Ruth Dudley Edwards: When it comes to war, I never had the luxury of being a pacifist

Putin is a very bad man who sees himself as a Tsar who will restore a Russian empire country by country once he has demolished Ukraine.

Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, regards Israel as a cancer, and, more importantly, wants the world rid of all Jews and Zionists (so that’s me gone along with anyone else who believes in the right of Israel to exist).

Being a religious fanatic, if he can get hold of a world-demolishing nuclear bomb Khamenei will be happy to blow up the entire world since he and his co-believers will, as martyrs, be transported up to the heavenly virgins as their enemies are consigned down to eternal damnation.

It's not just that Khamenei thinks Israel is a cancerous tumour that must be removed, but he considers - as he recently tweeted - that "The Zionists have always been a plague, even before establishing the fraudulent Zionist regime."

It’s code for Islamists’ shared desire to eradicate every Jew from the planet.

I never had the luxury of being a pacifist.

At a very early age, I learned about the Second World War and what happened to the Jews and it stayed with me forever.

The liberal world hadn't believed how truly evil the Nazis were.

I learned more about that later when I was writing about the 1930s.

Hitler had been making it clear for years that everything that was wrong with the world was down to the Jews, whom just like Islamists he wanted to eradicate.

But believing that he meant this was a step too far for an awful lot of society’s leaders - politicians, diplomats and - in that awful term, ‘opinion formers’.

“Herr Hitler is demonstrating encouraging signs of statesmanship” was a phrase I remember from the well-regarded Economist in the late 30s about which I was writing a book.

I remember the anger expressed 40 years on by a journalist who described office rows.

It was, he said, as though they couldn't actually believe that there was such a thing as evil.

Closer to home, it was pointed out to me in the 1990s by the IRA terrorist-turned-informer Sean O'Callaghan, who became my friend, that there was an assumption among British and Irish diplomats and politicians that just as ordinary respectable Irish people had gotten drawn into the war of independence and then returned to the sort of jobs they had held in teaching and the civil service, the Provos would do the same.

But they weren’t the same, he kept pointing out.

They've been brutalised in gun-fights, hardened in prisons, taken over by ideology and will compromise only when they have no option.

And like Islamists, they practise taqiya - lying - to conceal one’s true faith.

You can never trust them.

Israel and Ukraine deserve our gratitude for doing our dirty work against mortal enemies of our way of life.

If Trump joins the fight, we should win.

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l Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of ‘The Faithful Tribe: an intimate portrait of the loyal institutions’ and 'Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing and the Families’ Pursuit of Justice.’