The multicultural liberal democracies of the world face a pernicious threat within their borders, an insidious ideology that seeks to turn citizens against their own countries and replace liberty with tyranny.

As the death toll from jihadist strikes in Europe continues to rise and extremists openly peddle hate on social media and in some mosques, it is time to dispense with political correctness and have frank, rational discussions about radical or militant Islam, also known as Islamism.

"We cannot and must not pretend that things can continue as they are," British Prime Minister Theresa May declared the day after the jihadist assault on London Bridge. And she said that "things need to change."

The London Bridge attackers, who rammed a vehicle into pedestrians and then jumped out and stabbed people, employed the same tactics as the jihadist who launched a deadly attack on London’s Westminister Bridge in March. And the London Bridge attack of June 3 came just two weeks after the bombing of the Arianna Grande concert in Manchester.

Although May acknowledged that the attacks were not connected by a terrorist network, she declared that "they are bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism."

May described the jihadist’s credo as "an ideology that claims our western values of freedom, democracy and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam." And she asserted that the Islamist ideology is "a perversion of Islam and a perversion of the truth."

According to May, "defeating this ideology is one of the great challenges of our time, but it cannot be defeated by military intervention alone." She said that Islamist ideology "will only be defeated when we turn people’s minds away from this violence and make them understand that our values — pluralistic British values — are superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate."

The most important part of May’s speech was her acknowledgement that "there is, to be frank, far too much tolerance of extremism in our country." And she asserted that the United Kingdom needs "to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society. That will require some difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations."

Ideology

Islamism is a radical, religiously motivated political ideology that seeks to destroy liberal democracy and supplant it with a totalitarian theocratic Islamic state. The Islamic State terrorist movement — also known as ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh — attempted to establish just such a theocracy or so-called caliphate in large swathes of captured territories in Iraq and Syria.

The Islamic State is committing genocide in the Middle East, systematically targeting Christians, Yezidis and even Shia Muslims for extermination. Entire regions have been ethnically cleansed of ancient religious minority communities.

What is the connection between terrorism in the West and genocide in Iraq and Syria?

"It’s the same," Kyle Matthews, executive director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights, said of the Islamist ideology that fuels jihadist strikes in the West and genocide in the Middle East.

"An ideology, which has a political-religious objective of taking control of a state and then eventually the region and then eventually the world: that is their ideology," Matthews explained in an interview. "They do want to destroy, expulse, wipe out all diversity, all pluralism, particularly religious pluralism in their midst."

The ideology that has poisoned the Middle East has seeped into the multicultural liberal democracies of the West. And Canadians and citizens of other placid societies must now face a harsh reality.

"People growing up in the West are being brainwashed, falling for an ideology, which has total disdain for the host society and all these freedoms and actually want to lash out at everyone not like them, or is an ‘infidel,’" Matthews said.

Making excuses for terrorism

Terrorism and violence are the preferred tactics of jihadists.

"It’s quite clear they’re using violence," Matthews said. "If it’s a car bomb attacking Yezidis in Iraq, or Christians in Syria or against Christians in Kenya, it’s the same action targeting other groups — not just states — but minority groups, religious groups.

"It’s taking place on multiple fronts," he continued, citing recent jihadist violence in the Philippines and Melbourne, Australia.

Yet, adherents of political correctness tend to ignore the ideological motivations of terrorists, and they sometimes even attempt to make excuses for Islamist violence and terrorism.

"I keep on hearing people explain the rise of jihadist groups in the Middle East, saying it’s because there are autocratic governments here," Matthews said. "It’s because there’s no democracy that is why people are turning to extremism.

"But when you look at France or the U.K., and they are living in democracy, they have all the freedoms. They have rights. There’s no institutional impediment to them becoming a successful medical doctor or politician: it’s the opposite. And yet we are still seeing this go through. The lack of democracy theory is thrown out the window. … I think we have to look at the ideology."

How can the West counter Islamist ideology?

"Our political leaders need to admit there’s a problem," Matthews replied. "Saying we stand against terrorism means nothing. Terrorism is a tactic."

Saudi Arabia and Islamism

"Why are we letting Saudi Arabia get involved in religious building in our country?" Matthews asked rhetorically. And he also wants to know why Canada is allowing Saudi Arabia to send "religious preachers over to our country that are promoting values and ideas that go contrary to our cultural norms and our constitution?"

There is no religious freedom in Saudi Arabia, which is mostly Sunni Muslim. According to the 2017 annual report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), the Saudi regime "persists in restricting most forms of public religious expression inconsistent with its particular interpretation of Sunni Islam."

For the past 15 years or so, the Saudi regime has supposedly been addressing hateful content in official school textbooks. Although the USCRIF found that the regime has made some progress, it discovered during a February 2017 visit to the kingdom that some textbooks currently in use contain "intolerant content."

For example, the commission found that "remaining intolerant content includes derogatory language about non-Sunni Muslims, approval of jihad as ‘fighting’ to spread one’s religion, and characterization of Jews as ‘monkeys.’"

The USCIRF has called upon the Saudi regime to "halt the dissemination of intolerant literature and extremist ideology within Saudi Arabia and around the world."

