Adaptation

Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari is right, we need to be very careful about stigmatising Muslims, unless we want to play into the hands of the radicals. That's why I'm so strongly against indiscriminate stop and search, politicians stoking up fear, and the holding of people for months without trial. But his misguided analogy between the tube train bombers and the IRA smacks of a head in the sand refusal to accept reality: we didn't call the Provos Catholic terrorists because they murdered in the name of politics, not religion. The Jihadists won't lay their arms down if we redraw the borders or pull our troops out of Iraq: their holy war won't stop until the world is shaped in their warped image. They have no demands that we can meet. Dr Bari misses another point too: integration never works equally from both sides; for better or worse, it's always the job of the incomer to adapt. When he calls for more morality, people covering up in public and homosexuality being "unacceptable from the religious point of view," I think of Muslim women killed by their families for falling in love with the wrong man, and Saudi religious police leaving teenage girls to die in a blazing school.