At least 34 people are dead and many more injured as a result of the latest Islamist terrorist atrocity in Europe – in Brussels, this time.

But apparently – so the left-liberal tastemakers assure us – it is too early to make political capital out of this.

https://twitter.com/RupertMyers/status/712194851547250688

I’m afraid I disagree. The time to make political capital out of atrocities like this is precisely when the bodies are still warm and the limbs haven’t been swept up. That’s because – you see this again and again from the Boston bombings to the murder of Lee Rigby to the Charlie Hebdo – our decadent, supine, relativistic, Western liberal culture would dearly love to pretend that these are rare criminal events which we should learn to take in our stride and to which we should not ‘overreact’.

And I personally think the people who have been killed and maimed so cruelly and unfairly deserve better than that.

If their deaths and injuries are to mean anything, then surely the very least we owe the victims is to ask ourselves honestly why this happened and how we can reduce the likelihood of it happening again. Getting squeamish about speaking home truths on grounds of “taste” does not honour these victims. It insults them.

Here is why this morning’s bombings happened: political Islam is at war with the West.

It may suit our complacency to reassure ourselves that we’re not at war with Islam but that’s not going to make any difference to the sundry Jihadist cells now plotting even bigger atrocities all over the world.

They understand perfectly well what’s going on even if we refuse to.

For the basics, read John Ware’s superb profile of the Muslim Brotherhood in Standpoint.

Political Islam has absolutely no interest in finding any accommodations with what it considers to be our worthless Western culture. Its aim is total conquest. To deny this is a bit like reading Mein Kampf and going “Yeah but he doesn’t really mean it.”

This is why, increasingly, immigrant Muslim communities are failing to integrate with their host countries in the West, be they the US and Canada, those in Europe or in Australasia. Even if you believe that practitioners of “soft” Islam are in the majority, the moderates don’t stand a chance against the aggressive proselytising of the fanatical hotheads.

The situation is not unakin to that of Germany around 1933. Up until then, many if not most Germans had found Hitler’s short-trousered, strutting, zealots to be vulgar, unpleasant and not at all where they wanted to be politically. But the aggression and ruthlessness of those zealots overcame all resistance, so that even the moderates who despised them found it easier to endorse them and go with the flow. I’m sure there are lots of lovely Muslim families from Bradford to Molenbeek who’d prefer their daughters to be subject to British and Belgian law rather than the de facto jurisdiction of their local sharia courts. But I’m not sure it’s an option open to them.

The difference between Europe now and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s is that Nazi Germany was a state with recognisable borders and armed forces with uniforms. With Islamism, the enemy is much less plain in view. They have all the fanatical zeal of the Nazis – their treatment of the Yezidis and Christians and Shia in Northern Iraq and Syria is redolent of the Einsatzgruppen’s treatment of the Jews in places like Poland and the Ukraine – but they’re much less easily identifiable. That’s why, for example, Salah Abdeslam was able to spend 120 days on the run after the Paris attacks, being hid by sympathisers not far from his Brussels home.

If you understand this – and there’s no reason not to: speak to any Islamist and he’ll make no bones about his world view and what his mission purpose is – then burying your head in the sand and hoping that all the nasty stuff goes away (as it would appear, our friend Mr Myers does in that Tweet at the beginning) ceases to be a viable option.

What it makes you realise, for example, is that Angela Merkel is easily the most dangerous Chancellor Germany has had since 1945 – and has the potential to do almost as much damage to the character of Europe as her hideous predecessor.

It also makes you realise why it is utterly suicidal for Britain to remain part of the European Union.

The two things are intimately connected.

Angela Merkel has ‘invited’ – without apparently having done much consultation with the German people she represents – one million Syrian refugees to come and settle in Germany. Within five years, they will become fully integrated European citizens, entitled to the freedom of movement which is one of the EU’s raisons d’etre. All million of them, if they so wished, could under EU law come and live in Britain and form unintegrated ghetto ‘communities’ not unlike the ones they are already forming in continental Europe.

No British voter ever voted for Angela Merkel. But with her open invitations to refugees and economic migrants of the Middle East and North Africa, she has grasped for herself powers as great as our own prime minister’s.

Continental Europe is, increasingly, a basket case. I was in Frau Merkel’s home city – Berlin – at the weekend and could see, as so often you do in mainland Europe these days, two cultures living in parallel: the host culture; the unintegrated Muslim culture, such as that of the Turks who have been in the City since the 1980s but might just as well be living in Istanbul or Ankara for all the difference it has made to their cultural practises.

In Britain we are lucky enough to live on an island surrounded by a stretch of water which has always protected us from the lunatic preoccupations of our barmy continental cousins.

Let’s make the most of it. Let’s vote Brexit.