Howard sees Islamist terrorism as a threat to free societies

From ABC Online, Wednesday, October 4, 2006. 6:31am (AEST) ...

Prime Minister John Howard has compared Islamist terrorism to Cold War communism as a threat to the values of free societies.

Mr Howard has told an anniversary dinner for the magazine Quadrant that the ideological contest with communism was the defining global struggle of the second half of the 20th Century.
Mr Howard says the battle against Islamist tyranny is the global struggle of the new century.
"The fact is we are part of a global campaign for the very ideals that some people wistfully dreamed were unchallengeable after the Cold War," he said. "No less than in that long twilight struggle, this too will be a generational struggle for the ideals of democratic freedom and liberty under law."

However, Mr Howard stresses that Western action against terrorism should not be seen as action against Islam. "To those who want to portray the West as anti-Muslim I would say that it was not the Arab League who went to war in the 1990s on behalf of Muslim minorities in the Balkans," he said. "It was the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and their NATO allies."

He says terrorists and suicide bombers are killing innocent Muslim civilians every day and western action in Iraq is part of a confrontation with Islamist tyranny. "It remains, to borrow a phrase, an inconvenient truth that if countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia simply abandon the people of Iraq this would be an enormous victory for the forces of terror and extremism around the world," he said.