BEFORE last Friday’s terrorist attacks in France and Tunisia, Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, former chief of the defence staff, warned: “Britain must stop sleepwalking and prepare to tackle Muslim extremism.”

He said that Islamic State are going to wreak murder and havoc while our Armed Forces risk being left “on the back foot” by politicians who fail to plan properly. He added: "I think the problem is that we have not seen that we need to approach this issue of Muslim extremism as we approached the Second World War back in the 1930s.”

He criticised particularly the defence secretary Michael Fallon, “…who blithely suggests it will take a generation to battle Islamic State. We do not have a generation. In that generation, even in ten years, a hell of a lot of damage is going to happen and IS will continue to draw all sorts of people into their ranks and get stronger and stronger. It needs to be dealt with and it is an existential threat to us all."

Lord Richards spoke words which our politicians don’t want to hear, and the comparison must be with Winston Churchill who, almost single-handedly, had to argue down the appeasers of Hitler such as Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax and Rab Butler in the 1930s.

We are hearing the same excuses today as were made in the years immediately before the Second World War. Then the whole country remembered with grief and horror the catastrophe of the First World War and were prepared to do everything to stop it happening again. Actually, they were not prepared to anything; they were only prepared to do nothing. The appeasers’ argument was that if we let Hitler do as he liked in Europe, he would not make war on us. They were utterly wrong.

The appeasers reckoned that Hitler was a flash-in-the-pan who couldn’t last. They said we should trust the good sense of moderate Germans to unseat Hitler, with the same confidence that today’s politicians appeal to “moderate Muslims”. It was a delusion then, and it is a delusion now.

The shocking truth – which may very soon turn into a calamitous reality – is that the West doesn’t have a policy to deal with Muslim extremism and the terrorist violence which is being perpetrated throughout North Africa, the Middle East, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The folly began years ago when western leaders expressed a childish enthusiasm for the so-called Arab Spring. They really were foolish enough to believe that all those delightful, educated young people rising up against perceived tyrants such as Gaddafi, Mubarak and Assad would depose tthem and implant democracy in countries which had been dictatorships for centuries. What actually happened – and which some predicted at the time – was that the nice young rebels, staging the revolution on their mobile phones, would be quickly replaced by the militants, extremists and terrorists of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaida and worst of the lot – so far – IS. We even helped them by bombing Gaddafi’s Libya.

Now the West is hypnotised and horrified by the murderous antics of the well-organised terrorists. We are also paralysed, seeking to avoid engagement – boots on the ground – at all costs. This is the rerun of the 1930s appeasement policy of which Lord Richards speaks. Today’s terrorists are not going to go away, just as the Nazis refused to go away. They will have to be taken on, and soon, or else the carnage we now see in North Africa and the Middle East will, like the refugees, cross the Mediterranean into Europe.