Acts of Sickening Barbarity

Fascinating, completely irrational, but fascinating. That the source of a problem cannot see the kernel of reality involved in escalating that problem into one of global significance. Claiming instead to have been victimized. this is not what one normally thinks of when believing that maturity and intelligence equate with responsibility. Particularly when that maturity and presumed intelligence reside in the personage of a British Cabinet minister.

House of Lords-ensconced Lady Sayeeda Warsi, formerly co-chair of Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative party and currently minister without portfolio in his government, took it upon herself to lecture Britain for its purported hatred of Muslims. How extraordinary; on the evidence of institutionalized coddling of fanatical Muslims the world outside Britain had the indelible impression that British Muslims were well done by.

Not to hear Baroness Warsi, however. From her privileged heights as a devout Muslim, far from the experience of the squalid, teeming ghettoes and their fiery, eloquent clerics in mosques which are breeding ignorance and hatred resulting in the kind of unrest and belligerence that makes for easy recruits by Islamist jihadists, she sees only the unfair labelling of Muslims between the camps of the 'moderate' and the 'extremist'.

To well-balanced people, making that distinction between those who are 'moderate', which is to say reasonable, non-threatening, and those who are decidedly 'extremist', translated as fodder for violent jihad in nature, would appear in and of itself moderate and reasonable. In other words, an attempt made to distinguish good citizens from potential terrorists; at the very least those whose discontent and grievances pose as a threat to the country.

That threat has raised its head sufficiently frequently through the successful commission of viciously bloody attacks on British public transit users, and other vulnerable venues, and the just-in-time arrests of others planning carnage and destruction to convince authorities that the problem is real, attention to it justified. Yet even so, Britain uses kid gloves in response to iron-fisted threats, bending over backward toward political-social 'correctness'.

There is also the reported perceptions and feelings of mainstream Muslim society in Britain, including those whose only experience has been that of growing up British, albeit Muslim, second-generation Brits who worship Islam, yet are hugely in support of the theories that abound in Islamist propaganda. Among which is the outstanding charge of international Islamophobia.

Suicide bombings are quite obviously not unknown in Britain. And the threats of more, including the secret service and police successes thus far in apprehending additional threats-in-motion. So why would there not be a public back-lash of some dimensions growing inevitably on the back of the real fears that terrorists gloat they are able to foist on civil society?

Baroness Warsi would do far better by her religious community and her loyalty to Britain expressed in fewer accusations of discriminatory talk, and the implementation of more sincere and frequent attempts at educating the Muslim community toward the truth and the reality of the threats emanating from Islam into the wider community.

Like it or not, if the Muslim community feels hard pressed through perceived accusations and suspicion coming from the non-Muslim community, they must acknowledge its cause. They must also spare no efforts to disown, reject, condemn the violence and the threats that erupt from those from within the Muslim community to threaten and antagonize and terrorize non-Muslims.

She could begin by using her own academic and professional education and her political and social status to address the question her own prime minister posed earlier: "how we are allowing the radicalization and poisoning of the minds of some young British Muslims who then contemplate and sometimes carry out acts of sickening barbarity."