THE Coptic Christians in Egypt are about to be exterminated. They are an ancient, but minority, Christian community in a predominantly Muslim country.

There has always been some friction between Christians and Muslims in Egypt, but this has intensified fiercely in the last two or three months. Churches have been burned down and scores of people murdered.

Do you remember the Arab Spring? All those delightful, civilised, democratically-committed young people in Tahrir Square, organising their yuppie revolution on their iPhones – and the western press telling us what a good thing it was?

I said in this column months ago, when that revolution was in its early days, that it would be taken over by the Islamist extremists in the Muslim Brotherhood and that Egypt can expect nothing but uncertainty, bloodshed and terror.

This would be bad enough if it were happening only in Egypt. But the truth is that the whole of north Africa and the Middle East is on the edge of a conflagration.

Take Libya for another example. The western press are so naive as to imagine that all it takes is the triumph of the uprising over Gaddafi’s forces to establish a sort of genteel Guardian-reading, BBC-inspired democracy to take hold in that country. They forget, these blithe optimists, that the countries of north Africa and the Middle East have been for centuries a nightmare of bloodletting tribal rivalries, held, for a few decades, in some sort of check only by very nasty despots such as Mubarak and Gaddafi. Now that the dictators have either departed or are about to depart, the usual barbarisms will resume.

Then there is Yemen, which has become the new breeding ground for Al Qaeda and which was a hell-hole of sectarian warfare even before Al Qaeda arrived there. The opponents of the corrupt and evil regime in Bahrain are being savagely slaughtered by troops imported from Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, a conservative estimate puts the number of Syrians murdered in the last four months, by the forces of the Syrians’ own president, at more than 5,000.

Western governments have made explicit their intention to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan as soon as they can. They have no alternative: western nations cannot afford to maintain a controlling presence forever.

But as soon as the western powers retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, an even fiercer hell than already exists in those countries will break out. Does anyone imagine that when the vast American military presence takes itself out of Afghanistan, the Taliban will return with a commitment to women’s education and universal human rights? No: we are about to witness civil wars, state terrorism and beheadings on the grand scale.

I can’t end this cheerful column without another mention of “our closest ally” in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia. This primitive barbarism does not even allow women to drive. As for religious tolerance, while Britain allows Muslims to build mosques by the thousand in our country, if I attempted to walk down the high street in Riyadh, wearing my crucifix or my dog collar, I would be thrown into prison.

The Arab Spring is rapidly turning into an Islamic fundamentalist winter and this will alter the political and cultural character, not only of north Africa and the Middle East, but of the whole of Europe, too.