Is this all the fault of Islam? The definitive answer is…

Yes and no. Of course, most terrorist attacks these days have something to do with Islam. The people who carry them out are invariably Muslims, they tend to scream “Allahu Akhbar” before demonstrating the infinitely merciful and compassionate nature of the deity they profess to worship, and they make it very clear that they're killing in order to avenge the deaths of Muslim “brothers” or to avenge an insult to Mohammed (whom I promise never again to refer to as The Prophet, because he’s not my prophet) or to terrify us all into submitting to shariah law - or whatever particular “cause” they’ve chosen to justify bringing yet more needless misery and suffering into the world. And of course most of the funding for terrorism these days comes from rich Muslims in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia, Quatar and Kuwait. All sound suspiciously Islamy to me.

So, when liberal-leftists. or Muslim "spokesmen", or Barack Obama (who is a left-liberal Muslim spokesman) seek to decouple Islam from terrorism, sensible people tend to roll their eyes and mutter, “Oh, knock it off!” But (and I really hate to say this) they’re not entirely wrong - even though their craven, limp-wristed dhimmitude is utterly nauseating.

I’ve recently been asked to write about the great 20th Century philosopher, Karl Popper, whose two great areas of expertise were political philosophy and the philosophy of science. As I know nothing about the philosophy of science, I’ve chosen to concentrate on his brilliant, impassioned, crystal-clear defence of democracy, The Open Society & Its Enemies, which has informed my political views ever since I read it in my early twenties. In the mid-1970s, Britain – known as “the sick man of Europe” – seemed to be falling apart: there was much speculation that it had become ungovernable, and many people on the right (and quite a few in the political centre and even the soft left) had begun wondering whether some form of military coup followed by an authoritarian national government led by a cabal of the great and the good might not be such a bad idea. I might even have wondered the same thing myself – the country really was in a bloody mess. But then I happened to find Popper’s monumental two-volume work on my brother’s bookshelves. It - and Solzhenitsyn's The Gualg Archipelago - inoculated me forever against totalitarianism of any stripe. In the introduction Popper described his book (written in exile in New Zealand during the early years of the Second World War)  in these terms:

It attempts to show that this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or ‘enclosed society’ with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man. It attempts to show that the shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism. And it suggests that what we call nowadays totalitarianism belongs to a tradition which is just as old or just as young as our civilisation itself.

One of Popper's great insights was that the open society will never once and for all vanquish all its enemies: there will never be, as Francis Fukuyama termed it, an "end of history" when liberal democracy will be so widespread and so firmly rooted that it cannot be extirpated.  Islamism is just another of those reactionary movements whose aim is to suppress all that messy freedom, with its attendant uncertainty and confusion and having to think for yourself and taking personal responsibility for your own life and suchlike. As Eric Hoffer argued in his marvellously revelatory 1951 book, The True Believer, there will always be a plentiful supply of pathetic, disappointed, inadequate young men who hate their lives and themselves, and are therefore only too eager to slough off their old despised identity in order to be reborn as savage warriors for a cause which will remove the need to think for themselves: the more ridiculously unattainable its aims and the more brutal and subhuman the acts it demands of them, the better (I wrote about The True Believer in relation to the filthy, blood-soaked Orcs of Boko Haram here.) The causes in whose name they murder, Hoffer argues convincingly, are interchangeable. Islam just happens to be the current flag of convenience for self-loathing misfits. Those who assumed that the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled the end of totalitarianism were evidently wrong – Islamism has stepped into the breach left by the demise of communism as the major enemy of freedom and the open society. If it hadn’t been Islamism, some other hateful, poisonous, fear-filled, violent movement would have arisen instead.

That doesn’t mean that Islam doesn’t have charges to answer. The conflation of religious law and political systems doesn’t help. The structure of the religion (if it can said to have one) - the lack of any form of central authority such as a Pope or an Archbishop of Canterbury - seems to mean that anyone can set themselves up as a cleric in order to encourage deluded losers to go out and kill anyone they feel like killing (including fellow-Muslims).

Then there are those passages in the Koran which seem positively to encourage this practice. Wholesale immigration (entirely our fault, of course) means that Western democracies are host to a ready-made fifth column. And while left-liberal politicians and media folk like to pretend that Islam’s murderous minority have nothing to do with “good” Muslims, the fact is that a majority of European Muslims hold views which are directly opposed to the freedoms endorsed by the vast crowds in Paris today. Most Muslims think criticism of their prophet should be illegal and subject to punishment: In other words, they agree with the terrorists – they just disagree about the severity of the punishment and who should carry it out. Not really good enough. Either Muslims accept free speech (in which case they accept criticism of their religion), or they don’t. Those that don’t might be happier living in a country where their religion is protected by the state from criticism or – worse – humour! To expect the host country to abandon its values to suit an alien belief system betokens ignorance or arrogance or both.

If you think that it's the duty of a modern democracy to prevent people poking fun of your beliefs, you aren’t Charlie - you're a proper charlie.