“We began with the usual and – this time – quite surreal assurances from politicians, Muslim leaders and, in particular the BBC, that the latest attacks were ‘nothing to do with Islam’. This is what we always hear when a bomb has gone off, or failed to go off – and it is always a silly statement, based upon nothing more real than wishful thinking….

“Then, as always happens, we had the next stage of wishful thinking … we were assured by assorted correspondents and politicians that Britain’s Muslim community were, in their entirety, appalled and outraged by the attacks. Well, maybe they were – but how do you know? … Don’t forget that more than half of our Muslims feel sympathy for suicide bombers in Israel and a fairly hefty minority (one in eight, at the last count) for similar action against the cockroach imperialist infidel scum (i.e. you and me) over here. Not to mention almost half of Britain’s Muslims who want Sharia law in this country and do not remotely, therefore, share our norms and values.

“We are told these sorts of things in order to stop us coming to unpalatable conclusions, because the government still clings, ever more precariously, to the vestigial tail of that discredited ideology, multiculturalism. Take, for example, the issue of immigration. The aspirant, useless bombers who missed their targets at Glasgow and London came here from Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. A recent Mori opinion poll commissioned by the government’s Commission on Integration and Cohesion showed that almost 70 per cent of British people thought that we had let far too many immigrants into the country….

“Every month or so we read that the immigration appeals court has allowed some murderous lunatic from the Maghreb or beyond to stay in the country, despite his clearly stated homicidal impulses, because it would be an infringement of his human rights were he to be returned to the Islamic hellhole from which he arrived…. It is surely only a matter of time before someone who comes before the immigration appeals court is allowed to stay and later blows himself up in a public place. Perhaps it has happened already.”

Spectator, 7 July 2007

Although, to be fair, unlike Nick Cohen et al, at the end of the piece Liddle does at least get around to mentioning the attack on Iraq as a contributory (albeit secondary) factor in encouraging terrorism: “Whatever your feelings about the war, it must, surely, provide a moral justification for those Islamists intent upon unleashing murder upon our soil….”