Security sleeps as death cult awakes

Jihadism is similarly obsessed. It means, as numerous slickly produced videos on the internet demonstrate, adoring and serving death, be it as the slayer or the slain. In fact, its beatification of terrorist violence, or the management of savagery, as the Islamic State's official journal Dabiq proclaims, is more telling than the professed ideological dimension.

Indeed, to love death as jihadism does is to say that it is beautiful to receive it and to risk it and that the most beautiful and saintly love is to distribute it. This putrid need of death is evident today across the Middle East.

If that's what jihadism at its fundamentalist core wanted, it got it. It is a form of political nihilism made possible by the sacralisation of violence.

This aspect of jihadism and the capacity of a version of Islam to play into the cult of death is not to desensitise youth to death (as some Western security analysts assert) but to sacralise it.

Before throwing more money at "extremism" and creating more sweeping government powers, the elected representatives of a secular democracy ought to do far more to defend a political way of life and target the promulgation and appeal of this potent and ultimately fascist death cult.