It’s fine to be a ‘new’ atheist, so long as you don’t object to Islam

Rationality can be an overrated quality in politics. Communism was, after all, so rational that it imagined humans as lumps of clay to be moulded at will – with unsuitable ‘elements’ consigned to the Gulag.

The attempt to apply rational political criteria to the actions of psychopathic movements has also historically led to erroneous political decisions at home: appeasement in the case of Nazi Germany and a frivolous desire to find materialist ‘root causes’ of Islamic extremism.