sue for peace. Against an enemy as implacable as Nazi Germany, the only possible war aim is the same: unconditional surrender.