Now There’s a Surprise Department. Melanie Phillips joins the attack on Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair for his stand against Islamophobia:

“… this case had nothing to do with understanding or respecting diversity. It reflected instead the neurotic hypersensitivity which inflates minor error into the hanging offence of racial insult – our modern witch-hunt, in which the slightest deviation from permitted speech is regarded as a heresy to be punished by excommunication and banishment.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 5 July 2005

You can just imagine what Phillips’s response would be if the officers concerned had made anti-semitic remarks. Muslims, however, are apparently fair game when it comes to backward jibes against minority communities.