As it happens, Awlaki himself had been a guest speaker at FOSIS conferences. The organisation protesting that campus radicalisation did not exist had hosted a man who did more than anyone else to promote such radicalism. And this is part of a common pattern. The day before the Warsi-featured conference, FOSIS was hosting an event addressed by Hamza Tzortzis, a well-known Islamist speaker on campus (also a favourite of the Tsarnaevs), who, among other things, defends beheading those who leave Islam (he calls it "painless"). A couple of days after Warsi's speech to FOSIS the group's current president, Omar Ali, spoke on a platform with numerous extremists at a rally in support of the convicted al-Qaeda facilitator Aafia Siddiqui (currently serving an 86-year sentence in the US). Why should anyone — let alone a UK government minister concerned about "Islamophobia" — be taking part in an event that will actually make matters so much worse?

FOSIS epitomises the problem. Always wishing to be seen as representing Muslim students as a whole, the FOSIS leadership has in fact long been defined by its narrow sectarian interests and a specific desire to promote fundamentalist versions of Islam as mainstream while condemning any critics as critics of Muslim students as a whole.

The damage such sleights of hand do to opinion on all sides cannot be overestimated. Had Baroness Warsi not been so busily promoting the idea that Muslims — in particular Muslim students — are being "demonised" she might have looked into the facts and found an explanation: that any suspicion is caused not just by the extremists but by actions like those of Baroness Warsi.

The lie which the extremists, and those who give them political cover, hope to promote is that "Islamophobia" comes either from nowhere, or from some horrible, nativist instinct on the part of non-Muslims. At no point do they consider the possibility that while there may well be people who dislike people because of the colour of their skin, their accent, their height or anything else, the reasons for being suspicious or distrustful of any Muslims is provided first by extremist Muslims and second by the fact that mainstream Muslims too often pretend that the extremists are not extreme or otherwise provide them with cover.

When extremist organisations like FOSIS seek to make themselves the mainstream they tarnish by association the whole community, including those who suffer most from them. What is an Ahmadiyya Muslim student to think of such official support for clerics who tour the country preaching hatred of their own particular denomination?

A perfect example occurred five years ago when the journalist Peter Oborne presented a Channel 4 documentary called It Shouldn't Happen to a Muslim. Timed to coincide with the third anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings, the claims of this programme were summed up by the UK's first Muslim minister, Shahid Malik, who said, "I think most people would agree that if you ask Muslims today what do they feel like, they feel like the Jews of Europe."