Published in Magill, March 2005. Note: This article was a rebuttal of Dr Millar’s piece, ‘No surrender to holy terrorists’, which appeared in the same pages.
In the previous article, Rory Miller of King’s College London writes that we in the West must not compromise with what he calls ‘Holy Terror’. He suggests that all Islamic militants across a very broad spectrum fully identify with al-Qaeda and are engaged in a civilizational struggle against the West. Those in the West who do not respond to this challenge are soft and dithering. In this conflict Dr Miller tells us that to compromise is to surrender. Yet his discussion of so-called ‘holy terror’ offers an oversimplified catch-all view of political Islam and Islamic militancy.
