IF I had to put my finger on one of the great evils of this world, it would be fanaticism. Life is, or at least it should be, a rich tapestry, each of us a unique thread in an ever-changing image.

People may be similar to one another but no two people, even identical twins, are exactly the same.

Fanatics, whatever their colour or creed, smother this spectrum of living colours and would cheerfully turn the world into a lifeless, monochrome husk.

They want everyone to be the same as them and loathe and would even seek to destroy those who are not.

The killing of soldier Lee Rigby on a London street was grotesque, an act of horrific, unbridled, ritual savagery which would not have looked out of place in the Middle Ages rather than on the streets of modern Britain.

The danger is that Lee Rigby becomes a martyr for racists who need little excuse to commit acts of violence in the first place.

Hate crimes against Muslims, the majority of whom I believe are moderate and law-abiding, are already on the rise and there have been arrests in connection with a suspected arson attack on an Islamic boarding school on the outskirts of London.

I’ve heard people on social networking sites such as Facebook say, ‘Why is it always Muslims?’ But it’s not and never has been always them.

In the last century it was the IRA, who came from a largely white, Roman Catholic background, who brought terror and mayhem to our shores.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Jews, gipsies, homosexuals, and the mentally ill were the scapegoats for the Nazis, sacrificed at the altar of pseudoscientific notions of ‘survival of the fittest’ and racial supremacy.

Millions of human beings were slaughtered on an industrial scale, viewed with little more compassion or regard than bacteria lining a toilet bowl.

If you go back far enough to the Crusades it was the Christians, not the Muslims, who raved about Holy War, massacring Muslims and Jews alike when they broke through the gates of Jerusalem in 1099, burning mosques as they went.

Jews were murdered as ‘Christ killers’, ignoring the simple fact that Christ himself was a Jew.

This kind of racism and fanatical hatred is literally blind and it must not be allowed to flourish or triumph in this country.

People sometimes blame religion but fanatics will always twist the words of God to justify the havoc they unleash.