There are various pieties that politicians observe in the wake of some barbarity committed by Islamic fundamentalists and duly David Cameron observed them in his statement yesterday about the murder of David Haines. Of the perpetrators, he observed:<\/p>\n
\u201d\u02dcThey are killing and slaughtering thousands of people \u201d\u201c Christians, Muslims, minorities across Iraq and Syria. They boast of their brutality. They claim to do this in the name of Islam. That is nonsense. Islam is a religion of peace. They are not Muslims, they are monsters.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I really wish he wouldn\u2019t. It doesn\u2019t add anything whatever to our understanding of Isis to say that they are not Muslims but monsters. They may not be our preferred kind of Muslims \u201d\u201c my own preference is for the C of E sort you used to get in the former Yugoslavia \u201d\u201c but they are, unquestionably Muslims of a particularly unattractive stamp. Calling them monsters is an impolite way of abnegating any effort to understand them.<\/p>\n