THE Russian revolutionary Lenin is credited, probably wrongly, with having coined the term “useful idiot”.

These are people who allow themselves to be used as propagandists or apologists for radical political movements they do not really understand.

It seems to me that I have been a useful idiot for Islamist extremism.

This may seem odd, because I have regularly challenged religious orthodoxies which threaten human and especially women’s rights.

However, when I look back at what I wrote in my Argus column about the campaign to free Omar Deghayes in 2006 and 2007, I do feel a bit of a fool.

If I had my time again I’d still campaign for Omar Deghayes to be freed from Guantanamo Bay, where he was illegally imprisoned and abused.

Guantanamo was an abomination.

As was the torture carried out there and the illegal rendition of prisoners by the Bush and Blair governments.

However, that being acknowledged, I hope I would now be more wary about appearing to endorse groups of people I actually knew little about.

Still less would I believe I understood their politics.

Or that I was being told the truth by all my informants.

I would certainly not assume that all strands of Islam followed in our city are compatible with democracy and equal human rights.

The Deghayes family were refugees from Libya.

In the past, I naively assumed that country was the focus of their interest.

I never expected that within a few years, three of Omar Deghayes’ young nephews would travel to Syria, a country with which they appear to have no family connection, to fight and kill and in two cases to die.

And that they would do so with the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, a Salafi jihadi group in pursuit not of freedom, justice and democracy but of a Sunni-led caliphate.

Nor did I expect to hear one of the boys in a television interview justify his actions on the basis that “Muslims” were being attacked by Bashar Al Assad.

In using the word “Muslims” rather than “rebels” he echoed the sectarian view of the al-Nusra Front that Assad’s Alawite government – in common with groups like the Shia and Druze – is “Kuffar”, not Muslim.

I found it chilling to hear the boys’ father, Abubaker Deghayes, who co-led the campaign for his brother Omar’s release in 2007, justify his sons’ involvement in Syria as a “just cause”.

Following his son Abdullah’s death, Abubaker Deghayes posted an online tribute with a video sermon by Saudi theologian Sheik Muhhamad al Arifi, writing: “In tributes for the loss of my son Abdulah and every Shahid (martyr) in Syria.”

Muhhamad al Arifi is a controversial figure who holds deeply fundamentalist beliefs.

He has among other things suggested Muslim children should not watch children’s TV and that a daughter should not sit alone with her father for fear that she might tempt him into lust.

He is banned in Switzerland because of his virulently anti-Shia views.

Abubaker Deghayes has said his sons fought alongside freedom fighters who would not kill civilians.

The British Government should, he said, “think of it in a positive way”.

But he must have known that the al-Nusra Front – though they are rivals to IS for leadership of any future caliphate – works in close military co-operation with them, holds to the same harsh interpretation of Sharia law and has a similar disregard for human rights, especially those of women and non-Sunnis.

The fact is that neither Abdullah nor Jaffar died as martyrs.

They may have hoped to do so.

They may have longed for approval and to belong to something bigger than themselves.

But the sordid truth is that they died in someone else’s country, fighting an unjust war, led by vicious men for a base and ignoble cause.

Their brother Amer has become a poster boy for murderers.

Whoever financed, encouraged or knowingly allowed these sad-faced troubled boys, one still a child under British law, to travel abroad to be maimed and killed – placing them in a position where they might kill innocents themselves or commit or witness atrocities from which a human soul does not recover – has done a truly terrible thing.

I hope that Abdullah and Jaffar are at peace.

But I grieve for their victims and I rage at the terrible waste of their young lives.