I am responding to Brother Su's 'Militancy propaganda is pure Machiavellian' (Sept 7). I have no complaints about the author's comments on Malaysia and Lee Kuan Yew's remarks on Malaysian militancy but I would like to make some comments on Islamic militancy in general.

I think that what non-Muslims (particularly Westerners) might find unnerving about militants and terrorists who are Islamic is that they tend to conduct their militancy and terrorism in the name of Islam.

Those of us who know that Muslims, because of the nature of Islam, cannot separate their actions from their religion and that the real meaning of "jihad" can't stop this fact.

Palestinians blow themselves up and call themselves martyrs. Abu Sayyaf members behead people in the name of Islam. Lashkar-e-Jabbar separatists in Kashmir pour acid on women if they do not cover themselves according to their strict Islamic dress code.

Often the targets of Islamic militants are Westerners. These are real examples and we cannot deny that they are happening. I do not wish to make any judgements as to the justness of these causes but just commenting on the nature of their actions.

In comparison, other militant groups tend not to justify their actions through their religion. Even the Northern Ireland conflict is really between nationalists and loyalists, and is a political struggle between two sides that just happen to be separated by religious belief.

This, of course, is not true for everyone but they are acting more on political belief and for land rather than entirely on religion.

Even the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia were not necessarily between Christians and Muslims but Serbian supremacists (many of whom were atheist) and other former Yugoslavians (including Croatian Christians and Bosnian Muslims) in a conflict dating back centuries with hatreds approaching the irrational.

Most non-Muslim militants tend to fight for their political causes rather than religious per se even though their acts of terrorism are no less despicable than other groups.

So when Western news reports use the term Islamic militants/terrorists, they are technically correct not necessarily because of Western bigotry but because the militants/terrorists have defined themselves so.

Also when Brother Su mentioned that in pre-secular Turkey there were no record of persecutions, he forgot about the Armenian genocide in 1915, which was the persecution and slaughter of millions of Armenians by the Ottoman government, the first of many genocides in the 20th century.