IT’S only a few weeks ago since I said in this column that Islamic State’s barbaric atrocities now witnessed in Iraq and Syria will come to Europe.

At times like this, there is no consolation in being proved right.

The awful events in Paris last week were widely reported as having a lot to do with freedom of speech and freedom of the press. True. But ironically we are suffering constraints on our free speech, not only from militant Muslims, but by our own hand throughout the mass media. We are, it seems, forbidden by the canons of political-correctness to speak the obvious truth that the murders in Paris are part of an Islamic insurgency on three continents.

The Guardian, The Independent and the BBC repeat the mantra that terrorist attacks are vengeance for the West’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. This is nonsense.

The massacre of 166 people in a Mumbai shopping centre in 2008 had nothing to do with western involvement in Muslim countries. Neither did last week’s slaughter of 2,000 people by Boko Haram in Nigeria. The reality is plain and in front of our eyes.

There is a violent Islamic insurgency on three continents and mass murder by Muslims is taking place daily from Nigeria, to Mail, Sudan, Somalia, Algeria, Libya, Syria, Iraq, through Afghanistan and into Pakistan.

The history of the last 1,400 years shows plainly that these Islamic insurgencies are frequent.

From the start, Muslims were commanded by the prophet to convert by use of the sword. In AD 732 a Muslim army of as many as 200,000 men was defeated by the Christian Charles Martel at Tours. If that battle had been lost, all Europe would have fallen to militant Islam.

In 1565, the relief of the Siege of Malta, by a Christian alliance, ensured that the Mediterranean did not fall into Muslim hands and so give them a toehold in southern Europe

Then came the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571 when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Papacy, the Republic of Genoa, the Duchy of Savoy and the Knights Hospitaller decisively defeated the main fleet of the Ottoman Empire. There was that other September 11 – 1683 when Christian armies under Jan Sobieski arrived at the gates of Vienna and defeated the last substantial Muslim incursion: the last, that is, before the one which we face at present.

Add to this catalogue the fact that Europe has allowed unrestricted Muslim immigration for a decade and that so many of these incomers refuse to integrate – so that, as Bishop Michael Nazir Ali has told us, there are hundreds of no go areas for non-Muslims throughout the continent. These are the causes of our present discontents.

Belatedly a few journalists – with the support of a few courageous editors – are beginning to tell it as it is. Charles Moore, for instance, writes: “If we say the Paris attacks had nothing to do with Islam, we are lying.” He refers to figures (which are supposed to reassure us!) to the effect that only ten per cent of Muslims in France support terrorism. That’s ten per cent of six million. In other words 600,000 terrorist supporters in one country alone.

Andrew Gilligan and the eminent historian Michael Burleigh are also among the truth-tellers.

But we won’t face the truth. This is our tragedy. As TE Hulme said: “A civilisation can survive any number of enemy attacks, but if it once loses its confidence in its own identity, then no power on earth can save it.”