LAST week I was asked to address the annual meeting of Amnesty International New Forest on the principal threat to human rights and what we can do about it. This is what I said: For most of the 20th century the principal threat to liberty arose from the collectivist ideologies which set too low a value on individual rights and property, as against the priorities and demands of the state. In this respect communism and national socialism were not dissimilar. Likewise, the enormities inflicted by Stalin and Mao rank with those of Hitler.

Having defeated National Socialism in the Second World War, we embarked on the Cold War to defeat the expansionist ideology of communism. In doing so, we often acquired “clients” whom we armed and supported in pursuit of our greater objective of defeating communism. We were sometimes insufficiently discerning in our choice of clients. Often enough, they were regimes that abrogated human rights and extinguished liberty as much as communism itself.

If they were dictators we held our nose and we kept them in place. This had consequences for governance, poverty and oppression. In the 21st century, I believe the principal threat to liberty has passed from the secular or “godless” ideologies of the last century to a violent Islamic fundamentalist creed.

This presents in two forms: firstly it is a civil war between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam, a division that goes right back to the seventh century. It is a battle that is currently being waged by proxy between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Syria.

The second manifestation is the violent coercion of Muslims by their puritanical co-religionists for living and behaving in an insufficiently “Islamic” way. The roots of these puritanical strands go back to the 18th century with Wahabism in Saudi Arabia and Deobandies in the Indian sub-continent. It manifests itself in the belief that one can only truly be a Muslim in a fully Islamic state.

This creed is deeply hostile to democracy, subjugates women and attaches no importance to liberty. It is this creed that drives Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and SIS. The theological development of these movements is a matter in which we have played no part and for which we bear no responsibility.

The recruiting sergeant for Islamic terror groups is the hopelessness of poverty arising from decades of corrupt and incompetent governance.

It is the same hopelessness that drives others to try to find purpose and meaning in the zealotry of religion. And we do bear some responsibility for creating circumstances where such poverty, oppression, and poor governance persisted. One of the legacies of the Cold War was that we tolerated and even encouraged such regimes. We meddled where we had no business to, with disastrous results.

Clearly we do need to develop responses to protect ourselves from the threat posed to our values and way of life. We also need to tackle the source of poor governance and the resulting poverty and oppression that gives rise to the hopelessness which nurtures terrorism.

This comes with a price tag: it has to be achieved by international development aid. One of the more depressing features of my constituency correspondence is that there are a large number of people who believe we can save ourselves this expense, and just cut ourselves off from the world’s problems. They are burying their heads in the sand. We need to share in the burden of relieving the world’s problems, or we will be engulfed by them.