I THINK commentators are doing an enormous disservice by referring to the terrorist grouping ISIS as “Islamic State”.

I know that the terrorists have started to call themselves that, but it is no reason for everyone else to follow suit.

I might announce tomorrow, that I shall be known as “the Prime Minister’, I doubt that my constituents would humour me, however, and they would be right not to do so, because I am not the Prime Minister – no more that is ISIS an Islamic State.

It is neither a state, nor Islamic. On the contrary, it is a horde of bloodthirsty heretics. To refer to them as “Islamic State” is an insult to 99.99 per cent of the world’s Muslims.

For an institution like the BBC to acknowledge this grizzly bunch of psychopaths as “Islamic State” is to afford them a status they do not deserve and to play into a narrative that suits the Islamaphobia of my recent postbag.

There is a group of my correspondents for whom the world is absolutely black or white and for whom Islam is – of necessity – a wicked and cruel religion, who believe that peaceful Muslims are an aberration that will soon be a thing of the past. For these correspondents ISIS, the so-called Islamic State, is the genuine article.

I wonder if people who hold this view have any appreciation of the broad sweep of history and world events. Christianity, for instance, can offer examples of horrific crimes to match anything ISIS has come up with.

Christians burned each other at the stake for centuries over obscure differences in doctrine that would defy the understanding of most believers.

The St Bartholomew’s day massacre, or the defenestration of Prague, are just two examples from European history where neither women nor children were spared in centuries of vicious religious bloodletting. It was, after all, only in 1964 that the Roman Catholic Church accepted the principle of freedom of religion. Jews were repeatedly massacred and expelled from Christendom.

Moorish Spain was tolerant of Christianity, but when Christians conquered, the Moors were expelled or forced to convert, and those who chose conversion were hounded by the Inquisition to prevent them backsliding to their old ways.

The Ottoman Empire, the longest-lasting example of an Islamic state, was tolerant of Christian and other minorities. That tolerance was rarely reciprocated.

In 1099 when the crusaders captured Jerusalem the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres recorded that on the Temple mount “ten thousand were beheaded. If you had been there, your feet would have been stained up to the ankles with the blood of the slain.

“What more shall I tell? Not one of them was allowed to live. They did not spare the women and children”.

By contrast, when Saladin retook Jerusalem, the Muslims allowed most Christians to go free.

Yet, only four years later, Richard the Lionheart massacred 2,700 Muslim hostages at Acre. Should anyone conclude from all this that all religions are equally dreadful, they should consider how the godless state ideologies of the 20th century managed to extinguish more human life than all of the wars of religion put together.

When I survey our history and the state of affairs, I am not inclined to blame any religion.

It isn’t what men believe, it’s what they are.

I am inclined to believe that the sheer depravity of inhumanity is such that it can only be rescued by the redemptive power of God.