No doubt you were hoping that Melanie Phillips, like Omar Bakri, would make her holiday a long one. But she’s back, with a series of rants that indicate she’s had difficulty bottling up her rage over the past three weeks or so. Here’s the short version: the government’s crackdown on civil liberties doesn’t go nearly far enough, Inayat Bunglawala’s statement that the Panorama attack on the MCB was motivated by a pro-Israel agenda betrays “the signature obsession of the Muslim fanatic”, Patrick Sookhdeo’s Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity is an admirable source of information and analysis and so is Daniel Pipes, the Mayor London is a “groupie for Sheikh Yusuf Quaradawi”, there’s the usual swipe at “the anti-Israel bigotry of the British left”, and so on and so on.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 26 August 2005

I particularly liked the letter Mel reproduces from one of her admirers denouncing the decision to issue Nottinghamshire police with green ribbons: “Incensed upon reading how the Chief Constable has issued his 4,000 officers with badges pledging support to the Muslim community in the wake of the London bombings I phoned and was put through to his PA…. I was given the usual gumph about how we shouldn’t tar one entire community with the same brush etc etc etc – usual liberal/public sector clap-trap. I suggested that they should in fact wear badges showing solidarity with the community under attack by the fanatical Muslims and the poor devils killed and maimed in these latest attacks. Whereupon I was accused of being a racist.”

It’s political correctness gone mad, I tell you.