I’m going to come clean and confess that this week, when I look out at the world beyond the happy bubble of my home and family, I feel something close to despair.

My wife and I, and about a dozen close friends, were in London Bridge on Saturday night, at the home of a very dear friend, temporarily ignorant (at that exact moment) of the rampaging murders that were happening only a couple of hundred meters from where we stood. More unnervingly, had we not cancelled our pre-party dinner plans, all of us would almost certainly have been dining in the Borough Market area at the precise point when three pathetic, inadequate, cowardly little parasites began marauding through the pubs and restaurants, slashing at decent, innocent people with ten-inch blades.

At the moment, as a society, we tend to vacillate, and argue, between two positions on this. Broadly speaking, the right-wing “Muslims are to blame and they are all responsible” – the view popularised by Donald Trump and regularly vomited around the UK by UKIP members and a slightly depressing number of people in this country.

On the other hand, we have the left-wing “terrorism has nothing to do with Islam”, which (and this needs to be said), is every bit as cravenly stupid and irresponsible as the opposite view. These two positions, contradictory though they are, are like a pair of ugly, moronic twins: they share in every respect the same abject lack of intelligence, their utter moral squalor, their total refusal of nuanced thought.

These views shame us. The quality of our debate shames us. We should be ashamed.

The reactionary right-wing response to terrorism is plainly immoral for the extraordinarily simple reason that it implies a form of ‘collective punishment’, regarding individual human beings as a collective, as being ‘guilty by association’, without any reference to their individual ideas, actions or way of life, simply tarnishing them because of their shared cultural association. It is worth remembering that the military form of collective punishment is banned by the Geneva Conventions, and rightly so, and for ethical (as opposed to merely military) reasons that we can and should feel free to apply to non-military contexts.

Philosophical ethics 101: Collective punishment is fundamentally immoral because morality fundamentally takes place on the level of the individual. Simple. Ok? Good.

But the idea that terrorism ‘has nothing to do with Islam’ is very nearly as stupid as the idea that we should deal with it by punishing all Muslims. Islam as a religious culture has tremendously deep problems that need to be addressed, debated, argued about and slowly resolved as part of the global conversation in a technologically globalised world. Its appalling misogyny, for example, is a real and serious problem: its hatred and mistrust of women, directly connected to its medieval hatred and suspicion of sex and sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular. Which, in turn, is directly connected to its evil and barbaric attitudes to homosexuality.

No. Not good enough. And for your sake, don’t you dare be dumb enough to call me a racist for saying so.

The list goes on: The general and very popular attitudes to ‘blasphemy’ within Islam are completely unacceptable in a free society in the modern world. I’m sorry, but your human rights – which I would fight to the death to protect – do NOT include the right not be offended, by anyone who wants to critique, criticise, question, or simply take the piss out of your beliefs. It is their fundamental human right to do so, in fact. Muslims everywhere are going to have to be a great deal less thin-skinned, and it’s not ‘Islamophobic’ to say so. Someone did a picture of Mohammed? Get over it. Grow up. It’s a fucking drawing.

I long for the day that we, as a society, will find the nuance to vigorously oppose the prejudiced vilification of all Muslims, and at the same time feel able to – equally vigorously – openly criticise the many cultural elements within Islam that are in-and-of-themselves extreme, elements which need to be adjusted, reformed, evolved, so that the religion of Islam can authentically put a proper distance between itself and that crazed hatred of this world, that vicious, nihilistic totalitarianism, which typifies those Muslims who find in their faith an injunction to murder and to maim those who don’t share their beliefs.

I look out of my window this week, and I feel, more than ever before in my life, that we have such a very long way to go.