Now here’s a thing. According to a global opinion poll, while public opinion in Britain is more favourable towards Muslims than in other European countries, British Muslims are notably more alienated from Britain and the west than Muslims anywhere else in Europe. As the Guardian reports today, the Washington-based Pew Global Attitudes Project asked Muslims and non-Muslims about each other in 13 countries. In most, it found suspicion and contempt to be mostly mutual, but uncovered a significant mismatch in Britain.

The poll found that 63% of all Britons had a favourable opinion of Muslims, down slightly from 67% in 2004, suggesting last year’s London bombings did not trigger a significant rise in prejudice. Attitudes in Britain were more positive than in the US, Germany and Spain (where the popularity of Muslims has plummeted to 29%), and about the same as in France. Less than a third of British non-Muslims said they viewed Muslims as violent, significantly fewer than non-Muslims in Spain (60%), Germany (52%), the US (45%) and France (41%).

By contrast, the poll found that British Muslims represented a ‘notable exception’ in Europe, with far more negative views of westerners than Islamic minorities elsewhere on the continent. A significant majority viewed western populations as selfish, arrogant, greedy and immoral. Just over half said westerners were violent. While the overwhelming majority of European Muslims said westerners were respectful of women, fewer than half British Muslims agreed. Another startling result found that only 32% of Muslims in Britain had a favourable opinion of Jews, compared with 71% of French Muslims.

Across the board, Muslim attitudes in Britain more resembled public opinion in Islamic countries in the Middle East and Asia than elsewhere in Europe. And on the whole, British Muslims were more pessimistic than those in Germany, France and Spain about the feasibility of living in a modern society while remaining devout. The Pew poll found that British Muslims are far more likely than their European counterparts to harbour conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks. Only 17% believed that Arabs were involved, compared with 48% in France.

So much for appeasement! The result of Britain being nicer to Muslims than anyone else in Europe and beating its collective breast about ‘Islamophobia’ has meant that they hate us more. Or to put it another way, Muslims hate their host countries less the more ‘Islamophobic’ they are.

When we’ve finished working out whether we should laugh or cry, we have to ask why this should be. The answer seems to me blindingly obvious — indeed, in my new book Londonistan I’ve been trying to address this very question. In part, it’s because many British Muslims have been radicalised as a result of their places of origin — such as Pakistan — having been radicalised by Saudi Wahabbism, and that extremism having taken root within Islamist institutions in Britain over the past twenty years. But just as important has been Britain’s own behaviour. Britain has actively, if unwittingly, helped radicalise many within its Muslim minority through the very multicultural doctrine of minority rights that it has told itself is the way to be nice and accommodating towards them, and through the collective madness that has taken hold throughout the British intelligentsia and establishment.

Multiculturalism has had two principal effects that are relevant here. First, it has left all immigrants stranded in cultural limbo. Since Britain no longer upholds its own majority culture on the grounds that minority values equal and even trump those of the majority, there’s no culture for immigrants to be integrated into. Into the resulting vacuum sweeps radical Islamism to provide an identity based on hatred, violence and lies.

Second, Britain’s grievance culture, which holds that minorities cannot be blamed for any wrong they may do because they are all victims of the majority, has lethally reinforced the sense of paranoia and victimisation which fuels the jihad. And third, the specific paranoid conspiracy theory which animates Islamist grievance, which holds that the west is on a mission to destroy Islam and that the strings of the west are being pulled by the Jews, is actually reflected back and reinforced by the accepted discourse in Britain which holds that America is a rogue superpower out of control, which talks up western ‘atrocities’ in Iraq, which demonises Israel and which proclaims that the Jews are a conspiracy which has hijacked American foreign policy in the interests of the Jewish state.

Elements of all this deformity of thinking are present throughout Europe. But it is Britain where multicultural victimology and national self-loathing are most entrenched. Who can be surprised, therefore, that Britain’s Muslims hate their host country, the west and the Jews the most when Britain so hates itself, the Judeo-Christian heritage that underpins it — and the country whose existence reminds it of a shameful history of betrayal, appeasement and prejudice that it wants to forget?