Just 24 hours before, the city was totally euphoric: winning the 2012 Olympic Games was certain to unleash a new spate of creativity and energy which was long overdue for London, at least since the times of Carnaby Street and the Beatles.

Then, on Thursday morning, came the shock of the carefully-timed bombings under and over ground, the scenes of carnage and ambulances rushing in the streets of the once-happy capital.

Just a day or so before, an article referred to how things had got back to normal, that American Independence Day was not accompanied, as it did in the previous years, by a cacophony of threats and terror.

The world had gone to sleep, and terror struck once again. Looking back today, there was an underlying logic leading to the attack that seems to have escaped the whole West. Looking back, it is now clear that terror would seek to strike just when the leaders of the West were meeting at Gleneagles. To have missed the logic shows how deeply the West was sleeping.

Just 24 hours after Twin Towers, the West invoked the application of Nato Article 5 which states that an attack against a member country would be considered as an attack against all members. Then came the war on Afghanistan, regarding which there was enough consensus. Then America started to speak about Iraq and its dictator and most of Europe disagreed with the American point of view. From an understandable dissent, Europe slid to a rather substantial disinterest in the war against terrorism. No one in Europe came up with anything resembling a comprehensive and efficacious strategy against terrorism. Many words, little substance.

The strategy of terror continued, nevertheless. Last year Spain, this time the UK, next time Italy?

This time, there cannot be any reasonable doubt that the terror the West is facing comes from Islamic terrorism. Both the London bombings and the killing of the Egyptian Charge d’Affaires in Baghdad have been claimed by Al Qaeda, inspired by the same nihilist Islamic ideology that speaks in defence of the massacre of “Jews, Crusaders, unfaithful, apostates” and which aims to destroy a whole civilisation based on holding life sacred.

Despite all the evidence and the linearity of successive terrorist attacks, there are still those in the West who consider terrorism to be a reaction, and thus justified in a way, who would want to somehow blame the West, or Israel, or even some Muslim countries, for the terrorist reaction. The West’s real blame lies in having repeatedly underestimated and misunderstood the reality of an organic structure of Islamic radicalism which has now developed deep roots within western society, which nurtures a culture of confessional hatred and communitarian separatism.

Sorry to say it at this point, but the UK itself has proved to be a fertile breeding ground for this kind of Islamic radicalism. Britain had become the country where some of the most notorious leaders of Islamic extremism, responsible for full scale massacres of innocents in Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, even Chechnya, have found refuge. Where the Jihad is preached as a holy war, and where young people are indoctrinated into becoming Islamic martyrs, producing successive waves of Islamic fighters and aspiring terrorists.

All this was (is) carried out in a very naïve country where freedom of expression was (is) held to be supreme, even when the instigation of extremism should never have been allowed due to freedom of expression reasons. Last January, Omar Bakri, a Syrian, president of the Al-Muhajiroun (The migrants) movement, told The Times in an interview that Great Britain had become “Dar al-harb” (The House of War) and that “the lives and property of the infidels are no longer sacred”, that the British Muslims were duty bound to join Al Qaeda and its organisations.

It was in London too that Abu Qattada, the sanguinary mufti who legitimised the massacres of civilians in Algeria, was allowed to live in peace. And it was only recently that Abu Hamza al Masri, a British citizen of Egyptian origin, leader of Ansar al Sharia, accused of having promoted terrorist attacks in Yemen, was arrested.

Those who thought that allowing extremists to enjoy the freedom of speech would be beneficial are now served. It is one thing to allow the freedom of speech in Hyde Park Corner and quite another to allow the whole country to become the Corner.

This is war, a war against civilisation as we know it. There is a change, to be sure: this terror attack was not on the Twin Towers scale, something which was totally unthought-of, beyond imagination, aiming directly at the heart of the system which we all thought impregnable.

But, like Twin Towers, this, and the Madrid terror attack a year ago, had as its real targets ordinary people doing ordinary things: the Underground, the bus, going to work, going to school, reading the paper: the small daily routine of ordinary people which form the rites of a common culture, the banality of everyday life in any democratic country.

It is precisely this that the terrorists want to destroy, what Tony Blair called “our way of living”. The West that stands up to terror is not the mute and blank faces of the world’s leaders as they backed Mr Blair, with jackets all buttoned up and hands hanging at the sides, but the millions of ordinary people going about their ordinary lives in order and courage. The bell that tolls for Britain, tolls for Europe. Not for any form of indiscriminate repression against Islamic communities, against people who only want to work and live. More than being defeated over the Constitution, Europe is being defeated by this long sleep in the face of what aims to destroy it. Let Europe be as different from America as it wants. But let it do something substantial.