It's only natural

You know, I can’t hear an Irish accent without immediately thinking of violence. This is basically because after 20 or 30 years of listening to reports and interviews regarding IRA inspired violence the accent and the act are linked in my psyche. Now, as a rational person I know that the Irish are no more violent than anyone else and that the thought is nothing more than a reaction to what effectively amounts to a few decades of indoctrination; but it is there.

For that brief second, when I hear the accent, I think bombs.

This experience makes me believe that it’s stuff like this that will eventually corrupt the thinking of people who have been otherwise reasonable in their position on Islamist violence and its relationship to Islam.

After a while continued violence will eventually affect many people in this way and I believe it is a perfectly reasonable and expected reaction. It’s part of the human condition to be open to such conditioning and it is probably some throwback to an ancestral survival trait.

Now, most people will see this for what it is and will get over it but I suspect that many will not. This is the seed that is being planted now and this is why it is imperative that the Muslim world becomes more vocal and, perhaps, physical in defending its faith and its way of life against those that seek to corrupt it.