Israeli historian Benny Morris has an article in the National Interest warning of the Islamic threat to Israel and indeed to civilisation in general.

According to Morris: “Islam these past two weeks has definitely been closing in on the Jewish state, with Israel’s ambassadors in the two major Middle Eastern states with which it had good relations, Turkey and Egypt, being sent packing.”

In both countries, Morris asserts, “it was Islam which gradually eroded secularism and brought down pragmatic, prudent governments in the region, which drove the diplomats from their posts”. From this standpoint the Arab Spring, and indeed any democratisation of Muslim-majority countries in Middle East, is to be opposed.

Morris pours scorn on those Westerners who “deluded themselves into believing that the popular uprisings sweeping the Arab world were presaging a new birth of freedom”. If the Muslim citizens of these countries are ever going to be capable of governing themselves it will only be in the distant future, and possibly not even then – “over the span of a century or two, who knows? maybe democracy will evolve in Cairo and Sana and Damascus (though I wouldn’t bet on it)”. In the meantime, “what this tumult is certainly delivering is the ruination of responsible government, chaos … and a surge in, and possibly, finally, a takeover by, radical Islamism”.

And it’s not just the Arab Spring that’s got Morris worried. Elsewhere he warns that the “threat of resurgent Islam” has emerged within Israel’s own borders: “The Israeli Arab landscape is increasingly dominated by minarets and veiled women.” Minarets, veils – this is the language and imagery of the European far right, transposed to the Middle East.

Of course, from Morris’s standpoint it was a historical blunder to have allowed Arabs to remain in Israel in the first place. They should have been ethnically cleansed back in 1948, according to him, allowing for the construction of a purely Jewish state. Indeed, in Morris’s opinion, it is a mistake to allow Muslims into any country with a non-Muslim majority. He takes the view that “mass Muslim penetration into the West and their settlement there is creating a dangerous internal threat”.

This is the man who was recently invited to speak at the London School of Economics, with the enthusiastic approval of Harry’s Place, who are fully in favour of hate preachers so long as they’re Zionists.