We are witnessing the death rattle of a death cult.

But, oh, it can still sting.

In Manchester on Monday night, the good times of a pop concert were brought to blood-drenched carnage by a suicide bomber whose terrorism has been claimed by the Islamic State.

Daesh, as the pitiless organization is called by many media outlets in what is largely an attempt to avoid the I-word, is on its beat-back heels across the breadth of its mythical Caliphate in northern Iraq and eastern Syria.

The junior league of the terrorism circuit — Al Qaeda remains senior as a world-wide terrorist broker — has lost more than half of its territory in the past year.

A protracted battle to recapture all of Mosul, led by Iraqi forces and Kurdish militia, is reported to be within days of completing its operational goal. (Ruthlessly and in violation of international war protocols, in at least some incidents, as documented elsewhere in the Star today.)

ISIS is in command-structure retreat, its ideological recruits decimated by aerial assaults, scattering backward toward Syria, fleeing to Libya, a lawless and stateless nation where they hope to reassemble, or, for its acolytes from the West, going home, forged by combat and prepared to do Daesh-bidding on the civilian front in Britain, Germany, Belgium, France . . . anyplace where a franchised cell or lone-wolf cretin can wreak havoc.

Read more:

‘Sadistic’ acts by Iraqi forces undermine war on Daesh, critics warn

How an embedded photographer exposed torture at the hands of Iraqi ‘heroes’

Alleged Manchester bomber phoned mom before attack, said ‘forgive me’

Salman Abedi, the 22-year-old suicide bomber university dropout, is believed to have traveled to Syria, sharpening his radicalization before returning to Manchester, city of his birth, teed up for massacre, and where his Libyan father had sought refuge. Both father and younger son, Hashim, were this week arrested in Tripoli. Another son was arrested in Manchester. Libyan authorities claim Hashim has admitted he and Salman were members of Islamic State.

With Britain’s security level threat ratcheted up to “critical” and a thousand troops deployed on the streets, even before police raided the Manchester flat suspected of being the bomb factory where Abedi’s deadly device was manufactured, the fear is that the terrorist plot was much grander in scheme than slaughtering concert-goers at just one location in what was nevertheless the worst attack on U.K. soil since the 7/7 London bombing in 2005. (Five plots were disrupted in the last two months alone, The Independent reported Thursday, according to unnamed security sources.)

In recent days, I’ve been impressed by how deeply just about everybody can get into a terrorist’s head. Cops and journalists and politicians, academics and psychologists, and, of course, the special interest groups and religious authorities who are more preoccupied with the perceived societal impact of identified zealotry than the wreckage unleashed by the terrorist act.

They haven’t even begun to bury their dead in Manchester and already we’re being scolded for appending “Islamic radicalism” to what happened: the murder of 22 people and injuring of more than 60 others.

If we dare name the phenomenon, as President Barack Obama always refused to do, and as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped around doing this week, then we’re promoting Islamophobia and the maligning of a faith group, no matter how many careful qualifiers are inserted into the discussion.

It’s a tortured exercise in semantics, intended to distract.

Rather than assume the imagined voice of the assailant — Abedi (as far as we’ve been told) left behind no video or social media manifesto justifying his butchery — better to accept the boastful responsibility claimed by ISIS.

There is no shortage in the annals of ISIS of Koran-based rationalization for its apocalyptic vision.

It may indeed be a dreadful mutilation of religious texts, but there’s no separating Islamic State from Islamist doctrine.

This was insightfully explained by Graeme Wood in a lengthy article he wrote for The Atlantic two years ago, his thorough research and interviews with Islamic State “spiritual authorities,” including one who guides foreigners to the Daesh cult, triggering intense backlash from academics and apologists.

Wood, a reporter and author who’s spent years interviewing ISIS members, wrote: “We are misled . . . by a well-intentioned, but dishonest campaign, to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature.

“Much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.”

It is an end-of-days Holy War in which they are engaged.

“The reality is that the Islamic state is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure-seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe.

“But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.”

We are being disingenuous and dangerously dissembling by trying to erase the Islamist out of Islamic State and its fellow travelers.

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It is frankly absurd to believe that ISIS or Al Qaeda can draw the West into a clash of civilizations and to crank that fat-chance scenario as an intellectual trope for framing hysterical consequences.

The warning against provoking ISIS, punishing ISIS, heightening security protections to thwart operatives in thrall to ISIS, is duck-and-cover hyperbole.

Except there’s no ducking and covering from unforeseen attacks against soft targets — pretty much all that ISIS has left in its terrorist arsenal — is there?

We are advised to keep calm and carry on, which isn’t a bad posture — defiance, solidarity, drawing strength from our democratic principles — although I’d be hard-pressed to urge equanimity upon the parents of massacred children.

So Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham goes on a radio show to say, to remind — because apparently the rest of us are slobbering idiots and need reminding — that Abedi was a terrorist and his terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, certainly not as practiced by the overwhelming majority of 1.8 billion Muslims around the globe.

“The message that I would want to get out — and this is how the vast majority of people feel — this man was a terrorist, not a Muslim.’’

Well, he was both.

And while most Muslims, themselves most often the victims of terrorist violence in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, are dismayed by how their faith has been warped by radicals, there are some who, while certainly never considering aligning with ISIS, seek the exculpatory on its behalf.

Here I would like to share an email I received a few days ago from one Ahsan Jafri after writing about the Manchester atrocity: “Hmm, I wonder if your ‘humane’ Western heart has ever bled for the 1,200 children the RAF blew to bits in Mosul in the last 30 days alone. The narrative that the ‘liberal’ media is complicit in is beyond criminal, that is, to apply deafening silence to the literally hundreds of thousands of Muslim children blown to bits by Western bombs decade after decade.

“To ask the question why Muslims hate the West is the most shockingly atrocious query one can make.”

Straight out of the ISIS playbook.

Mayor Burnham continued: “The worst thing that can happen is that people use this to blame an entire community.”

Who, except reactionary blowhard politicians and fringe crackpots, is blaming an entire community?

The condescension in some quarters is withering.

It hardly needs saying that a religion practiced peacefully the world over is not defined by the criminality of a deluded person here and there or by terrorists who’ve hijacked Islam as their cloak of righteousness.

Some terrorist groups are fundamentally political in their aspirations; others are intrinsically inspired by faith, not greatly different from the fundamentalist Islam preached by Salafists from Riyadh to Birmingham.

Pretending that Islamism is not a core denominator is false and deceitful.