Britain’s Muslims have us all living on a knife-edge, desperately trying to find a compromise between saying it as we see it on the one hand, and avoiding offence to the followers of the Prophet on the other.  The BBC, clearly terrified of being accused of bias, seems to assign every terrorist-related story to a Muslim member of staff, conveying the impression that at least half the population are of this persuasion; and whether appearing on screen or before a Parliamentary Committee every Muslim family has to be accompanied by a lawyer of their own faith, presumably to intimidate interviewers (and send out signals to their co-religionists).

It gladdened the heart, then, to hear Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, tell Muslims to stop apologising for jihadists.  It was an appropriate response to those who, a few days before, had been blaming the security services for turning that nice boy, Mohammed Emwazi, into the brutal executioner, Jihadi John.  The police and MI5 clearly had good grounds for keeping him under surveillance and, with hindsight, the only complaint must be that they did not harass him enough.  In any case, could any personal grievance justify a man gloating on camera as he hacks-off an aid-worker’s head with a bread-knife?  This is a man whom every self-respecting Muslim will disown without hesitation or qualification.

But then, when it suits them Muslim lawyers will use exactly the opposite argument and criticise the police for not doing enough.  This, we are told, is what happened in the case of the three London schoolgirls who managed to slip off to join ISIS undetected.  It was all the fault of the police, for not informing their parents that a close friend of theirs had already gone off to Syria!  It may be that this was a mistake.  But did the girls really steal family jewellery, sneak out their passports and board a plane to Turkey, simply because the police had not told their parents about their friend?  These were clever girls, blessed with initiative, and but for ISIS they would have put it to good use.

And so the story of Muslim hyper-sensitivity goes on.  MSP Humsa Yusaf is taking legal advice following an ‘Islamic slur’ by Ukip’s David Coburn; and Chris Graham, a newly appointed director of Rangers Football Club was quickly forced to resign because he had sent a sexually explicit cartoon of Mohammed to Anjem Choudra, an Islamic activist and former Chairman of the Society of Muslim Lawyers.  ‘Freedom of expression,’ declared Choudra, ‘does not extend to insulting the prophets of Allah’; and in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan it would have cost Mr. Graham his head.

British Muslims are saying loud and clear that they will put up with no insult, and the message is coming not only from self-declared radicals and activists, but from those like Humsa Yusef and Aamer Anwar, fully paid-up members of the establishment whose regular criticisms of British authorities inevitably play their own part in sowing the seeds of disaffection in the minds of young Muslims.

The basic tactic is clear enough: in the ‘war against terror’ one side is as bad as the other.  Jihadi John may now be a terrorist, but so are the armies of Britain and America.  There is no difference.

No?  Except that these countries wage war only after formally declaring it, their soldiers identify themselves by wearing uniforms, they do not recruit young girls to serve as suicide-bombs, they do not hack-off prisoners’ heads, they do not hijack civil aircraft, they do not engage in routine rape, they do not sell young children as sex-slaves, and they do not massacre adherents of other religions.

But supposing we assume that Britain and the United States are terrorists: what was it that ‘radicalised’ them?  Where can we find in their case the equivalent to the harassment and intimidation that turned that ‘nice boy’ into Jihadi John?  Muslims (and pathological haters of Tony Blair) blame it all on the Iraq War.  But the attack on New York’s World Trade Center came two years before the Iraq War.  That attack on September 11, 2001, was as cowardly an act of war as the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941.  It inevitably ‘radicalised’ America, and it made every other civilised nation tremble for its own security.

The heightened surveillance of which British Muslims complain likewise reflects a nation ‘radicalised’ by Islamic terror, even to the extent of having to re-examine the civil liberties which lie at the foundation of our democracy.  We have been driven to measures which would have been unimaginable twenty years ago by the London bus bombing of 1996, the Madrid train bombing of 2004, the attack on Glasgow Airport in 2007, the brutal hacking to death of Fusilier Lee Rigby in May 2013, and the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in January of this year.  Add to these the exposure of countless plots to blow up civil aircraft, the discovery of bomb-making facilities at innumerable private addresses and the undeniable recruitment of young British Muslims by ISIS, and it is hardly surprising that there is heightened surveillance.  It is a fate that Islam has brought upon itself, but they are not its only victims.  I, too, am a victim every time I check-in at an airport.  My wrinkled face, grey hair and sad blue eyes get me no immunity.

This is not to say that our responses have always been humane and proportionate.  Guantanamo Bay shames us all.  But even there, conditions are infinitely better than those under which ISIS holds its ‘detainees’.

Muslims will continue to play the victim-card, but their young people have not been radicalised by unemployment and police-harassment.  Countless non-Muslim youths, black and white, have suffered the same fate without being turned into shoe-bombers.  Behind every radicalised Muslim lie not only grievances, but powerful words: words that preach death to Israel, words that preach hatred to America, and words that hold out the dream of Muslim world-domination.

To know what that would mean, we have only to look at history; and every attempt to excuse Jihadi John and to transfer blame to the security services brings the nightmare nearer.

This article first appeared in the West Highland Free Press on