“The head of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, was one of the first in the governing and quangocrat class to sound the alarm over multiculturalism some fourteen months ago when he warned that Britain was ‘sleepwalking to segregation’. He has also said that mass immigration is changing the face of Britain and that Muslims wanting to live under Sharia law should leave the UK….

“But now, Phillips’s position appears to have shifted. Last weekend, he said he was disconcerted that the debate about the veil seemed ‘to have turned into something really quite ugly’ and descended into ‘bullying’. He told BBC One’s ‘Sunday AM’ show: ‘I, this morning, really would not want to be a British Muslim because what should have been a proper conversation between all kinds of British people seems to have turned into a trial of one particular community, and that cannot be right.’

“Ugly? Bullying? ‘A trial of one particular community’? Surely, it’s those who draw attention to Islamic extremism who are mostly on the receiving end of ugly bullying. Any mention of ‘Islamic terrorism’ produces instantaneous denunciation as an ‘Islamophobe’, racist, bigot and all the rest of it – backed up by the implicit threat of violence, a state of affairs which started with the fatwa against the life of Salman Rushdie. As a result, the British media are now so cowed and intimidated they refuse to publish much vital discussion about Islam, to the terrible detriment of free and vital debate.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 24 October 2006

Regular readers of this site will of course be well aware of how “intimidated” the British media has been when it comes to attacking Islam and Muslims, particularly in recent weeks during the outburst of racist hysteria provoked and legitimised by Jack Straw’s comments on the veil.