Excerpt:
Saturday night's jihadist terror attack was Britain's third in three months and the seventh globally, and it came only eight days into the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The British public is reeling while our politicians scramble for answers ahead of the general election on Thursday.
Let us start here: any politician who is unable to name the threat facing us does not deserve to be taken seriously. Islamism is the political ideology that seeks to impose any given interpretation of Islam over society. Jihadism is its violent offshoot. Terrorism seeks to terrorise. If we are so terrorised that we cannot even identify the evil haunting us by being able to name it, we stand no chance of even beginning to galvanise a civil society coalition to defeat it. This abysmal failure by politicians to clearly name the threat not only betrays liberal Muslim activists who require a lexicon for the fierce internal community debate about the need to defeat Islamism and reform Islam today, but it also muddies the waters for mainstream society by making it harder to isolate Islamists from everyday conservative Muslims. The inevitable consequence is that all Muslims end up being blamed.