Late last year, a leaked German intelligence report revealed that Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are allegedly supporting Islamist groups in Germany. German media reported in Dec. of 2016 that a report by that country’s BfV domestic intelligence agency and Federal Intelligence Service (BND) warned that Middle Eastern countries were funding radical mosques, Islamic schools, radical clerics and radical Islamic conversion groups.

According to media reports, the intelligence document reveals that there are already 10,000 followers of fundamentalist Salafism in Germany.

When it comes to preventing the dissemination of Islamist ideology from foreign sources, Matthews declared that "we have to be a lot tougher about that and stand our ground."

Anti-Semitism

To counter Islamist ideology, Matthews recommends that Canada crack down on hate preachers. "We’ve had numerous videos come out in the last two months of certain religious figures in Montreal or Toronto calling for hate speech against the Jewish community," he said. "Why are they not being prosecuted?

"Religious freedom shouldn’t allow you to get a get-out-of-jail card for spreading hate against other religious groups," he asserted. "I think we need to start prosecuting these people. Make an example of them so that others realize that this is not going to fly in the West."

Canada’s Jewish community is also very concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism and hate speech spewed by certain Muslim clerics in this country.

"When will the Canadian government finally take hate speech against the Jewish community more seriously?" Michael Mostyn, chief executive officer of B’nai Brith Canada, asked in a Feb. 17, 2017, post on the organization’s website.

"Earlier this week, footage came to light of an imam at the al-Andalus Islamic Center in Montreal calling for the destruction of the Jewish people," Mostyn stated in the post. "During his sermon, Sayed al-Ghitawi asks Allah to ‘destroy the accursed Jews’ and to ‘make their children orphans and their women widows.’"

Mostyn also expressed disgust at the mosque’s official response to the incident. Mostyn wrote: "Rather than unequivocally condemn his statement, al-Andalous instead justified al-Ghitawi’s sermons, saying that his calls to ‘destroy the accursed Jews’ were taken out of context, and that the publication of both videos by CIJNews was ‘a shameless attempt to revive polemics against the Muslim community.’"

In March, B’nai Brith reported "an incident involving yet another Montreal imam to the Hate Crimes Unit of the Montreal Police Service." The complaint stems from anti-Semitic comments alleged to have been made at a different Montreal mosque.

B’nai Brith alleges that in a Dec. 23, 2016, speech at the Dar al-Arkam mosque, Muhammad bin Musa al Nasr described Jews as "the most evil of mankind" and as "human demons." And the Jewish rights organization claims that the preacher then invoked the Islamic hadith: "[at] the end of time "¦ the stone and the tree will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me — come and kill him!’"

At the time, Mostyn posted a statement on the B’nai Brith website asking when this country will "finally recognize that we are not immune to racism and antisemitism, and that it is this type of rhetoric that directly leads to radicalization all over the world?"

Anti-Semitism is pervasive in the Middle East, according to Near East scholar Bernard Lewis, author of the 2002 book What Went Wrong: The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. He writes that the inability of five Arab armies to prevent 500,000 Jews from establishing the state of Israel in the ruins of the former British Mandate in Palestine in 1948 shocked Muslims. And this prompted many in the region to ask, "how could this happen?"

"Anti-Semitism and its demonized picture of the Jew as a scheming evil monster provided a soothing answer," Lewis writes.

"The struggle for Palestine greatly facilitated the acceptance of the anti-Semitic interpretation of history, and led some to blame all evil in the Middle East and indeed in the world on secret Jewish plots," Lewis explains. "This interpretation has pervaded much of the public discourse in the region, including education, the media and even entertainment."

What is the connection between anti-Semitism and Islamist violence?

"Jew-hatred is as essential to extremist Islam as it was to Nazism, and whenever extremist Islam takes root "¦ attacks on Jews soon follow," David Frum and Richard Perle write in the 2004 edition of their book An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. Both Frum and Perle served in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush.

Tragically, there is not much sympathy in many parts of the world for Israel when terrorists slaughter innocent Jews. And Frum and Perle contend that "the adulation in the Arab world of terrorist attacks on non-combatant Israelis, including children, is not the sign of a morally healthy society."

Socialists, Marxists and Islamists

According to Frum and Perle, "Islamic extremists may find fellow travellers in the non-Muslim West." For example, the 2002 assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, an outspoken critic of Islamism who was killed by a radial activist, shocked the Netherlands.

Many on the political left in North America, including socialists and Marxists and so-called social justice warriors, have made common cause with Islamists who seek to destroy the Jewish state of Israel. That the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to cripple Israel’s economy, has a strong presence on many Canadian and American university campuses is evidence of this unholy alliance.

In the final analysis, Frum and Perle contend that terrorists are ideologically driven. "Discredit the ideology, and you defeat the terrorists," they conclude.

"We have to be more truthful when we speak about it," Kyle Matthews said of Islamist ideology and violence. "When we speak about it, we identify it. Then we can come up with solutions."

Follow Geoffrey P. Johnston on Twitter @GeoffyPJohnston.