WHEN atrocities as terrible as last week’s shootings in Paris occur, the search is on for explanations for how some people can commit such unspeakable crimes, and in the name of a religion: Islam.

One focus for criticism has been “multiculturalism”.

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It’s a term to avoid.

It often confuses more than it illuminates.

But for me, it’s about how we respect those in our society of different races, colour and religion, whilst insisting that if you cloose to live in Britain there are imperatives of our law and culture which everyone has to accept.

That must include the freedom to publish disobliging cartoons, where they fall within the law.

Getting the balance right is tricky.

But our history teaches us that to attempt to suppress different identities creates more problems than it solves.

We tried that with those of the Roman Catholic faith - denied civic rights until the middle of the nineteenth century, and subject to significant discrimination well into the twentieth.

We are still living with the consequences of this prejudice in Northern Ireland.

A second focus has been Islam itself, with suggestions put forward by some commentators that there is something inherent in Islam today which allows maniacs to justify their psychopathic evil by referring to the teachings of the Holy Koran.

In previous centuries thousands lost their lives across Europe in the carnage between different Christian denominations.

This was no more to do with the message of the New Testament, than today’s terrorism is to with the Holy Koran.

There is, however, a specific issue about Sunni Islam that makes it vulnerable to being misused in the way we have seen.

The main Christian denominations, and Shi’a Islam, have clear authority structures.

Sunni Islam doesn’t work in this way.

It has “schools of thought”, but it’s much easier for a charismatic extremist to proclaim himself a “scholar” and attract the weak-willed and the criminal to his perverted cause.

Fortunately, more and more mainstream Muslim clerics are now managing to find their voice to condemn the poisonous narrative of jihadist terrorism for the filth it is.

We need them to shout this as loudly as they can.