Radovan Karadzic’s defence against 11 charges of genocide did not get off to the best possible start at the Hague last week. The chief prosecutor at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia opened proceedings by releasing transcripts of tapped telephone conversations of the Bosnian Serb leader from 1991, which record Karadzic saying: “There are 20,000 armed Serbs around Sarajevo ... it will be a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die. They will disappear. That people will disappear from the face of the earth.”

It’s true that these recordings do not mention Srebrenica, where 7,000 captured Bosnian Muslim men and youths were massacred; but as a clear indicator of genocidal intent they leave no room for doubt.

The release of the wiretaps is just a small part of the efforts made by what we used to call the West to bring about justice for the families of those massacred Muslims. A friend of mine who was involved in the location and disinterment of the victims’ hidden remains is just one of many Britons who have given years of their life to this grim cause: the International Commission on Missing Persons was established in 1996 specifically to piece together as many as possible of the victims of the Bosnian conflict.

The ICMP’s director-general is an American, Kathryne Bomberger; she designed its “super-mortuary”, the world’s largest storage facility for human remains, where parts of no fewer than 4,000 bodies are kept. This is exhibit A in the trial of Karadzic, as it was in the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, whose interminable trial at the Hague was abandoned after his death from a heart attack in 2006.

These trials cast an uncomfortable searchlight on the behaviour of European politicians during the earlier stages of the Bosnian conflict. The Conservative government of John Major was the most forceful advocate of an arms embargo that would almost certainly have doomed the Bosnian Muslims to suffer further acts of genocide, until in 1995 Bill Clinton browbeat the European Union into agreeing to airstrikes. These, backed by US-armed Bosnian and Croatian ground forces, forced the Serbs to abandon their plans to “ethnically cleanse” Bosnia and Croatia.

In 1999, when the Serbs began a similar ethnic cleansing policy against the Muslims of Kosovo, it was Tony Blair who supplied the political leadership for a military campaign against Milosevic. Britain and America — under the Nato umbrella — bombed Belgrade, most notoriously attacking the Serbian radio and television headquarters and killing 16 workers, including make-up artists and set designers. It is worth remembering that this bombardment, carried out in defiance of a United Nations veto by Russia and China, was most vehemently supported by Robin Cook and Clare Short, the two cabinet ministers who subsequently resigned over Blair’s decision to back America’s “shock and awe” assault on Baghdad without UN sanction.

There is little doubt that the success of the bombing campaigns against the professedly Christian Serbs on behalf of the terrorised Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo had emboldened Blair to think that similar action against Saddam Hussein would be equally vindicated. He had been greeted with tearful adulation in Kosovan refugee camps; he must have expected the same welcome from Shi’ite Iraqis after the overthrow of Saddam.

As we now know, it was a different story. Blair is hate figure No 1 for thousands of Muslims, even in his own country, many of whom subscribe to the view, propagated by Al-Qaeda and its Sunni acolytes, that the war in Iraq was anti-Islamic in its entire purpose. Little good would it do Blair to point out that Saddam was a profoundly secular figure hated by the clerics, or that the dictator’s eventual hanging was punctuated by the calling-out of Shi’ite versions of Islamic prayers by his gleeful executioners.

Such observations would not fit in with what has become known as “the single narrative”, the Islamist ideology which states that the entire history of the world since the time of the crusades has been that of continuous oppression of Muslims by a Zionist-Christian alliance, represented most recently and heinously by America. Above all, this single narrative becomes entirely aphasic on such matters as the American actions against the Orthodox Christian Serbs on behalf of the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo.

The Cambridge historian Brendan Simms, who has made a particular study of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, wrote some years ago that “many in the European establishment have never forgiven the Americans for being right about Bosnia. Most Muslims, in Britain and worldwide, have forgotten it, if they ever knew it in the first place. For a long time I saw the inability of the US to parlay its efforts on behalf of European Muslims into credit ... as a failure of American public diplomacy. But in the course of my own modest efforts at public meetings, and the odd appearance on Muslim channels, I quickly realised that I was hitting a brick wall”.

I had a similar experience when I spoke at a public meeting near the east London mosque, organised by the Muslim group Dialogue with Islam. When I argued that the Nato attack on Serbia in defence of the Muslims of Kosovo hardly suggested a fundamentalist Christian hatred of Islam on the part of the British and American governments, I could see that I might as well have been speaking in Welsh for all the impact it had on that audience of Muslim men and women.

They responded warmly, however, to the argument of Sheikh Dawud Noibi, a leading figure in the Muslim Council of Britain, that the US-led invasion of Afghanistan was motivated by the need to ensure the construction of an American oil pipeline there, implying that the Americans had allowed the attack on the World Trade Center so as to provide a pretext for this colonialist investment. Noibi, by the way, was appointed an OBE on the recommendation of the Blair government: presumably this seal of the state’s approval was just another dastardly trick by the Brits to fool the public into thinking they were not determined to destroy Islam.

Still, I didn’t push the issue as far as Simms, who was bold enough to point out to his Muslim audiences that prominent American Jews such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz — two of the most controversial so-called neocons in Washington under the Republican White House — had been leading protagonists of military intervention on behalf of Bosnian Muslims: “At this point they had switched off. Bosnia and Kosovo were simply subsumed into their broader narrative of Muslim victimhood. My interlocutors were neither stupid nor insincere. It was just that they were wired in such a way that precluded them from seeing the US as anything other than the global foe of Muslims.”

Today the conflict in Afghanistan is the focus of this ideology. Some like to mock the Americans for having supplied the Afghan mujaheddin in the 1980s; the arming of those Muslim warriors was the most expensive single covert operation in the history of the cold war. The Americans may regret it now, yet the real point is that the giving of billions of dollars to the mujaheddin proves the falsity of the single narrative: as recently as 20 years ago the notionally Christian West was sublimely indifferent to Islamism.

Perhaps that is what should really insult the militant Islamists: they think we have always been as obsessed with them as they are with us, when in fact we were scarcely aware of their existence until they started flying planes at skyscrapers in New York.

If Karadzic does take to the stand at the Hague we can expect him to boast that he was fighting the Islamist threat to civilisation while Britain and America slept. Against the charge of genocide, any defence will do.

dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk

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