Israel has now declared Grass persona non grata, but elsewhere he has got away with it. None of those who have honoured Grass over the years, including the Nobel Prize committee, has ostracised him for depicting Jewish victims as perpetrators and their genocidal foe as an innocent victim. The silence of European intellectuals on the rise of "educated" anti-Semites speaks volumes.

This silence, however, is not confined to the Continent. Here in Britain, we encounter it in academia, in the media and in the arts. When George Galloway won the Bradford by-election with an Islamist campaign, it took the nation by surprise. Neither the national press nor the BBC, indifferent to provincial politics, had bothered to report Galloway's vicious but highly effective campaign. The intelligentsia ignored the irruption of religious fanaticism into domestic British politics for the first time in centuries. As Tim Congdon observes in his column, the political elite is silent about the impact outside London and the South-East of an immigration policy that has embittered the electorate in depressed regions.

Silence is the order of the day, too, on the collapse of stable family life into which successive governments have sleepwalked. They have created a culture of dependency that obliges the 25 million Britons who work to support up to ten million others of working age who do not. They have also silently undermined marriage, the institution which Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali defends and elucidates, while the philosopher John Haldane untangles the contradictions that beset liberals who discount the traditional definition of marriage. 

At the heart of British government, the dismantling of democracy, sovereignty and the nation state proceeds apace — but it is rare that we get such an insight as Michael Pinto-Duschinsky provides this month. He shows how the civil service connives with the human rights establishment and the Liberal Democrats to prevent any repatriation of powers from unelected foreign judges to Parliament. This process is driven not only by pragmatic self-interest, but by the secular religion of human rights.

 Secular religion is the theme of Melanie Phillips, too. A period of silence from Richard Dawkins would be as welcome as it is improbable. The silence of the intellectuals is always selective. In the face of the foes of civilisation, though, silence is the worst form of cowardice.