The Young Turks news show has become increasingly regressive as time goes on. Here’s a 13-minute video with hosts John Iadarola, Ana Kasparian, and Michael Shure discussing the recent terrorist attacks on London.

Two words are completely missing from the long discussion: “Muslim” and “Islam.” I don’t think that omission is accidental.

The tone was set in the opening statement by Iadorolo: “In terms of exactly who they are, I don’t care about that–they’re assholes who got what they deserved for an absolutely terrible attack, especially considering that the Manchester attack just happened; but even that wasn’t the first attack in the UK. That’s very rough.”  Well, some of us care who they are! The U.S. and British governments, for one thing.

And so it goes on, with Shure blaming George W. Bush and Tony Blair (via the Iraq War) for the terrorost attacks and the subsequent blame the fell on “that community” (a.k.a. Muslims). At 4:29, Kasparian refuses to name the terrorists, even though their names had been released by the police. Why? Could it because they had names that sounded like Muslims? At 8:39, Kasparian mentions “this group of people” (she means Muslims), and blames “Western governments [who are] killing innocent civilians in Middle Eastern countries.” She goes on to say that the attacks are due to those people who get angered at drone strikes and enact retribution, saying that we’re “missing the mark because we let our emotions get in the way.” In other words, the terrorism is the fault of the West, and it’s understandable that an angry Muslim would want to blow up a bunch of kids in Manchester or diners in London.

The whole discussion judiciously avoids not only the topic of religion but even the name of the religion. It’s Islamist apologetics and West-blaming of the worst stripe. I was no fan of the Iraq war, but I don’t think that it somehow makes the retaliatory killing of other innocent civilians justified. Kasparian’s conclusion, given later on, is that the solution to Islamist terrorism is for the West to stop bombing other countries. Perhaps that will help, but we already know the problems with that “solution” (see also here). It’s not going to stop Muslims from attacking other Muslims, or Islamists from attacking in the West.

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In contrast, Tom Holland, identified by the Spectator as “a historian of early Islam, [and] a dinosaur enthusiast and a translator of Herodotus’s Histories,” has no problem indicting religion as a major cause of these attacks, and something essential to recognize if we want to solve the problem. His new Spectator article, “After five centuries, religious war has returned to Britain,” is a passionate defense of his view that Britain is now in a faith-against-faith (or faith-against apostasy) battle. Now you won’t be able to read his piece as it’s behind a paywall, but judicious inquiry might yield you a copy.  Here are two excerpts:

But then, last Saturday night, religiously motivated killing returned to London Bridge. Three men, swerving to murder as many pedestrians as they could, drove a rented van across the very spot where severed heads had been fixed to the bridge’s southern gatepost. They crashed opposite Tooley Street. Then, brandishing long knives, they plunged into the warren of streets and passageways around Southwark Cathedral where, back in the reign of Mary, six high-ranking clergymen had been tried and convicted of heresy. For eight terrible minutes, terrorists — no less convinced than Tudor inquisitors had been that they were the agents of a stern and implacable god — visited slaughter upon Borough Market. Just four days later, another group of Islamists, equally fanatical and set on martyrdom attacked the Iranian parliament and Ayatollah Khomeini’s mausoleum in Tehran, killing at least 12 people and injuring many more.

The London Bridge attackers wanted us to be in no doubt about their motivation. ‘This is for Allah,’ they shouted, as they slashed and stabbed their victims. When they could, they slit people’s throats — just as Isis executioners in Syria, claiming obedience to a command in the Quran ‘to strike off the heads of unbelievers’, had slit the throats of western hostages. Shot by police marksmen, the three men were hailed by supporters of Isis as ‘martyrs’.

Sometimes it can be hard to recognise ghosts for what they are. Reactions to the atrocities committed on Saturday — as to the atrocities committed only a few short weeks previously in Manchester and on Westminster Bridge — have mingled despair with perplexity. We just don’t understand violent religion.

And this:

And yet, for all that, it is clear that the legacy of Islamic supremacism, deriving as it does from both the Quran and sayings of Mohammed, still has a potent and seductive appeal. Indeed, there is a sense in which it may be precisely the integration into Islam of the Western notion of human rights that is helping to fuel its recrudescence. After all, if — as Muslims believe — their religion is the last and ultimate of God’s revelations, then any dimunition of its purity, any dilution of its traditions, can all too easily be portrayed as a lethal threat to the entire future of humanity. Isis, who have pointedly reintroduced both the jizya and slavery, are merely the most extreme of those factions within Islam who insist that Muslims, far from compromising with the values of the West, should instead seek to destroy them utterly.

We are witnessing a civil war within Islam and the three men who brought carnage to Borough Market last Saturday did not see themselves as murderers, but rather as warriors. They imagined that they had been divinely summoned — just as Mohammed had been — to the overthrow of kufr: unbelief.

No laws, no increase in police numbers, no boost to the powers of the security services can adequately patrol such ideas. Only by directly confronting these beliefs do we have even the faintest prospect of diminishing their potency. To do that, though, will first require acknowledging what Isis and their cohorts in the West actually embody: a strain of Islam that has its roots deep in the past, and which, as our most careful analyst of Isis, Shiraz Maher, has put it, ‘believes in progression through regression’. To dismiss it, as Theresa May did, as ‘a perversion of Islam’ is not merely to close our eyes to the nature of the threat that it presents to Britain’s future as a free society; it actively risks making it worse.

So as we begin the inevitable discussion about what to do next, the first step ought to be a fairly basic one: recognise the problem.

And that’s what people like The Young Turks adamantly fail to do.