The 9/11 suicide pilots were – obviously – trained pilots, even if they were not interested in learning how to land. Osama bin Laden was a construction engineer and came from a limo-driving family of engineers. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood mass-murderer, was a Western-trained doctor and psychiatrist who had presumably passed the requisite exams.

Now a group of four young Islamic men, one a medical student and one a physics student, are charged with having plotted the random massacre of police and soldiers in London. These are countless more cases which should blow away one of the most comforting illusions of the Western liberal mind: that exposure to modernity and liberal values will somehow eliminate primitive barbarism.

It is reported online that a Muslim female professor at the most important Muslim University in the world, Al-Azhar, in Cairo, Egypt, held to be one of the most moderate Muslim nations, says rape is acceptable if you’re doing it to humiliate your female prisoner of war who is now a captured slave. She is quoted as saying ‘(Slavery) existed before Islam. It existed among all nations and countries, not just among pre-Islam Arabs. Anyone could trade in freeborn men and women. This is called the selling of freeborn people… But when Islam emerged, it put (slavery) into order, by limiting it to legitimate wars between Muslims and their enemies… The female prisoners of wars are “those whom you own. In order to humiliate them, they become the property of the army commander, or of a Muslim, and he can have sex with them just like he has sex with his wives… Legitimately-owned slaves come from among prisoners from a war, which is waged against the Muslims, a war to plunder land, a war against our faith, and so on.”’

If this report is accurate, so much for the magic of a university education. Nor is the imperviousness of barbarism to modernity only a Muslim phenomena by any means. Reports from many Western universities are indistinguishable from the foregoing. Of course, we never had much excuse for the belief that the apparatus of modernity, including education, would destroy fanaticism and primitivism. Amazingly, Germaine Greer has been quoted as supporting female circumcision as an authentic cultural expression, or some such.

An actual majority of participants at the Wannsee Conference, which put the Nazi holocaust on a production-line basis, are said to have had doctoral degrees. In Nazism’s confused philosophy, the product of arty failed intellectuals, there was a strong anti-modern strain. According to Nazi Armaments Minister and technocrat par excellence, Albert Speer, Hitler was in some ways ‘a very primitive man’, dreaming of re-creating an agricultural society, opposed to jet aircraft and tommy-guns and very lukewarm about nuclear research and modern physics. (Einstein was of course Jewish). Science and modernity were, in Hitler’s vision, linked to decadence. In this, as well as in its blind, mad hatred of Jews, Nazism was probably closer to modern Islamic extremism than any other political doctrine has been. Tony Abbott was quite right in likening Isis to Nazism. He was trying to wake people up to its true nature and monstrosity.

They are not identical but probably no two doctrines have been closer in many ways. Nazis burning books and Isis fighters smashing ancient monuments and statues were acting from the same rage against a world too complicated for them to understand.

There was a vague feeling abroad after World War II that, one way and another nearly all nations wished to modernise. The exceptions were seen as rare and eccentric. The American Communist Party, to show its commitment to modernity, had an atomic nucleus on its flag.

Nearly all nations and doctrines then at least claimed to have an ethic of modernity and enlightenment. With this went an ideal (often not lived up to) of humane behavior. This was seen most clearly in attitudes to criminal punishments.

Even when Soviet Russia was running the Gulag and the Arctic death-camps, it at least claimed the purpose was rehabilitation, and photographs were published to the world allegedly showing happy inmates undergoing rehabilitation. The same was true of the dreadful Japanese and North Korean prison-camps.

Some Communist camps in various countries had the name ‘Re-Education Camps’, suggesting that those re-educated would be released as better people (and deceiving some of the more wilfully gullible Western intellectuals). Over the gates of Auschwitz was the slogan Arbeit macht frei – ‘Work brings freedom’.

The point is that humanity has been regarded as an essential feature of modernity, or alternatively that modernity is regarded as a solvent of barbarism.

There was an idea abroad after World War II, particularly in Europe and the Anglosphere, that despite many setbacks the modern world was becoming a kinder and more humane place (and indeed some statistics show this to be true). Even regimes which practiced torture did so in a furtive, shame-faced way. And all more-or-less made at least a verbal commitment to modernity.

Twenty years ago, (post Pol Pot), anyone who’d described Isis’s grisly movies of mass beheadings, crucifixions and other slaughters with torture of unbelievers, simply because they did not subscribe to a particular strain of Islam, or displayed modern values or traits, would have been regarded as mentally unbalanced or in the grip of a nightmarish fantasy. The murders by Islamists, deliberately targeting women and babies in Israel, and the mass-atrocities, including killing off women too old for sex, give the lie to all this. Not only has modernity failed to humanise the behavior of those responsible, but groups like Isis, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram etc actively seek re-primitivisation (as do some Western intellectuals and much of the Green movement).

In a famous passage written in 1899, the young Winston Churchill stated:

Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.

Islamic extremism has been technologically parasitic upon the West for science and those parts of modernity which it selects for its own use. Exposure to Western science and modernity will not reform it, except perhaps with glacial slowness.