Like the Salafists, the MCB says there is no evidential link between the government's definition of non-violent extremism and violent extremism. It also says there is no justification for the Prevent programme to focus on Muslims when "the vast majority of terrorist attacks in EU countries have for years been perpetrated by separatist organisations, with less than 2 per cent being by Muslims". They point to an EU Europol report which says that two out of 152 terrorist attacks in 2013 were "religiously motivated".

Aside from the fact that Prevent does address all sources of extremism, what the MCB does not mention are the 216 arrested for religiously inspired attacks in 2013. This figure also appears to exclude the UK, which would boost it appreciably. Nor does the MCB mention that attacks from separatist organisations have decreased significantly and that 41 of these can be attributed to dissident republicans in Northern Ireland. Nor, unlike violent jihadists, do separatists go for mass casualty attacks. They tend to target infrastructure and, unlike jihadists, they pursue a limited goal of separatism—not changing the fabric of society or way of life in the West.

Nor does the MCB agree with the government as to what constitutes extremism. Two official inquiries into the so-called "Trojan Horse" plot affecting 16 Birmingham state schools found evidence of Muslim children being warned not to listen to Christians because they were "all liars", how they were "lucky to be Muslims and not ignorant like Christians or Jews", of children being warned they would go to hell if they didn't pray, of segregation, of homophobia, a hard-line curriculum, contempt for the armed forces and even scepticism about the near-beheading of Drummer Lee Rigby and American civilians killed by the Boston nail bombers. Yet the MCB dismissed most of this bigotry as merely evidence of "conservative Muslim practices".

At a recent London conference of head teachers, Muslim boys were reported to have turned their backs on girls dancing in a school performance and insisted that they needed to leave their classrooms in the middle of lessons in order to pray at set times.

Dr Shafi is reported to have supported the boys, only conceding that they should have adopted school rules after repeated questioning. Is it any wonder that those children opposed the British value of tolerance? Yet one can only imagine the furore had the head tried to enforce school rules with detention.

I have never heard the MCB condemn the bigoted beliefs which non-violent Salafists like Haddad and Khan proclaim as mainstream Islam. They agree with the Salafists that the current Prevent programme should be closed down. And like the Salafists-and other Islamists—they have a reflex tendency to dismiss criticism of such beliefs as "Islamophobic" and motivated by a right-wing "neo-con" agenda.The problem is that Islamists don't seem to know their Left from their Right. And we don't help by calling them "radical". The broad spectrum of Islamist ideology is not radical. In its views about equality, women, gays, freedom of conscience, and the economy, Islamism is, in fact, regressive and right-wing.

If you want to know just how much our deference to Islamic sensibilities has muddled our Left-Right thinking, look no further than the current "Stand Up To Racism" campaign, sponsored by the MCB, trade unions and the Communist newspaper the Morning Star. One of its speakers last month was billed as Shakeel Begg, for the past 14 years the chief imam of the Lewisham Islamic Centre in south London.

Some of the speakers whom Begg's Islamic Centre has given a platform to are very regressive indeed. Like the Saudi cleric Sheikh Muhammad Salih Al-Munajjid, who runs an online Q&A about Islam. Asked online what should be the punishment for gays, the sheikh quoted sacred texts saying they should be burned, or "thrown from a high place, then have stones thrown at them".

Islamic State literally enforces this. A man in his fifties, said to be gay, was recently thrown off a seven-storey building by IS. He survived the fall, only for a baying mob to finish him off with stones.