In the UK, perhaps 2% of the population declare themselves as 'Muslim' in the Census. The population is now estimated to be just over 60 million, which equates to 1.2 million Muslims.

A vanishingly small percentage of this 1.2 million are suspected or known to actively plot againt the interest of the majority. The security services know about perhaps a few thousand individuals they suspect of being involved in these plots, moslty in orgnasiational or support roles - perhaps a few hundred of them might be actively planning to immolate themselves in attas on the wider public.

That's a lot of people to wathc, and (potentially) a lot of suicide bomb attacks; if they are all as 'successful' as the 7 July 2005 London attacks, the casualty rates might creep into the hundreds of thousands. That would be a massive problem, but nobody (not even the terrorists) imagines that every attack would succeed.

It's FAR more likely that the death toll in Britain from Islamic terrorism in the next five years will be about the same as it has been in the last five - less than 100 dead.

About the equivalent of a bad year's murder statistics. Or barely a day's road death casualties.

Yet, across our whole media (including myriad blogs, including this one, for fuck's sake!) barely a day goes by without one or more of the top stories being somehow linked to the 'problem' of Islam. If it isn't the uncovering of a plot, it's a bungled police operation. If it isn't a bungled police operation, it's an employment tribunal for someone who's supposedly been sacked for being a Muslim or sacked by a Muslim for not being one. If it's not an employment tribunal, it's a family court case where a mixed-race daughter has been abductd by her Muslim father. If it's not a child abduction, it's that the child has decided she wants to be a Muslim and disapproves of her moother's sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll lifestyle.

If it's not this, it's a 'fake shiekh' sting where a reporter pretends to be a Muslim and tricks someone's real opinions out of them by feigning approval. If it's not a 'fake shiekh' sting, it's a former cabinet minister who is deaf in one ear saying that he sometimes asks his Moslem women constituents who wear a full-face niqab veil to remove it when they visit him in his constituency surgery because (surprise, surprise) he finds it hard to communicate with them when he can't see their lips moving, and moreover that he personally he doesn't like people wearing veils in public because (though he didn't say it in so many words) he thinks it's a bit rude.

If it's not that, it's a right-wing and generally hostile right-wing press spinning those comments into a variations on the old 'fit in or fuck off' anti-immigration paranoia (though, to give them some credit, Jack Straw, the former cabinet minister I mentioned, is smart enough to have known perfectly well what the likely reaction to his niqab story would be) .

And so on and so on et cetera ad nauseam. 

My questions are -  is this the way to persuade the 'backward Muslims whose civilisation hasn't moved on since the 14th century' that Western 21st-century secular democracy is a better way to live? And is it the best way to tell the secular majority (and, even among the British Pakistani and Bengali populations that form the majority of the 1.2 million British Muslims, over 50% are non-devout or entirely secular) what is actually going on in the country and the wider world?

So yes, I am sick of Muslims, but in a very particular way. I am sick of the way the rest of us are letting our whole national conversation be determined and driven by a few hundred criminal lunatics, whether we are atheist, agnostic, Christian,  Jewish, Muslim, Wiccan, or flipping Jedi.

I am sick of the way our civil liberties are being eroded willy-nilly in the name of protecting us from these fanatically religious bogey-men who are supposedly trying to destroy our way of life, when that didn't happen in reply to Irish Republican terrorism. 'Ah, but this is an entirely different and much more dangerous form of terrorism', they say.

How do you work that out, eh? Surely the only significant difference is that Islamic terrorists kill themselves at the same time as they kill us? Which, apart from anything else, means that they never ever get any better at it, because their first attempt is the only one they ever have. The IRA bombers got progressively better at it, because they got to practice. Veteran bombers could share their expertise. That, by definition, doesn't happen with Islamic terror suicide bombers, because they don't have the organised command infrastructure that allows them to share knowledge beyond posting to a website (which, by definition, have to be accessible to the public domain). And, obviously enough, they're dead after they succeed, so can't tell anyone what worked well and how they would do it differently next time.

Of course it is a more dangerous form of terrorism. It has to be, or else you would have no reason or excuse to assault civil liberties built up over centuries in it's name.

And, were I a Muslim, I would be heartily sick of the way that I was being demonised by all of this.

Of course, there are bad Muslims. There are evil, dangerous Muslims. There are loud, noisily self-righteous Muslims who use this constant drip-drip of hostile media coverage as a lever to try to recruit more  Muslims to their brand of noisily self-righteous hate-fuelled Islam - and I am sick of them, too.

 It's getting to the point where I think that most of the Muslim problem would simply vanish in a puff of newsprint if the media gave themselves a week off from reporting all of these tiny stories, linked only by the involvement of someone Muslim in them, as if they are all part of a grand over-arching zietgiest.

Not least because if they carry on doing that for long enough, it will be. Europeans have been panicked into a herd mentality that permitted industrialised hatred, and ultimately led to genocide, before. Within living memory. Have we learned nothing? Have we learned that the solution is NOTHING TO DO with the way the object of the fear, paranoia and hatred actually behave?

The we they behave is THEIR responsibility, not ours. The way WE behave is OUR responsibility, not theirs. THEY cannot MAKE us do ANYTHNG we do not want to do.

I strongly believe that the only we we can be manipulated is to manipulate our emotions, not our intellects.

Fear is an emotion, and we are being given lots of reasons why we are supposed to fear Muslims. (And it cuts both ways - Muslims are being given lots of reasons to fear the West, America, Christians, etc.)

We ALL need to wake up and look at what we are being fed. In whose interests is it to hate one another?