We wouldn’t want to delude ourselves. At the risk of under­mining the comfort that comes from jihad denialism, let us have a quick stocktake of Islamist ­extremism globally.

In Syria and northern Iraq, the bloodthirsty jihadists of Islamic State have slaughtered 50,000 people or more. Children have been executed because of their parents’ faith. Blood has been drained from those refusing to bow to an extreme version of Islam imposed by a self-declared caliphate and women have been raped and chained and sold into slavery.

About 150 Australian citizens have voluntarily joined Islamic State. Some have been killed, some as suicide bombers, one infamously had his children hold up severed heads, and many remain. At least as many people still living among us have supported the ­jihadists, helped to recruit them or tried to join them. Some jihadists have come back to our shores; more hope to join them.

In the Syrian civil war that has both helped to spawn ­Islamic State and been exacerbated by it, perhaps as many as 400,000 people have been killed. Millions have fled and are encamped in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, while hundreds of thousands have fled to Europe. Terrorists have hidden among the refugees.

The ongoing military conflict is a witch’s brew of competing interests, strategic plays and fundamentalist rivalries that has drawn in global nuclear superpowers the US and Russia. It is also a proxy struggle between the pre-eminent Sunni power of Saudi Arabia and the Shia empire of Iran; and it pushes up against the military might and tense borders of Israel.

Across the Middle East and North Africa, Islamic extremists continue to create merry hell for governments, democracy, the rule of law and the safety of non-Muslims. In Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt and Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, Islamist extremism has spread bloodshed and either created dystopia or constantly threatened it.

In Afghanistan, a decade and a half of foreign intervention is drawing to a close as a feeble ­national government attempts to embed order against persistent and bloody attacks from Taliban extremists and other Islamic terrorist outfits. In Pakistan, girls are slaughtered by extremists for daring to go to school and politicians are assassinated for defending the rights of non-Muslims while the heaving populations of nuclear-armed Pakistan and India square off across the Punjab border.

In Paris, Islamic terrorists have gunned down journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, music fans at the Bataclan theatre as well as tourists and locals in restaurants. They have used trucks to mow down dozens of families in Nice and Berlin. These are just a few of the worst terror attacks.

In the US we have seen the ­unspeakable horror of 9/11 claim almost 3000 lives and more recent atrocities such as the Boston marathon bombing, Orlando massacre and San Bernardino shooting. We have seen bombings, shootings and stabbings in London, Bali, Jakarta, Istanbul, Mumbai, New York, Brussels, Sydney, Parramatta … the list goes on. Innocents — always innocents — brutally and senselessly killed.

The evil is so immense and the scale of the acts so overwhelming it is sometimes the micro that gives perspective. After the Boston bombings of 2013, the bodies of two victims were lying on the footpath and could not be moved because the crime scene had to be preserved.

One was a 23-year-old university student, Lingzi Lu, and the other an eight-year-old boy, Martin Richard. Out of respect for the victims and their families, a small group of Boston police vowed to stand with the bodies through that day and night in a silent vigil.

“We stood there not so much as cops, or veterans, but as fathers,” said Captain Frank Armstrong. “I have five children; every one of us there that night thought ‘but for the grace of God that could be my child, coming in to watch the marathon on a beautiful day’.”

Islamic terrorism has changed the way we travel and how we live. It is a global scourge that seeks to foment social, political and strategic upheaval. It strikes at our humanity, under­mines security and chips away at tolerance. So far, it must be said, its chaos theory has been relatively successful.