I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the depth of Britain’s stupor. Until last Sunday, when I watched bbc tv’s Question Time and saw a panel of esteemed public leaders and virtually an entire studio audience savagely eviscerate one of the UK’s smartest, most rational journalists. Her egregious infraction?

She identified Iran as a grave threat to the UK and Western civilization.

Before we continue, recall who and what contemporary Iran is. Iran, by its own ceaseless admission, is the avowed enemy of America, the Jewish state, the UK and of Western civilization in general. Since the 1979 Iranian revolution, Iran’s Supreme Leaders Ruhollah Khomeini (until his death in 1989) and Ayatollah Khamenei (who was also a key figure in the revolution) fed their people on a steady diet of hatred and vitriol. As Ayatollah Khamenei likes to say, the United States is the “great Satan,” Israel is the “little Satan,” and both, along with the Christian West, must be annihilated by Islam.

This fanatical religious hatred of the West is the foundational pillar of Iran’s foreign policy. “Cold and warm weapons, that is, pens, words and machine guns, should all be aimed at the enemies of mankind, headed by America,” Khamenei has stated. Israel, he’s repeated over and over, is a “cancerous state” that must be cut out.

Khamenei, as well as retiring President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—and Iran’s new, “moderate” president, Hasan Rowhani—is a Twelver. Twelvers adhere to the Shiite belief that the twelfth imam, or Mahdi, will soon emerge to establish a global Islamist caliphate. Khamenei and his followers consider it their duty to wage war on unbelievers to create the apocalyptic conditions that are meant to surround the Mahdi’s return.

Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons is a direct function of this apocalyptic ambition. If Iran is allowed to get the bomb, it will use it, as former Iranian diplomat Mohammad Reza Heydari has warned: “If Iran is given more time, it will acquire the knowledge necessary to build a nuclear bomb …. If Iran gets to the point where it has an atomic bomb, it will certainly use it, against Israel or any other [enemy] country.”

If all that’s too abstract, consider what Iran does week to week, day to day in support of all varieties of radical Islamist terror, including its support of radical Islamist political regimes (Egypt), suicide bombings (Iraq), civil unrest (Libya, Egypt, Tunisia), cyberattacks, and large-scale military attacks (Syria). As the nucleus of global Islamist terrorism, Iran is the patron of some of the deadliest terrorist organizations in the world, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad regime in Syria, as well as extremist groups large and small throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and even in Europe and Latin America.

Then there’s the Iran-al Qaeda axis. For a few years after 9/11 it was widely believed that the long-running Sunni vs. Shiite rivalry meant that Iran and al Qaeda and its offshoots were not working together. Turns out the West was wrong. Intelligence gathered from multiple government agencies proves that Iran has sheltered al Qaeda terrorists, including Osama bin Laden and his family, and has assisted al Qaeda with financing, planning and carrying out terrorist attacks on Western targets. Iran is key to al Qaeda’s survival and operation.

Iran’s fingerprints are in one way or another on almost every Islamist attack in recent years, every radical jihadist, and every radical Islamist organization or regime currently in operation. Iran, as Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry first stated more than two decades ago, is the head of the terrorist snake.

The facts exposing Tehran’s supreme ambition to destroy the West are so indisputable, even Iran and its radical Islamist allies don’t disagree.

How, then, do you explain an audience full of UK residents, including the mayor of London as well as key M.P.s, pillorying a respected journalist for merely repeating what Iran and the terrorists have themselves stated over and over? Watch the madness yourself:

On the issue of Iran and the threat it poses, I expected the general reaction to be one of apathy and passivity, with perhaps a smidgen of halfhearted criticism. I expected ignorance—but a thoughtless, shallow ignorance, the result of not having seen and considered all the facts. Instead, the ignorance on this occasion was willing and intentional. These people had seen the facts and had either ignored them or outright rejected them. But that’s not all—they then engaged in a rude, disrespectful, fiery and impassioned barrage on Phillips and her assertion that Iran was dangerous.

Welcome to modern Britain! In staunch defense of its enemy, mainstream Britain boos and hisses into silence a true defender of Western civilization!

Remember Drummer Lee? He’s the British soldier who only a month ago in a London suburb was struck by a car, dragged onto the pavement, then stabbed, beaten and very nearly beheaded by two radical Islamists brandishing a meat cleaver and a machete, screaming “Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar.” Iran, more than any other sovereign country, is responsible for creating and feeding the global plague of Islamist terrorism out of which that attack came.

In the above clip, Ed Davey, a Liberal Democrat M.P., lambasts Phillips to great applause, stating: “Your comments, Melanie, on Iran couldn’t be more poorly timed. There’s just been an election in Iran and we have a new president.” He went on to explain how the West will now be able to work with Iran. “Poorly timed?” Really? Really? Hasan Rowhani was raised by Khamenei, he thinks like Khamenei, and he pursues Khamenei’s goals for Iran. Neither Rowhani nor Khamenei expressed outrage or condemnation at the Woolwich attackers. How could they? This is the very behavior they have for years endorsed. Under Rowhani, a radical cloaked as a moderate, Iran is going to be more dangerous, not less. Coming in the wake of Rowhani’s election and Drummer Lee’s murder, Phillips’s remarks on Iran were perfectly timed.

Yet, silly, foolish Britain, despite all the facts warning against it, gushes over Iran and its “new leadership and direction.”

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London and a Conservative, delivered some similarly preposterous statements. “It is a curious fact, that as far as I can make out, Iran is not actually in breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” he said. Perhaps that’s true, but isn’t that essentially what the West said of Hitler in 1939? He isn’t killing Jews now, so why worry? How many lives could have been saved had the West paid heed to the facts and to Hitler’s own declarations? Johnson also assured the audience that Iran is not manufacturing nuclear weapons and is not a threat to Britain and the West.

Watching Johnson and the other members of the panel brought to mind the prophecy in Isaiah 56:10, which describes the behavior of Britain’s and America’s leaders in the end time. “His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.” Here’s a man with great influence and power, a leader saddled with the responsibility to protect his people, actually deceiving his people about the danger that surrounds them. Britain’s enemies are encroaching—they just beheaded a man on the streets of London!—and the nation’s watchdogs refuse to bark, let alone bite.

Last week’s bbc Question Time highlights another end-time prophecy, this time in the book of Hosea, which is mainly directed at Britain (biblical Ephraim). In Hosea 7:11, God says “Ephraim also is like a silly dove without heart ….” The meaning of the Hebrew word “silly” is to “be enticed” or “be deceived.” It also means to “be simple,” or “naive,” or “gullible.” It can also mean to be easily “seduced.” Is there a more apt description of Britain and its dalliance with Iran and radical Islam?

Surely a nation has reached the apex of irrationality and foolishness, thereby thrusting itself limp and unguarded before the feet of its enemies, when in defense of its adversary it starts attacking its own patriots. In this case, one of the bravest, smartest, most rational and articulate journalists of our age. Britain’s treatment of Melanie Phillips is not unlike the treatment of Winston Churchill during the 1930s. Phillips, like Churchill, is analyzing the facts, drawing logical conclusions and delivering a clarion warning to Britain and the West. And Britain responds with putrid contempt for the message and messenger.

The tragic reality, made evident by the widespread malice for Melanie Phillips and her message, is that Britain, even more than Iran, radical Islam and all other threats, is its own worst enemy.