This escalator only goes up

The terrible Paris attacks are all over the news. I don’t see any need for links, if you missed this one you don’t have TV or the internet and most likely live among the slowly whispering reeds on a sunny riverbank somewhere. You lucky bastard.

Predictably there are the ‘nothing to do with Islam’ stories and the ‘everything to do with Islam’ stories. Obviously it is to do with Islam. That is what the terrorists are using as their excuse. Whether Islam agrees or not is of no consequence unless Islam comes out as a whole and says ‘No, this is not our shit’. They haven’t… yet.

I can’t do anything about it, and neither can anyone outside Islam. It is an internal matter that Muslims have to solve. Otherwise every Muslim will get the blame and this will escalate until most of the Middle East is radioactive glass and we have a new Holocaust that will put the last one in the shade.

It’s already begun. A woman in a hijab was attacked (verbally, not actually physically as far as I know) by a man shouting ‘Why can’t I see your face?’

Yeah, what a big man. Attacking a woman. I notice he didn’t have a go at the bearded gang in white robes. No, the woman in a veil is so much easier. He should be arrested for being a weak little shitebag in a public place.

I don’t care if a woman wants to wear a veil. Even men. I know some men who should, in the interests of public digestion. Wear what the hell you want. Okay, it might get you barred from the bank and the post office because they have a poor record where people in masks are concerned. It also should not be worn in photos on identity documents such as a driving licence or passport. In the street though, wear what you like.

Visit the north of Scotland in January and you’ll see people with a hat pulled down to their eyebrows and a scarf over their nose and mouth. They aren’t Muslim. They’re just very, very cold. The difference? At a basic level, there is no difference. You can’t see their faces either. I suppose if there is a difference it’s that those people have no problem showing their faces in the bank or the post office and would not even consider sending a photo to the passport office in their winter garb. Yet in the street, no difference.

Really, if a madman in Paris blows himself up at a rock concert and you have a good shout at a woman in a Manchester Asda, how does that help? When deranged Arabs shoot people in French cafes and New Yorkers refuse to take a cab with a Muslim driver, is that actually solving anything?

It’s alienating the non-radicals. This is what the radicals want. Push moderates over to radicalism. When you won’t go to Abdul’s corner shop in Newcastle because a gabbling maniac cut the head off an American in Syria, you are the one connecting Abdul to the crime. He had no more to do with it than you did. You’re the one pushing him into a place where he has no choice.

Yet, it’s Islam’s problem and Islam must deal with it. All we non-Islam people see is the outside. We neither know nor, to be honest, care very much about your religion. It’s yours, not ours. When we see a guy in a Semtex waistcoat shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and blowing himself into something resembling the innards of a haggis, we see Islam.

Is that what you want us to see? Really?

It’s your problem, Islam. The West has a solution, the first part of which is currently bombing Syria with garlic breath pilots and finely fried frogs legs in the in-flight catering. This can only escalate and the West has bombs that will give you two suns in your final sunset.

There is worse to come. I know much of Islam denies the Holocaust, but it was real. It was something Westerners did more than once. The last time was very big and very nasty and they’ve been getting bigger and nastier over time. I know we call the Islamic terrorists brutal but really, looking at our history, we should be calling them amateurs.

We in the West are good at finding final solutions to real and even imagined problems. We’ve been at it for a very long time and we can be merciless and shockingly inhuman in their application. Look at our history. The bleeding hearts will tell you we’re not like that any more but we haven’t really changed.

Please, please, Islam. Don’t find that out the hard way.