Not a 'struggle of our generation'

last Friday, in France, an Islamist named Yahya Salhi killed his employer, Herve Cornara. He attached the victim's severed head to the fence around a chemical plant, together with a cloth saying, “There is no god but god and Muhammad is his prophet” — and then rammed his vehicle into a warehouse full of chemicals hoping (but failing) to cause a massive explosion.

In Kuwait two hours later, Fahd Suleiman Abdulmohsen al-Qaba'a, a Saudi citizen, entered a Shia mosque and detonated a bomb that killed at least 25 people. He was presumably a Sunni fanatic sent by the ‘Islamic State' to kill Shias, who they believe are heretics who should be killed.In Tunisia, one hour later, 38 European tourists, most of them British, were massacred by a 23-year old man with a Kalashnikov on a beach in Sousse. The perpetrator, was studying engineering at a university in Kairouan, an hour's drive west of Sousse.

So, 64 murders that you heard a lot about, and 220 others you heard little or nothing about. There are hundreds of innocent people being murdered by Islamist fanatics in Syria every week, so it's no longer news. Besides, the motive there is obvious: It's just that the Islamic State is trying to expand its territory in Syria. But as for the others....

Britain's Prime Minister, Mr David Cameron, responded to the deaths of 30 British citizens in Tunisia by trotting out the same shop-worn drivel that Western leaders have been peddling for the past 14 years. The fight against the Islamic State is “the struggle of our generation,” Mr Cameron declared. Indeed, IS poses “an existential threat” to the West.

Maybe Mr Cameron doesn't know what the word “existential” means. Could somebody please explain to him that he is saying that the Islamic State poses a threat to the continued existence of the WestIJ Does he really think that is the caseIJ Forgive this writer for making a cold-blooded calculation, but sometimes it is necessary. The population of the West (not counting the countries of latin America, which don't play in this league) is about 900 million. Thirty nine ‘Westerners’ have been killed in attacks by Islamist terrorists this month. At this rate, the West will have ceased to exist in 1.9 million years. If this is an existential threat, it's not a very urgent one.

In fact, it's not really about the West at all. The European victims on the beach in Sousse were killed in order to destroy the tourism that provides almost 15 per cent of Tunisia's national income, and thereby destabilise the only fully democratic country in the Arab world. The extremists' real goal is to seize power in Tunisia; the Western victims were just a means to that end.

The bombing of a Shia mosque in Kuwait was intended to increase tensions between the Sunni majority and the large Shia minority in that country, with the ultimate goal of unleashing a Sunni-Shia civil war in which Islamist extremists could take over the Sunni side as they have already done in Syria and Iraq.

The Islamic State and the various incarnations of the Al Qaeda (the Al-Nusra Front in Syria, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, etc) pose an existential threat to the non-Sunni Muslim minorities of the Middle East, and even to Sunni Muslims whose beliefs diverge significantly from those of the Islamists. The West should help Governments in the region that protect their minorities, and of course it should try to protect its own people. But this is not the ‘struggle of our generation’ for the West. It should be nowhere near the top of its own list of priorities.