TOLERATION seems to be very much a one way street at the moment. Suppose for a minute that I was discourteous and sacrilegious enough to take a copy of the Muslim scriptures out into the street and ceremoniously set fire to them. I might end up with a fatwa, or death sentence, pronounced upon me by the Islamic authorities; at the very least I'm sure I would be accused under the terms of the Macpherson report as being guilty of causing "a racist incident".

I'm the first to admit I'd probably deserve all I got. But wait a minute, when it's the Muslims who are committing acts of gross intolerance and religious and cultural vandalism - even blasphemy - who is to restrain or condemn them?

As I write, hundreds of Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan are attacking ancient Buddhist statues under the orders of the Afghan Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Protection of Virtue. The Taliban Minister for Information, Qadratullah Jamal, has declared that these serene and beautiful artefacts are blasphemous idols and, as such, offensive to the Islamic religion.

As I say, it's one rule for them and another for us. What if Christians in London decided to burn down the mosque in Regent's Park as offensive to the Christian faith? Well, of course, they'd be locked up.

Toleration means living with stuff you don't like - because there are things which you like that other blokes don't. It's called "live and let live" and I'm all for it. Intolerance doesn't stop with the Afghan Muslims. The saintly Nelson Mandela said recently: "Little did we suspect that our own people, when they got their chance in government, would be as corrupt as the old apartheid regime". Oh but, dear Nelson, some of us did so suspect and said so at the time and were accused of "racism".

Remember how, for years, we were told that the only impediment to South Africa becoming an earthly paradise was the evil doctrine of apartheid administered by the nasty capitalist white man? It hasn't turned out that way has it? Blacks, it seems, can be just as nasty to their non-black neighbours as the whites once were to them. Black men as well as whites are susceptible to Original Sin. Gosh! When someone as eminent and universally revered as Nelson Mandela starts to tell these home truths, then politically-correct fellow travellers in Britain had better sit up and take notice.

I am old enough to remember the long wrangle over the sovereignty of Southern Rhodesia - that unhappy land which is now called Zimbabwe. I can recall Lord Carrington saying back in 1979 that, with the granting of independence to that country, then as now governed by Robert Mugabe, there would emerge a more just and equal society for its people. Indeed, Mugabe himself came into power promising the same. Twenty-two years later Zimbabwe is still a one-party state in which white farmers are being terrorised by hoodlums backed by state authorities. Zimbabwe is a wonderfully fertile land, rich in minerals. But, as a result of Mugabe's racist policies, the economy of the country has collapsed, causing poverty and misery to all its people irrespective of their colour.

I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that the days of our western civilisation are numbered; not so much because we are threatened by enemies from beyond our borders, but because the opinion-formers within hate and detest anything that reminds them of our history and culture. So, this week, we learn that there are intolerant iconoclasts in Afghanistan. Why can't we learn that there are powerful people in Britain who despise everything our country has stood for over centuries? A people that despises its past has no future.

Published: Tuesday, March 6, 2001