The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), America's largest Muslim umbrella group, has similar form. In the wake of earlier terrorism investigations, CAIR distributed a poster which read: "Build a wall of resistance. Don't talk to the FBI." The major American Islamic organisation has consistently taken a hostile attitude towards US law enforcement, partly perhaps due to its inclusion as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major Hamas terror fundraising case a few years ago.

Are cases such as this — continuous connections to terror and an unwillingness to co-operate with law enforcement — of no concern to those concerned with "Islamophobia"? If suspicion towards Muslims were ever to become mainstream, might it not come from just such facts? And if such a situation were to become worse might it not come from the realisation that people in positions of influence have tried to ignore the problem and deflecting it onto everyone else?

Sayeeda Warsi is just one of those guilty of this mistake. Her film account of the scourge of "Islamophobia" showed her talking of the ten to 12 occasions on which windows had been smashed and graffiti daubed at a mosque in the north of England. "Islamophobia" was, she said, "blighting lives". Women have had veils torn from their heads, she said, and families had been "continually targeted". This shows, she said, that "anti-Muslim attacks can happen any time, any place". Is that really so? If it is then all of us, of any background or faith, would do whatever we could to address the problem. Yet Warsi's approach does not address it. It exacerbates it.

At the end of March, shortly before making her film, Warsi spoke at a conference in the House of Lords organised by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS). FOSIS has been repeatedly criticised in UK government counter-terrorism reviews for its troubling attitude towards extremism. The aim of the March conference demonstrated exactly why. Titled "Representation and Reality", its intention was to challenge the idea that Islamic extremism exists on UK campuses. The truth is that to date numerous people who have been leading members of student Islamic societies have been involved in — and convicted of — the most serious terrorism offences. These include the Detroit bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was president of the student Islamic Society at University College London shortly before trying to blow up a plane on Christmas Day 2009. His inspiration, as for the Tsarnaevs, was Anwar al-Awlaki. The conference Warsi addressed was, in short, set up to conceal a fact and repeat a lie.