‘There has been and will continue to be mounds of scholarly research and debate on what role, if any, Islam and Islamism play in ISIS’s actions and its worldview. But, when it comes to the question of blame that will be sadly prevalent in the coming days, I have found that one of the most effective and to-the-point contributions is this 30-second clip from historian Reza Aslan, responding to hostile questions on CNN suggesting that Muslims are inherently violent… Aslan’s point is simple and correct: religions are big and diverse, and people get out of them what they bring into them…’

Source: Vox

This reminds me of the discussion, in a book I recently read about the 13th century Mongol conquests, about the horrific numbers of deaths for which they were responsible. The author considered the historical debate about whether this was a barbarian Mongol thing and concluded, quite rightly I think, that, no, it was a human thing of which they were just, for various reasons, very effective practitioners.