For him [Professor Bernard Crick], the whole issue is political and not religious and the continued use of the phrase "Islamic terrorists" tends to conceal this fact. "Of course they are in some sense Islamic. But we didn't call IRA bombers 'Catholic terrorists'."Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality, doesn't agree with this:
"[T]he point he is missing is that the IRA called themselves Irish not Catholic and these new terrorists call themselves Islamic. They have to be what they call themselves."Phillips is surely right. It's like those Marxists who say that Stalinism had nothing whatsoever to do with Marxism. Stalinism was a monstrous distortion and betrayal of the original aspirations and authentic values of Marxism; but it grew out of a regime that was created by a Marxist party, and grew in some continuity with what was done by that party in its first years in power - a continuity, what is more, some of whose sources are traceable back to weaknesses within the political theory and moral philosophy (such as it was) bequeathed to the tradition by its founders, and then developed by many of their followers in the wrong direction. So, one has to make a proper accounting there and not pretend that there's no link between the ideas and the historical disaster that was made out of them.
I know less - much, much less - about Islam. But given how often religions seem able to generate amongst their followers extreme and cruel manifestations, I'd be surprised if it could be shown persuasively that the beliefs of Islamist terrorists had simply nothing to do with Islam. (Hat tip: AE.)