Now the Islamist terrorists separate the British and Americans as they decide who shall be slaughtered to advance their cause.

The Mumbai massacres have striking parallels with those that took place in November 1997 on the shores of the Nile, at Luxor.

There, 24-year-old Karina Turner, from Ripponden, near Halifax, died as Islamist gunmen swept down from the hill tops surrounding the Valley
of the Kings where Tutankhamen's tomb lies.

In a gesture that every mother will understand, she threw herself across her five-year-old daughter's body in a vain bid to stop the Islamist fanatics from pumping bullets into her. They both died, along with the child's grandmother.

Eleven years ago, 60 innocent tourists died along with the Turner family. Like the attacks in Mumbai, the Islamists who carried out the killings were not immediately identified. Long before 9/11 or 7/7 or the arrival of President George W Bush, Islamist ideology was ready to kill in the name of its beliefs.

The Mumbai massacres are crimes, but they are crimes driven forward by the fundamentalist ideology of Islamism. The ideology of Islamism is not the religion of Islam, and a clear distinction needs to be made between the faith and the ideology.

Muslims in Yorkshire and elsewhere have every right to insist that their faith is one of peace, charity, and decent values. But the time has surely come now to speak out against all forms of political violence.

The object of the Mumbai attack is three-fold. First, to challenge the new US leadership and show that unless President-elect Obama bows to Islamist demands, attacks on innocent Americans and their allies will continue.

Second, in a classic strategy of tension rooted in fascist theory of state-destabilisation, the Mumbai terrorists seek a backlash from the Indian authorities and from Hindu extremists. In Islamist ideological theory, there is a permanent war going on between believers and non-believers. It can only end when sharia law and the rule of Islamist fundamentalists is established.

Striking at the heart of India's most westernised city and the most popular tourist region in the sub-continent also seeks to stop and reverse India's entry into world history as an increasingly democratic and free-market political-economy.

Third, the timing follows the democratic elections in Pakistan
and the initiative of Pakistan's new president, Asif Ali Zadari, to propose an historic compromise to India. This is based on lowering the nuclear stand-off between the two countries and moving forward to normalise relations which have left Pakistan – a nation with a population three times the size of Britain – in a permanent state of no-war but no-peace with India.

Zadari is taking huge risks in Pakistan by reducing the size and role of the notorious ISI – the powerful and secretive Inter-Service Intelligence agency which has run its own private foreign and security policy in support of Taliban and cross-border terrorism into Indian-controlled Kashmir. The ISI has been accused of encouraging the military coups that have deposed or killed democratically-elected leaders in Pakistan.

The issue of Kashmir continues to plague the entire sub-continent. Some 500,000 Indian soldiers occupy Kashmir on Pakistan's eastern flank. Up to 40,000 Kashmiris have been killed in the past two decades, according to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

There can be no peace in Pakistan and no stability in the entire region until the Kashmir imbroglio is addressed. Human rights abuses in Kashmir cause acute pain and distress to Pakistanis everywhere, including the important Kashmir-linked communities in Britain.

India has received more than £1bn in development aid from Britain this century. Yet the country is home to some of the wealthiest people on the planet, and Indian companies own Europe's steel industry. India can plant her flag on the Moon, but after 60 years of democracy, only 60 per cent of Indians have been taught to read and write.

It is in this vacuum of illiteracy and massive disparities of income and hope that fundamentalist religious ideology can flourish. Scores of Muslims were killed by Hindu extremists in 2002, and Hindu fanatics have also targeted Christian communities.

But as long as Indian politics is organised around religious identity, it is hard to see India creating a secular, democratic nation which prevents rather than stokes violence.

Can India rise above the anger and passion that the Mumbai killers hope to unleash?

Can India say yes to President Zadari's offer, remove troops from Kashmir and work with Pakistan, Mr Obama and Britain to face down terrorism in Afghanistan?

In turn, can the growing threat of Islamist murderous ideology be confronted?

This is a political struggle that is also taking place in Britain. Like the BNP, our home-grown Islamist ideologues are obsessed by Jews and by Israel.

The sanctimonious Muslim Council of Britain put out a statement yesterday condemning the Mumbai killings. Yet the MCB and Islamist extremists in Britain will not condemn the killing of Jewish civilians in the Middle East, and continue to pander to fundamentalist organisations like Hamas or Iran's President Ahmadinejad, as they call for jihad against Jews and for the destruction of Israel.

Successive Home Secretaries, Labour and Tory, have tried to pretend that the problem was a question of crime. Mumbai shows that this is an illusion. It is about ideology.

It was an illusion when the Turners, from Yorkshire, were killed in 1997. It is time to face reality. There is a struggle between democracy and fundamentalist Islamist ideology.

The choice is grave. On one hand, the British and universal values of freedom, rule of secular law and human rights; on the other hand, the dark forces of oppression and hate of the wrong religion, wrong gender or wrong passport.

This is not about the faith of Islam or about British Muslims. It is
about confronting and defeating an evil ideology which threatens Muslim, Jews, Christian and non-believers alike.

Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham and a former Foreign Office minister. His book, Globalising Hatred: the New Anti-semitism, has just been published.