Pressure cooker

I cannot overstate the simmering hostility that currently exists between Muslims and the indigenous people here in the UK.

While Muslims openly call for Sharia law and the abolition of representative democracy, governments shower them with funds and "community facilities" with the intention of appeasing Muslim anger by lessening their "isolation". Public buildings, from prisons to libraries to airports to hospitals, must provide facilities for the exclusive use of a group which constitutes 0.8% of the population. By their violence, threats and continual protest, Muslims have become an aristocracy with unique privileges and immune from criticism.

The media continually assures us that we need only fear "a minority of extremists" in the Muslim community. And that the key to defeating "extremism" is to "engage with moderate Muslims". These mantras are also universally repeated across the (mainstream) political spectrum. In fact, polls of Muslim opinion do not reveal any sharp distinction between these ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’, and that on the basis of the opinions that Muslims are prepared to confide to a white man with a clipboard.

While the Muslim community has protested against anti-terrorism arrests, against cartoons published in a foreign country, against British "foreign policy" and against the Pope’s choice of citations, there has not been a single protest against those who carry out mass murder in the name of their religion. What is any rational person to conclude from this?

In order to believe the media stories about moderate Islam and the "minority of extremists" one increasingly has to deny the evidence of one’s own senses. The Islamic zeitgeist is simply not one of moderation, it one of advancing the faith by ruthless realpolitik and , where necessary, violence. Arguments about the relative ratio of ‘moderates’ to ‘extremists’ are like arguing about the components of cigarette smoke: if only one chemical out of a thousand causes cancer the whole habit causes cancer. Likewise, even if hatred of the West were a property of only a minority of Muslims (which contradicts all available evidence), the presence of any Muslims guarantees terrorism.

As an aside, my parents spent a lot of time on the seventies in Yugoslavia. They tell stories of how one would not even know that there were Serbs, Bosnians or Croats, such was the unity and harmony in which people lived.

Twenty years later, the children they saw playing together were machine-gunning each other into mass graves. I sincerely hope that Europe is not travelling along the same historical route as Yugoslavia.