Enter the Muslim Billy Graham.

My prediction about the Maghreb domino effect seems to be developing along the lines we suggested. Mubarak looks due for an early bath, Gaddaffi is getting nervous, and the Yemen is revolting. Algeria is seething and Morocco looks dodgy.

 None of this tumult appears to be Islamist in nature.

Its current characteristics combine youth, computer literacy and the internet, social networks like Facebook and a demand not just for the material things in life that young people elsewhere take for granted but also for political freedom and plurality.

If this assessment is anywhere near accurate there is no room for a medieval caliphate. We may be seeing the high-watermark of extreme Islamism.

Or maybe this is wishful thinking.

One certainty is that the turbulence is spreading quickly in Maghreb countries which have one thing in common: nasty dictators who have been propped up by the West for fear that they might be replaced by Islamic extremists, just as they propped up vile regimes around the world which might otherwise have become Communist.

Why the West never progressed from this infantile foreign policy is a mystery. Perhaps it was the policy embodied in the nursery poem ‘Always keep a hold of nurse/for fear of getting something worse’.

On a more uplifting note the Speccie carried a full piece on the Islamic Billy Graham. Step forward the Telemufti Amr Khaled. He is a celebrity who preaches inter-faith dialogue and the need for young Muslims to get along with the West.

I have had a look at him performing on his web-site. He is good-looking, impeccably dressed in a dark business suit, no towel on the head, no robes, no beard, and oozing charm. He is the very model of a televangelist.

He has started a project in Yemen called ‘New Hope’ which is aimed specifically at Al Qaeda. Its object is ‘to pull out the roots of extremism in Yemen’. The project is deploying 100 clerics and 5,000 youth volunteers who will go to every city in Yemen to confront extremism, preaching the ‘true merciful Islam’, and inveighing against nonsense-talk of slaughtering infidels and all the other imagined grievances of disaffected Muslims.

The project started last November and combines old-fashioned preaching from the pulpit at Friday prayers with the latest internet techniques. Khaled seems convinced that before this year is out Al Qaeda will be yesterday.

Khaled is an Egyptian who was forced into exile because Mubarak thought he was getting too influential, and came to England. He is quoted in the Speccie as ‘living a wonderful life in freedom’.

He is using a UK-based foundation to train a new generation of youth leaders for Yemen. He has chosen 100 of the world’s most respected Muslim clerics to preach moderation from the pulpit and via podcast.

His general approach is to attack Osama with mockery and to show him to be ignorant of the Koran. He says ‘Who gave extremists the authority to speak on behalf of Muslims?’

Let’s hope that he succeeds and is not thrown off-course by the current political turbulence in Yemen, especially as he has the support and commitment of the present regime.

The NYT recently said that the unfettered growth of the security apparatus in the US was a far greater long-term threat to US freedom than ‘a few madmen in Yemen’.

We need to be a bit less worried about the limited threat imposed by Al Qaeda and much more worried about the moves by Blair and Broon to turn the UK into a totalitarian state which the new regime has done little to reverse.