Terror and illness

supervision will be enough to keep the public safe, given that the teen was judged by psychiatrists as at high risk of reoffending.

The intensive supervision includes GPS monitoring, living in supervised accommodation, with counselling and assessment by a probation officer and with regular reports to the judge. If the supervision fails and the teen hurts or kills anybody, there will be a huge and entirely understandable public backlash.

On the other hand, it is pretty obvious that sending the teen to jail could have made things even worse. An angry, troubled young man with a serious tendency to violence is unlikely to be rehabilitated in jail. He is all too likely to become angrier and more violent.

So the court takes a justifiable risk in choosing close supervision. Whether this will help the teen is also a difficult thing to judge.

The common idea that Islam has a particular proclivity towards violence is wrong. Violent fanatics have acted in the name of every kind of religion, even those which might seem the most peaceable. Christians often ignore the passages in the Old Testament that glorify violence.

They also tend to overlook the terrible history of Christian violence against Muslims, Christian ‘‘heretics’’ and Jews.

Hindus and Muslims in India have massacred each other. Even Buddhism has its nationalist massmurderers, as can be seen in the atrocities now being committed against the (Muslim and Hindu) Rohingya people of Myanmar.

In all of these cases politics and religion have been mixed together.

And in all of them psychopaths and mentally ill people, along with the fanatical and the alienated, have enthusiastically joined in the killing.

Right now the main focus of public concern is on terrorists acting in the name of Islam. Solving that problem will require a lot more than attempts at religious re-education.