LEADING commentator Janet Daley's article in Saturday's
Telegraph ‘
The West is at war with a death cult’ stands for everything that is woeful about European elites’ response to Islamic jihad.
It is a triumph of religious illiteracy.
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Janet Daley has called ISIS a 'death cult' |
The
jihadist enemy, she asserts, is utterly unintelligible, so beyond
encompassing in ‘coherent, systematic thought’ that no vocabulary can
describe it: ‘This is just insanity’, she writes. Because the
enemy is ‘hysterical’, lacking 'rational demands', 'negotiable limits,’
or ‘intelligible objectives’ Daley claims it is pointless to subject its
actions to any form of historical, social or theological analysis, for
no-one should attempt to ‘impose logic on behaviour that is
pathological’.
Despite this, Daley then ventures to offer analysis
of and explanations for ISIS’ actions, but in doing so she relies upon
her own conceptual categories, not those of ISIS.
Her explanations therefore fall wide of the mark.