An active evil - The Fourth Reich

HARDLY a day passes without Western sensibilities being challenged by barbarisms carried out in the name of extreme and violent Islam. 

Just yesterday, on the day she was buried, police admitted that a 27-year-old Afghan woman who was beaten and set on fire by a crowd of men in central Kabul in broad daylight last Thursday because they believed she burnt a copy of the Koran, was totally innocent of the charges made against her.

Leaving aside the principle that a person is innocent until proven guilty, the lynching of a young woman in a capital city, as police officers looked on but did not intervene, points to a dystopian horror that we can barely imagine.

This weekend the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul warned that Islamic State is the most potent threat since the Nazis, and described the organisation as the Fourth Reich, saying it is comparable to Hitler’s Nazis in fanaticism and barbarity. No matter how desirable it would be to dismiss that description, no matter how disheartening it is to acknowledge that such evil is active, to do otherwise would be foolish and dangerous.