Father Darline Joseph Marianathan, St Boniface Church, Okehampton and Holy Trinity Church, Chagford

WHAT began as a concept of packet networking in the 1960s developed into the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) for information sharing in the laboratories and has burgeoned into the internet today.

We are motivated to be heavily dependent on the internet for our business and recreation. The office for National Statistics claims that 87% of our population is using the internet in the UK.

In recent years, the terrorist attacks on our businesses and people have multiplied.

Without having to travel or have any training, terrorists use widely the same internet facility to radicalize citizens of our homeland and to carry out violence in our streets.

Our world class security and intelligence community roll their eyes in exasperation after the recent massacres in Paris, Tunisia, Beirut and Sinai.

Our politicians sing the praises of our military supremacy but from our previous experience we learned that all our coalition military might only destabilized the terrorists for the time being and had not completely defeated them.

In some cases, terrorists have re-emerged more powerful than before under different names posing a renewed threat.

It is rather inhuman and insane to stay idle in the face of bloodshed at our doorsteps.

Therefore, we can justify our MPs’ majority vote for expanding RAF tornados to join the battle against terrorist positions in Syria. But if we want to completely defeat those terrorists, we need a more powerful tool than our RAF tornados.

Our War on Terrorism needs to be a fight for hearts and minds.

Our virtue of generosity should be accompanied with prudence as we open our borders to migrants and refugees so that they get sufficient support to learn and share our way of life based on rule of law, individual liberty, tolerance to different faiths and beliefs.

Islam has so much potential goodness to make life better. Terrorists do not fit any particular religious, ethnic, economic, educational, or social profile. Terrorists try to present credible motives against true Islam, both by anti-democratic and anti-capitalistic means. This ideological misconception needs to be clarified among our Muslim brothers and sisters.

Such an effort would need more hearts and minds than military might.