The state of mind that lies behind the Islamist terror threat
Confusion over the name of the group behind recent atrocities mirrors our difficulty in agreeing on how to respond, writes Allan Massie
THE Prime Minister says we shouldn’t speak of “Islamic State” because “it is not a state but a barbaric regime of terrorism and oppression”; it would be better to use the terms Isil or Isis. Alex Salmond agrees with him: “Any description of terrorists which confers on them the image that they are representing either a religion or a state must surely be wrong and an own-goal of massive proportions.” Meanwhile the SNP’S Westminster leader Angus Robertson would have us speak of them as “Daesh – the commonly used phrase across the Middle East”. Names are of course important, and how you speak of these terrorists does matter. Nevertheless, in the wake of last weekend’s triple atrocity, arguing about what we should call the responsible organisation may seem to many about as important as the medieval scholastic debate about the number of angels who could dance on the head of a pin.
Isil, Daesh or whatever calls itself a State. It claims to have revived or restored the caliphate. It holds territory in Syria and Iraq. It has an army which fights battles. In the territory it controls it reportedly carries out the normal tasks of an administration. It finds a way of selling oil. It executes its own horrible version of justice. So it behaves like a state, and no matter how vile and repulsive its activities are, there is no reason to believe that it doesn’t have the support of at least some of the Sunni Muslim population in the territories it controls. We may not recognise it as a state and have good reasons for not doing so.