Who to blame for three schoolgirls going to Syria? Not the police.

So it turns out that those to blame for the three London schoolgirls, Shamima Begum, 15, Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Amira Abase, 15, going to join Islamic State (IS) in Syria are the police. Not the people who encouraged them to go and of course not the families who, like all religious families, ensured that their children were indoctrinated into their parents’ religion. There was no evidence to suggest the girls had been ‘radicalised’ – and the parents saw the girls on a day-to-day basis, after all, far more than the police who perhaps met them once or twice – so what is the basis on which the police could have done more?

It turns out that the girls knew a 15 year old girl who went off to join IS which apparently should have ‘set off alarm bells’ and it did. The police sent routine letters which they passed to the three girls to take home. The letters were never passed on. Perhaps the letters should have been posted direct to the parents but the fact remains that there was no evidence that the girls were likely to head off to Syria. So the parents never knew. I do not know if the parents knew the other girl who went to IS but at a guess they did know all about it. Does personal and family responsibility come into it anywhere?

We don’t know what the parents told their daughters about IS. Did they explain to them the likely life – if you can call it life – they would face? Women and girls do not exactly enjoy equal status and many of them are regarded as sex objects for IS ‘fighters’ and to become additional wives to them. Slavery, rape, violence and punishment are part of the daily diet of misery. Did they know all about this, or are the police to blame for this too?

I do not see the glamorous side of this at all, I don’t see a single attraction of joining a crazed organisation that routinely beheads people or burns them alive inside a locked cage. Or the hooded face of Mohammed Emwazi. He’s no role model, even though much of the media hands him an affectionate nickname, as if he was a celebrity. Why would anyone, let alone three young and very intelligent girls, want to spend their lives in a world like that, religious superstition or not?

But blame the police? Why not? And let’s blame everyone else, apart from the one reason that is the cause, direct or indirect, of much of the trouble in the world: religion, and this instance in particular, islam.

And it’s another reason why religion cannot be beyond questioning. To many of us, it is simply and literally incredible the believe that somehow we are ruled by a celestial dictator in the skies. That someone went to heaven on a winged horse – there is no such thing as a winged horse – or that a virgin gave birth to a child, which is biologically impossible. Without any doubt, of all the major religions islam is the one that we must fear. It is all very well to say that most muslims are moderate but without moderate muslims there would be no extreme ones either. In the case of the three girls, as in Iraq, Iran , Nigeria, Libya and in so many other places, religion is the problem. It all starts at the top, with governments that fail to stand up to islamic fascists who put fatwas on authors and encourage segregated religious schooling to parents who want to blame someone else.

The police are picking up the pieces of what governments of all colours have created. It’s not their fault.