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I don't buy into the hyphenated-American thing. Never have. And while my mother's maiden name was McGuire, the notion of identifying myself as Irish-American makes about as much sense as, say, hate-crime laws.

That's not to say that over the years I haven't embraced my Irish lineage and cried: "Just one more reason to dislike the Brits!" Read up on the Irish Potato Famine, and you'll begin to get the picture.

Reportedly, my ancestors raced from the Scottish Highlands to Ireland to get away from the Brits. Soon after, we're found working the red Georgia clay as distinguished members of a British penal colony.

In a moment of deep reflection, Charles Darwin ordered the races - a curious idea in the first place - and planted the Irish at the bottom of the food chain. He believed the most evolved form of life on Earth was the white, educated, property-owning British male - in other words, the chaps he shared tea and cakes with on balmy afternoons in London. So, there's long been bad blood between the Brits and the Irish, and periodically it's been spilled - largely from the Irish.

Still, Winston Churchill was a great ally in World War II; Margaret Thatcher a great ally in the Cold War; and Tony Blair proved faithful to the West's cause in Iraq.

But Blair's government at home has treated the jihadists' threat to their society with the typical schizophrenia that haunts socialist governments across Europe. They recognize there's a problem - radical imams preaching death to England and terrorist cells targeting British subways, for example - but they're just too politically correct or too fearful of the Arab community to genuinely confront it. Even fictionally: Keep this in mind when Netflix, let's say, recommends the BBC series "MI5" because you happen to enjoy "24."

MI5 is an actual counterterrorist organization in England, though lesser known than the Brits' Secret Intelligence Service, which is better known as MI6 of James Bond fame.

Despite the misery and death radical Islam has brought to England in recent years, guess who the stalwart terror-fighting MI5 team would face in its first episode? A right-wing evangelical Christian from the United States who was blowing up abortion clinics. The writers did take a big risk, however. They made the mad bomber a woman.

For fun, I went to the "MI5" Web site - the real one, not the TV show's - and discovered that the agency was hiring. It emphasized a need for men and women with language skills. More specifically, they need folks fluent in Arabic, Chinese, Urdu - the list goes on and on. However, American English's West Virginia evangelical dialect wasn't on it.

One suspects the BBC worries about Arabic reactions if the series delves into more realistic drama - such as the one the people of London are living with daily. After all, who can forget the outrage Arabs expressed over a series of cartoons?

But an anti-abortion, bomb-wielding American housewife? Too Hollywood.