Apologies for the slowdown in posts at present, but I am travelling. I am in the US, where all last week the Channel Four Dispatches programme on British radical mosques, which reached American audiences via the blogosphere and YouTube, provoked no little astonishment and disquiet. People were simply appalled that Britain was turning a blind eye and deaf ear to the incitement to murder and mayhem, hatred and violence being preached in mosques deemed to be ‘moderate’, and which was revealed only after the Dispatches team had conducted a ten-month undercover investigation putting cameras inside these institutions.

It was indeed eye-popping stuff. At the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, preacher Abu Usamah, an American convert to Islam, was filmed preaching hatred of Christians and Jews, that women should be beaten and that gays deserved to die, praised Taliban fighters for decapitating British soldiers and urged Muslims to establish a state within a state. At the ultra-respectable Regent’s Park mosque in London, the researchers found on sale copies of films of preachers decrying the equality of women as a ‘bunch of foolishness’ and claiming that Christian missionaries put the Aids virus into medicines in order to poison the people of Africa. And all this in mosques popularly believed to be devoted to moderation and interfaith dialogue.

All those credulous naifs who indulged in such dialogue with such institutions now look pretty stupid. Such revelations call into question not only their own judgment and state of knowledge, but the value of the contemporary shibboleth of ‘inter-faith dialogue’. Yes, dialogue is a good thing, and contact and communication between faiths should be encouraged – but only if it promotes real dialogue rather than the sanitisation of extremism and the bowdlerisation of thought itself. Religion is he arena of some of the most ferocious and intractable disagreements that exist between people. Any religious dialogue that doesn’t provoke such disagreements isn’t worthy of the name. The problem is, though, that the nature of these disagreements is such that they often bring such dialogue to a screeching halt. And since ‘inter-faith dialogue’ has become an end in itself, nothing can be allowed to jeopardise it. So the most difficult discussion tends to be excluded.

Which means the most important questions about Islam and Islamism, which require the most urgent examination, are excluded. Which makes ‘inter-faith dialogue’ worse than useless, because those who are involved in this self-perpetuating process are effectively conniving at a series of untruths, such as the ‘moderation’ of mosques which are anything but, and worse still attack anyone who tries to tell the truth about such extremism on the grounds that they themselves are ‘extreme’ – because they don’t put inter-faith dialogue first.

So much is all very troubling. But what was even more troubling was the reaction of the British media to the Dispatches programme – or to be more precise, the lack of it. While Americans were remarking upon the state of denial that allowed these mosques to promulgate the jihad in Britain, that same state of denial meant that with a few honourable exceptions the programme passed almost without comment in either the media or Parliament, with the ‘serious’ broadsheets particularly conspicuous by their silence. Today’s Sunday Telegraph at least punctures this silence to report that Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, the head of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, called for imams and mosque leaders to be questioned amid claims that forces were reluctant to act.

He also expressed concern that a Muslim primary school teacher, secretly filmed while he delivered a diatribe against Jews, Christians and ‘filthy non-Muslim doctors’, has been allowed to remain in his job… The school confirmed that it was investigating the remarks but said: ‘We have always found him to be a dedicated and committed teacher throughout his employment. He has never expressed religiously or racially intolerant views whilst teaching at Al-Noor.’

Mr Siddiqui said that he was ‘astonished’ at the school’s stance, but claimed it was indicative of a wider trend: ‘If a blind person refuses to accept he is blind, then no one can help him. British Muslims have a problem and it needs to be recognised. If it is, then we can isolate the few extremist individuals, and the entire community will stop being stigmatised.’

Americans are absolutely astounded by Britain’s indifference to such revelations. What will it take to wake the Brits up? they ask. Good question.