Was ‘Je Suis Charlie’ just an example of people venting their hatred towards Muslims?

Something dangerous is brewing beneath the surface in our country, and it worries me that warning lights are not flashing in the minds of many of those I respect most. After the discrediting of anti-Semitism, after the discrediting of discrimination against black people, after the discrediting of prejudice towards the Irish, I hadn’t expected to live to see a powerful generalised antipathy against any race or religion gather popular force here without stirring at least the more liberal of my fellow citizens into resistance. I expected a sense of alarm. There is none.

Last Saturday my Times colleague Janice Turner used her weekly column to sound a note of anxiety about what she called a new shrillness in attitudes towards British Muslims, and a ‘lumping together’ of all Muslims as though all were extremists. Indeed, she said, we are starting to do the extremists’ work for them. She concluded: ‘In our poisonous, polarising age, it is time to stop seeking difference and ask how we are the same.’

Now Janice is hardly a bleeding-heart multi-culturalist. She’s been a consistent secularist and has spoken up sharply and repeatedly against sharia, against Islamic attitudes to women, and against the wearing of the full veil in court. So have I. I join her in self-identifying as no fan of important parts of Islamic teaching. Speaking for myself, I’d say (and have) that as world religions go, Islam is not one I much like.

But the response to Janice’s column shocked me. Among some 500 online posts (a lot, for the subscription-only Times) I’d say that at least 90 per cent were hostile to her argument, and many of them biliously so. I got the same response last summer after writing in the same vein: if you read your online responses (and I do) you can emerge from this feeling you’ve been spending time somewhere pretty unpleasant.