THIS weekend, the Archbishop of Canterbury is to mark the third anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Centre by preaching in the mosque at al-Azhar university in Cairo, the most important centre of learning in the Muslim world.

On September 11, 2001, Dr Rowan Williams was in New York. The next year he wrote a booklet, Writing in the Dust, in which he said that we should not retaliate. “If I decide to answer in the same terms, that is how the conversation will continue,” he wrote. But while, personally, I may turn the other cheek, I must not do this on behalf of those who suffer innocently. It is my duty to take up the sword on behalf of the fatherless children and the widow. Not to do this is to concede victory to the aggressors, and that would be unjust.

Would Dr Williams argue that the brave men who fought back against the terrorists in the fourth aircraft to crash were in the wrong? He reckons that the terrorists had no choice: “We have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving no other option.”

This is a high-grade sample of the drivel we have heard these past three years from those in the West who despise the civilisation which is their inheritance. Of course the suicide bombers had “other options”: not every impoverished Muslim thinks the only answer to his problems is to destroy New York. If the atrocity were not the terrorists’ fault, what next? “We begin to find some sense of what they and we might together recognise as good.” Really? But it is impossible to make common moral cause between democratic freedom and the rule of law on the one hand and nihilistic killing on the other.

Dr Williams rubbishes the war on terrorism: “What possible guarantee could there be that the abolition of terrorism had been achieved?” Well, of course, in historical matters there are no guarantees, as there are no inevitabilities — unless you’re a Marxist. In fact, America’s military response convinced other rogue states — Libya, for example — to renounce the production of weapons of mass destruction.

Dr Williams’s fantasy turns out to be a paranoid one: “Every transaction in the developed economies of the West can be interpreted as an act of aggression against the economic losers in the worldwide game.” Rather, the fact is that many of those Third World countries which have decided to hitch their economic wagon to the Western engine are raising their living standards. Paranoia goes hand in hand with sentimentality, and we find buckets of it here: “As we protest at how the West is hated, how we never meant to oppress or diminish other cultures, how we never intended to undermine Islamic integrity, we must try not to avoid the pain of grasping that we are not believed.” This is where we are meant to weep into our handkerchiefs

Dr Williams’s conclusion is the inversion of the truth: “It is hard to start any sort of conversation when your conversation partner believes, in all sincerity, that your aim is to silence them.” But it was these “conversation partners” who silenced so many of us on 9/11.

Dr Williams is praised as a man of superior intelligence. But there is no intelligence in Writing in the Dust, only romantic faux naivety. As his writings reveal, he is an old-fashioned class warrior. He dislikes our Western way of life and romanticises the Islamic world as much as Marxists used to romanticise the USSR. This wouldn’t matter much in normal times, but these days we live on the edge of destruction. Before Dr Williams opens his mouth in Cairo, he should remember the slogan from the Second World War: “Careless talk costs lives.”

The Rev Dr Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, and chaplain to the Stock Exchange

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