Blind, bovine hope will get us nowhere – it’s time to change our response to Islamic extremism

Last Sunday, I appeared on the BBC’s Sunday Politics to discuss the aftermath of the Manchester attack. I said what I thought, and various Muslim groups promptly went bananas.

This was not caused by my suggestion that this country should finally crack-down on British officials who spend their retirements working as shills for the House of Saud. Nor by my ridiculing of that modern European tradition whereby someone blows us up and we respond by singing John Lennon songs (and now Oasis too). Rather they objected to my simple two-word suggestion that we could all do with ‘less Islam’.

In a short film preceding the studio discussion, I mentioned that countries like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have very little Islam and very little Islamic terror. By contrast, France has a great amount of Islam and a great amount of Islamic terror. To most people it would seem obvious – to co-opt the immortal words of Donatella Versace – that ‘more means more’. Because although many communities are capable of producing extremists, only Islamic communities produce Islamic extremists. Of course some people don’t want to accept this fact. Not least because informed choices might result. For instance, it might help us weigh up the ongoing cultural benefits of large-scale Islamic immigration versus the down-side of dozens of obliterated lives every now and then.

If I were a Muslim I would like to think that I would be seriously ashamed about all this, and spend my time – like Sara Khan and a few other noble souls – trying to deal with my community’s problems rather than covering them over. Sadly – for reasons about which I dare not speculate – many of the most vocal Muslim groups in Britain have other priorities.