The fact is that, while a very high proportion of Muslims are neither extreme nor violent, the evidence suggests that a terrifying number are – either supporters of Islamic terrorism (some 2000-plus according to the security service) or those who want to live under sharia law in Britain and/or Islamise the country and its institutions (some 40 per cent-plus, according to various polls).

In such circumstances, it’s remarkable how little prejudice there is against Muslims. And it’s the denial that there is any problem with any Muslims or with Islam, the refusal to halt the process of Islamising Britain and the attempts to censor and stifle discussion that really inflame people to boiling point.

Indeed, there are deeply totalitarian attempts across the west to suppress any association between Muslims and extremism or terrorism and isolate and punish any who make such an association.

Yet now the co-chairman of the Conservative Party has associated her party with such attempts. Indeed, her sinister attack on the media for spreading the “prejudice” of which she complains has to be seen as a direct threat to journalists like myself and others who speak and write about the Islamic jihad against Britain.

Not only is this an attempt to censor debate, but it is an example of the Orwellian discourse by and about the Islamic world in which words have come to mean the precise opposite of what they actually mean. It is the mind-bending formulation which, in the mouths of some Muslims, effectively says to the west: “If you say again that Muslims are extreme or violent we’ll kill you”.

It is essential that this kind of verbal bullying and blackmail is faced down. Yet now the co-chairman of the Conservative Party has associated her party with this mind-twisting intimidation….

Instead of using her unique platform to defuse extremism by telling a few home truths to the British Muslim community about its inflated and perverse sense of its own victimisation, Warsi has merely poured fuel onto the flames.

Warsi has now outed herself as at best a stupid mouthpiece of those who are bamboozling Britain into Islamisation, and at worst a supporter of that process. Either way, how David Cameron now deals with her will tell us much about how the Prime Minister will deal in turn with the great civilisational crisis that Britain now faces.

Melanie Phillips’s reasoned response to Baroness Warsi on her Spectator blog, 20 January 2011