WHOSE PROBLEM IS IT?

After the 7/7 incident the blogosphere has become alive like the aftermaths of 9/11. Almost everyone has something to say about the incident and if you filter those thoughts you will find the emotions "fear" and "rage". Some are thinking that the terrorism is a Muslim problem and it needs a Muslim solution. One such view:

Either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent.

But the problem lies elsewhere. There are some sane thoughts going on in "Thinkers Room" which asks some logical questions.

* Just what is it that would drive a human being to feel passionately enough about something to do this to innocent people?

* Now ask yourself -- what can make you feel so passionately, so deeply, so totally in something that you'd give your life, that you'd blow yourself up?

And the answer is "Fear" and it grips everybody, the oppressor and the oppressed, one of another:

The unfortunate thing is that human beings have this tendency to fear things they do not understand, and fear is a very powerful force. Fearful people in large enough numbers are a recipe for disaster.

The consequence:

There is no short supply of these (deranged) people who feel this passionately about whatever it is their misguided cause is. They are lining up to blow themselves up. They have been there for years. It is naive in the extreme to introduce religious connotations into this, and this is the slant that the world seems to have gripped with both hands, inadvertently or otherwise.

But why terrorism and Islam always seem to end up in the same sentence?

People do not understand Islam at all, and this has contributed immensely to the problem. The world would have no problem (generally) with dismissing Osama and his associates as a deranged and isolated bunch of crazies. But since they claim to be Muslims, for some reason the world has a problem divorcing them from Islam at large. Perpetually referring to them as 'Islamic Extremists' is doing little to help, besides subtly drawing an association between the two. And what is the result? Muslims who have nothing remotely to do with Osama Bin Laden are increasingly finding themselves on the defensive.

Here is another proof how people understand Islam:

A Sikh temple had been vandalised in an arson attack in Leeds after the 7/7 incident alongwith attacks on Mosques. Anna mocks:

We are foreign and we wear turbans, just like that bastard Osama. Thanks to a coincidence of complexion, we are complicit and we will pay.

Over at "Thinkers Room":

Organized religion is a convenient scapegoat for the many atrocities man commits. Man has spent millennia looking for scapegoats for antics, right from blaming snakes for appropriated apples right down to religion to killing others. Osama Bin Laden and his ilk have no problem appropriating Islam for their own use, violating almost all its basic tenets in the process. With all our experience and all the information at our disposal we should be wise enough to divorce the two.

On the other hand are the Muslims acting sensible? Few questions from comments on a buzzmachine post:

* Why there is not the same public outrage over slaughter committed in the name of Allah as there is about stories about a book being put in a toilet an unreasonable question? (May I add that Dan Brown is still moving with his head attached to his shoulders even after his heretic claims that Jesus married Mary & had a son in his book "The Da-Vinci Code" and there was no notable public outrage)

* If Bin Laden and Al Qaeda did not enjoy widespread popular support among Millions of Muslims, he would have been killed or turned over a long time ago.

* It's high time for the terrorists' co-religionists to stand up and demand a stop to all of this, publically, loudly, and consistently. To cast them out. To say "you don't represent us." To take back their religion from a small group of extremist butchers who have hijacked their faith in the name of worldwide jihad, instead of complaining that it's unfair when Muslims who commit acts of terrorism in the name of Allah are called "Islamic terrorists."

Are the Muslims ready to do it boldly?

I would say that it is everybody's problem. We should not be driven by this mideaval urge "An eye for an eye" endangering the innocent civilians and at the same time weshould denounce the people who attach a religion to their crime as terrorism has no religion. We all have to play our part, positively, to bring about a change.