Twenty people, mostly foreigners, were killed in an attack on a cafe in Dhaka that was claimed by the Bangladesh affiliate [7] of the ISIS franchise [8]. Government troops stormed the Holey Artisan Bakery in an upscale district of the capital 12 hours after it was seized by jihadist gunmen. Accounts are unclear if hostages were killed in the rescue operation, but at least some were apparently hacked to death by their captors—the favored method [9] of jihadists in Bangladesh. Local media reported the gunmen tortured anyone who was unable to recite the Koran [10]. After all this, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had the temerity to say: "It was an extremely heinous act. What kind of Muslims are these people? They don't have any religion." (BBC News [11], BBC News [12], NYT [13])
Oh, the hell they don't. Religious extremists commit some atrocity... and the religious establishment tries to portray them as atheists. Utter denialism. It seems that in Bangladesh, as in Egypt [14], an increasingly authoritarian but ostensibly secularist regime is trying to win Islamist support. The ideology behind this terror is political Islam. Call it what it is.
