Further to my post below, I have now looked at David Cameron’s comments on Webcameron about his stay with the Muslim family in Birmingham — and they are even worse than his remarks in the Observer. He says:

It’s hard to over-emphasise the importance of language. I know it sounds like a side issue, but it isn’t. We are just not getting this right. Every time the BBC or a politician talks about ‘Islamist terrorists’ they are doing immense harm (and yes I am sure I have done this too, despite trying hard to get this right.) Think of Northern Ireland – ‘IRA terrorist’ was fine because it marked them out as part of a terrorist group, Catholic terrorists would have been a disaster. Yet that is the equivalent of what we are doing now.

No, no, no! It is not the equivalent at all. It is completely different. The purpose of the IRA was to achieve a united Ireland; it was not to take over Britain and turn it into a Catholic state. But the jihad aims to turn Britain and the west into an Islamic state. IRA terrorism was committed in the name of Irish nationalism; Islamist terrorism is committed in the name of holy war. The Pope and the Catholic priesthood worldwide were not issuing encyclicals or sermons calling on the faithful to destroy unbelievers and install Catholicism as world government; the most influential religious authorities in the Islamic world are instructing their faithful to destroy unbelievers and install Islamic world government. To equate Islamist terror with Irish terror as if it were really ‘Catholic terror’, while insisting that the term ‘Islamist’ or ‘Islamic’ terror is now a forbidden term, would be Orwellian were it not simply so utterly stupid and ignorant. A party leader who makes this fundamental mistake, thus showing that he really hasn’t got a clue about the true nature of the deadly threat that this country is facing, simply does not deserve to hold high office.

Even Cameron, however, couldn’t escape the bleak and terrifying reality of this:

In the mosque and elsewhere I got the familiar depressing questions about who was really responsible for 9/11 and even 7/7. Dig a bit deeper and it all comes out. ‘CIA plot…Jews told to leave the twin towers’ - even when it comes to 7/7 ‘how do we know the suicide bomber videos are real and not fakes?’ Even if this is a view held by 5 or 10 per cent of British Muslims - and I suspect it is at least that – this is a real problem which we have all got to get to grips with.

Too right, Dave. And the first thing you have to do to get a grip is to work out the difference between Osama bin Laden and Gerry Adams.