Leading the effort is the former political editor of The Spectator, Peter Oborne, whose Channel 4 programme, It Shouldn’t Happen to a Muslim was the catalyst for the minister’s comments. You couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of the confusion that has befallen British debate today than to look at the story which appeared alongside Malik’s intervention. For on the same day Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice, was quoted across the press explaining why the Archbishop (or Grand Mufti) of Canterbury had been right to argue last February for elements of Sharia to be incorporated into British law. Thus on the same day that we see a serious advance in the fight for accommodation of Islamic law into Britain, a prominent Muslim claims that British Muslims are living through a period of Nazi-paralleled intolerance. While gaining new rights prominent Muslims compare themselves to people who were stripped of all rights. Nice work.

The central argument of Oborne’s programme was that many stories in the press about Muslims are not true and that those that are don’t portray Muslims in a positive enough light. It’s hard to know how you would report most of these stories in a positive light. But put that aside for a moment and let’s just look at the evidence that many stories about Muslims in Britain are made up.

Channel 4 showed that a claim by The Sun that a Muslim gang attacked a soldier’s house in Windsor was almost certainly baseless. What is not baseless is that in January four Muslim men pleaded guilty to attempting to kidnap a British Muslim soldier in Birmingham and behead him “like a pig”.

Channel 4 showed that a February 2008 Sun allegation that some Muslim medical students were refusing to scrub properly was baseless. What is not baseless is that in September last year Dr Omer Butt was admonished by the General Dental Council for refusing to treat a Muslim patient unless she wore a headscarf. For sure, certain stories have been under-sourced and over-hyped and I’m surprised that a hack could be surprised at such a trend in hackery. But for every such dubious story many true and resonant stories exist.