Is forgiveness a weapon in the war on terror?

Could you ever torture someone? Could you, under different circumstances, in a different world (I hope) than the one which led you to this Spectator, be as brutal as the fighters of the Islamic State? Your answer, I reckon, is most likely to be no. Most people these days talk of IS jihadis as if they’re unnaturally evil, an aberration — and you can see why. If the IS are uniquely bad, it means we don’t have to re-evaluate the species, and to boot, it gives us licence to stamp them out.

It is tempting to think of them as an anomaly, but on this point I’m with Toby Young, who earlier this month wrote that the Catholic notion of original sin explains brutality best. The seeds of cruelty are in all of us — not just IS, or young men, but girls and grandparents too. We could all, if we chose, grow into terrible monsters.