So writes Melanie Phillips on her personal website, Melaniephillips.com, in today's must-read column. She lays out clearly the willful-self-delusion behind PM Brown's position that "Muslim" and "terrorist" should not be linked.

The capacity of the human mind to delude itself never ceases to amaze. How can such educated individuals be killers? people exclaim. Have such people really leaned nothing from history? Have they forgotten the Nazis, forgotten Dr Mengele, forgotten that the genocide of the Jews was carried out by people who delighted in Goethe and Mozart? Ayman al Zawahiri, bin Laden’s number two, is a paediatrician. Yet he is responsible for the deliberate mass murder of thousands of people.

On BBC Radio Four’s Today programme this morning (0755 approx), the reformed Islamist extremist Hassan Butt patiently spelled out to presenter Jim Naughtie that Islamist terrorists carry out their acts of mass murder as an expression of religious faith and fervour. They do it, he said, ‘for the pleasure of God’. Far from being acts of despair, these terrible atrocities are acts of religious exultation.