Altikriti, his two colleagues on the press platform and other Brotherhood-associated organisations have roundly condemned terrorist attacks on the UK and terrorism by al-Qaeda and so called Islamic State abroad.

But some of Altikriti’s associates here have also openly applauded attacks by Hamas against unarmed Israeli civilians, including suicide bombings. Nor has Altikriti publicly disowned Hamas, which he does not regard as a terrorist organisation anyway, although he has said he does not consider Israeli civilians to be legitimate targets.

However, when interviewed by the BBC in 2014, Altikriti denied that the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi supported suicide bombing, insisting he knew of no evidence that Qaradawi did, even though the cleric has been very widely publicised as saying he considers them to be “heroic acts. We should hail those who carry out these acts and bless them and call on God to take them to live in Paradise.” Altikriti’s claim to have been ignorant of Qaradawi’s blessing is especially bewildering because it was his organisation, MAB, in 2004 — the year he was also MAB president — that invited Qaradawi to London amid a storm of protest in the newspapers and on the BBC about this very issue. Moreover, Altikriti was photographed sitting next to Qaradawi at a reception at City Hall, London, hosted by the then mayor, Ken Livingstone. Usama Hasan, now senior researcher at the Quilliam Foundation, says he was present at the reception and heard Qaradawi asked about women and children as targets. According to Hasan, Qaradawi replied in Arabic that there was no such thing as civilian targets in Israel because “Israeli women are not like our women. They are living in a militarised society.” Altikriti is fluent in Arabic.

What about Altikriti’s approach to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? He is an Iraqi-born British citizen, having been given sanctuary here when he was just two, after his father fled from Ba’athist persecution in Iraq.

Some 630 of Altikriti’s fellow citizens — British soldiers — have fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002. Like many Muslims and non-Muslims he was opposed to both wars. He said he preferred political rather than violent “resistance” because he didn’t want to see “any spillage of blood — coalition forces or the Iraqis”. Yet he also affirmed the right of Iraqis to use “any means and methods” to expel the “occupation”. Those, like him, who were opposed to the invasion had “made a decision to fight for what is true and pure”.(That word “pure” again.) Is it really so difficult for Altikriti and the thousands of other Brotherhood followers in this country to understand that it is one thing to see the invasion through the eyes of Iraqis resisting it, but quite another to publicly support them when the lives of your fellow citizens are at stake — especially when those fellow citizens belong to a country that protected your family from Iraqi oppression in the first place?

To convince sceptics that the Brotherhood alligned movement here is “working tirelessly for the good of British society on several fronts” Anas Altikriti and Kozbar will need to reconcile their admirable rhetoric — how they strive for positive coexistence, tolerance, peace, compassion and justice, etc — with the words and actions of the organisation they led between 2000 and 2007: the Muslim Association of Britain. While condemning al-Qaeda attacks like 9/11 and 7/7, some of MAB’s actions and rhetoric directed at the Israel-Palestine conflict were particularly inflammatory and contributed to keeping young British Muslims angry.