Or perhaps anti-Muslim. It has been mostly right-wing commentators who have complained that there is scarcely a public official who dares make a comment about the general badness of the actions of the terrorists, or their general fanaticism without immediately insisting that they are not anti-Muslim, and imply no disrespect to that great religion. It has become grumpily lumped as a prize example of modern political correctness, which, as far as most of the grumps concerned goes, seems otherwise to mean a restriction on their God-given right to be bigoted, homophobic or racist. To such complainers, it is immediately obvious that the crisis could be resolved more quickly if we could call a spade a spade. Aren't we lucky that the News Ltd tabloids aren't intimidated? How brave they are.

Of course Tony Abbott – who like George Brandis was once a proponent of the idea that the law should support the right to be bigoted but has retreated, temporarily at least, from that position while he has a crusade to prosecute – insists that there is nothing Islamic or a state about the Islamic State.

By the same token, I guess, he might insist that there was nothing Christian about the Crusaders who came to the Middle East about 1000 years ago, to liberate by slaughter the Holy Land from Jews and Muslims, as well as incidentally killing, and looting the houses of, any oriental Christians they passed on the way. Perhaps they were Christian, much as they were incidentally European, but surely that was not intrinsic to their cause.

Nor was there, I suppose, anything specifically British or English about the mass executions of Indians after the Indian Mutiny, or American about any of the well-documented military massacres of native American women and children 150 years ago, or in the emu parades of Tasmania that unfortunately killed a few Tasmanian Australians 50 years before that. Probably could have been done by Mexicans, Eskimos or Zulus.

Such nitpicking matters, and many like them, are, of course, in an unfortunate past in other places. Anyway we ourselves were not there with our more enlightened modern ideas to influence our fathers, mothers, and further ancestors to lift their standards. Moreover, we now know, or most of us do, that various bloodthirsty incitements in our scriptures for stoning, drowning and decapitating people with the jawbones of asses because they are different are of only metaphorical import, and do not reflect on the very beautiful, worthy and fundamentally decent and tolerant parts of the religions in question. It seems, alas, that not all of the others in the world have reached our stage of civilisation or insight, or both.

Perhaps, to paraphrase Julia Gillard, Islam "doesn't explain nothing; it explains some things, and it is for the nation to think in a sophisticated way about these shades of grey".

Be all of that as it may, there are a good many people who think that it is fundamentally a parenting problem. It seems that there are a few alienated and angry rebellious youths, mostly female, who have rejected the accepted canons of the religion practised by their parents, and who are, instead, listening to sinister alienated and angry rebellious people preaching revolutionary solutions to the problems of the world, not least that there is a good deal of hatred expressed around the world for people like themselves.

The conventional response of a good many people of the sort who listen to Alan Jones is that it's the parents fault, probably for not being strict enough on the children. The parents should be fined – certainly held responsible for what their brats do. Perhaps the children should be taken from them, and parked in a welfare home. Of course, if the children are old enough, the problem is best resolved by compulsory military service, possibly involving fighting abroad. Indeed our chicken-stranglers, as our SAS is nicknamed, are quite good at knife-fighting, if not at swordplay.

Certainly these ingrate Muslim ratbags should have their dole removed. Indeed, one might combine the two solutions by having a work for the dole program by which they could assist members of the Australian Federal Police to do mass arrests of potentially dangerous citizens, in between taking Aboriginal children to school. That would sort them out pretty quick, I reckon.

Some think juvenile delinquency was unknown in Australia until we let a few boat people slip in. But those with memories know it is a perennial problem – always very capably dealt with by politicians, shock jocks and editors who know what's what. There are any number of instant solutions.

I suggest that we should immediately signal our loud public disapproval of beheading by doubling the sentence that it presently carries, whatever it is. We should go down the Queensland anti-bikie route of putting any three known Muslims congregating together in jail; indeed with a sympathetic chief justice there, we could equate burqas with motorbike helmets and kill two birds with one stone, as it were.

We could, for example, adopt the "one slash and you are in jail for 10 years" rule recently adopted in NSW after a plague of knockout punch assaults. There must be precedent going back much further, given the way that Kings Cross and Surrey Hills was plagued with the Razor Gangs in the 1920s – alienated and angry hooligans, many Irish and Catholic of course, slashing decent Protestant hoodlums with cut-throat razors.

A distinct core of the NSW population of those times were inclined to the belief that the problem could best be addressed by getting rid of the Irish, or Catholics, and preferably both. They had, after all, been of the most dubious loyalty to the King during World War I. In those days, Sydneysiders did not have the benefit of guidance on such matters from the Telegraph, the Australian or Ray Hadley, but mercifully, in those days, the Sydney Morning Herald filled the breach admirably.

Indeed Irish Catholics, sometimes even the Irish generally, served admirably as Muslims for the first 170 years after the English settlement which Tony Abbott seems to think marked the beginning of Australia. Much more than the Aborigines, who could be unobtrusively shot, or poisoned, the Irish served as the key problem in public policy in much the same manner that Muslims do today.

In the 19th century the then majority Protestant population had profound doubts about whether Catholicism could be said to be a Christian religion, and thought the Irish irredeemably, as it were, lost in pagan superstition and fecklessness, under the manipulation of wicked and insidious priests, guided by the whore of Babylon in Rome. Many of the 19th century Catholic Irish spoke little English, and a good deal of what they did was about as intelligible to the average Pom as the language of Yorkshire.

Nor was there any pussyfooting about with politicians declaring that Catholicism, or being Hibernian, was an admirable thing in itself, and not the object of the criticism.

One of a number of historical highpoints involved Henry O'Farrell, an alcoholic Irishman recently released from a lunatic asylum who shot and wounded the Duke of Edinburgh at Clontarf (hark at the name) during the Ides of March in 1868. He was tried and convicted before three weeks had passed, and hanged a fortnight later. The Premier of NSW, Henry Parkes, whipped up any number of "indignation meetings" by loyal, generally non-Irish, Protestants, calling for all manner of pogroms against Catholics. Alas he did not have the nous to think of sending Irish boats back, nor did he have the services of a compliant military willing to do his will behind closed doors. Indeed perhaps the problem was that most of those wearing uniforms were Irish.

Of course all right-thinking Australians know that Christian sectarian passions had mostly disappeared in Australia by about 1960. They wonder why people "go on about it' when it's not a current problem. In much the same way, it is said, black armband people are said to be obsessed about "historic" child abuse, the rescuing of children from their parents, pacification of some anti-social Aborigines, and awful incidents, in other times and places, at officer cadet establishments.

But it is not that those who do are wallowing in their victimhood. Oh no. It is that some see the experience endlessly repeated, if with new sets of victims. And with much the same professional establishment comfortably repeating many of the same platitudes about how it can all be solved.

Fancy those Sunni and those Shiites not failing to resolve their differences after a good talking to from the Telegraph. Fancy those Iraqi lot learning from the last time we used a $100 million plane and a $2 million bomb to blow up a Hilux utility. Fancy those Muslim Australian malcontents not turning away from violence after they saw what Campbell Newman was willing to do to the bikies. It's about time we got serious, by golly.