It is time we paid tribute to the greatest of our contemporary heroes - the unsung pedant. Across the globe at the moment huge waves of public opinion crash on our shores, ready to carry all before them. The roil and swell of popular feeling flings all sort of flotsam and jetsam into our public debate. And risks sweeping away the fixed points by which we've been able to steer for years.

But the sturdy pedant stands against the swelling tide and erects a little fence of facts. Will that be enough to hold back the spume and froth? We don't yet know, but let us salute the pedant's lonely courage.

There is a wave of public feeling, stronger than almost any I know, which holds that Western nations that take up arms against terrorist enemies are guilty of near-criminal folly. Their actions will be horrifically self-defeating, the terrorists they target will only emerge strengthened and the hazy dream of mad neocons that democracy can somehow be bolstered by the exercise of arms will only be further discredited.

To stand in the way of this tide is to place oneself against a wild, roaring, elemental force that gathers momentum with every day that passes. But the pedant stands his ground. Behind the facts. The fact that Iraq, the country whose liberation was supposed to be a fiasco and crime of the century, has just had another successful democratic election. The fact that liberated Iraq is the only Arab nation that is a functioning democracy with a free press. The fact that Basra, liberated by force of Iraqi arms with American help, is now a peaceful and flourishing regional capital.

Rarely is the tidal force stronger, or more overwhelming, these days than when its directed against Israel's shores. But the one place we can find a secure footing is on the facts. When a wave of criticism hit Israel in the aftermath of the counterterrorist fighting in Jenin, when words such as massacre and comparisons with the Russian razing of Grozny bubbled to the surface, the answer was again in the facts. The Chechen action cost the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. In Jenin the total number of casualties was 75: 26 terrorists, 23 Israeli soldiers and 26 civilians. Each death a tragedy. But the reality of that grim arithmetic is that it does not add up to the massacre that was reported.

And so when we consider the heart-rending suffering in Gaza, let us also root our reaction in those hard, corroborated facts. Which in some cases are only now emerging firmly. And note, as we search for the truth, that one result so far has been the opinion-poll evidence, which shows a significant dropping of support for Hamas in both the West Bank and Gaza. Who else but a pedant would pay attention to anything as anorakish as opinion polling returns in Ramallah - yet where else but in the facts others overlook do we find the solid ground on which we can build for the future?

Wrong target

And this support for moderation among a population that has suffered so terribly for so long helps us to work out how to respond to another wave that hit our own shores this week. The decision to ban the Dutch politician Geert Wilders has led to a torrent of interest in his words. And especially in his film, Fitna. Wilders believes that Islam is the force that animates the terrorism that scars the globe today. And he makes his case with furious energy. But Islam is not the problem.

Islamic Iraq, like Turkey and Indonesia, is a democracy. Islamic politicians such as Mahmoud Abbas are struggling towards peace. Islamic populations across the world yearn for a world grown as boring as Belgium.

The force that really animates terror is Islamism - a totalitarian political creed that twists Islam as Stalinism perverted socialism. There is a world of difference between Islam the great religion and Islamism the ideology of submission, a distinction of just a few letters but massive importance, a distinction the pedant insists on and the historian can help us to explore. Which is why pedants are the real heroes of our age.

Parallel worlds

Looking at Mr Wilders's flamboyant hair-do I was irresistibly reminded of Sting's appearance as the villainous Feyd-Rautha in David Lynch's film Dune. The movie is based, of course, on Frank Herbert's wonderfully realised sci-fi novel. But even with Sting in the cast and Brian Eno on the soundtrack, the film bombed at the box office and disappointed critics.

I, however, love it. Just as I loved the film version of The Amber Spyglass, another adoring adaption of an alternative fictional world that is just too intricately involved to entice the general moviegoer.

Both Dune and The Amber Spyglass appeared to fall between two stools - insufficiently faithful to the novel for the hardcore fans and yet still too wrapped up in the world the novelist created for a new audience. But for me it was the very absorption in another, parallel, world, an absorption so great that it moved the director to offer us his own take on a total vision he found compelling, which gives these films their magic. They are tributes to the magnetic imaginative power of Herbert's world and Pullman's universe - and worth losing oneself in just for that.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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