The Muslim Labour MP for Dewsbury, Shahid Malik, has been addressing the implications for British Muslims of the London bombings far more outspokenly than Muslim leaders or much of the chattering classes. In the Financial Times, he does not mince his words:

‘We have reached a dangerous crossroads, and the direction we choose will prove to be a defining moment in our history. The knowledge that the bombers were British Muslims, living what were, to all appearances, respectable and unremarkable lives, has sent us a signal we can no longer ignore, that there is indeed an “enemy within”. The battle for the soul of the community has begun.

‘The stakes are high and the choice is stark: either we confront the voices of evil, or we sit back and allow wider British society to regard us as a community that condones such evil. We must accept that the poisonous preachers of violence and hatred in the name of Islam, few in number though they may be, have to be halted in their actions. This means ending their access to, and their manipulation of, impressionable and vulnerable young men.’

Such directness is refreshing. Yet Malik still sidesteps the main issue. Referring to the political anger at what young Muslim men see as the

‘double standards of the west in relation to international Muslim areas of conflict, whether that be Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq or Chechnya’

he fails to point that this perception of double standards is not only wrong – at least as far as Afghanistan, Iraq and ‘Palestine’ are concerned, and maybe Kasmir and Chechnya too -- but that this false perspective means not only that Muslims fail to acknowledge the role of Islamists in these conflicts in instigating unprovoked aggression, but also that young Muslim men are incited to acts of mass murder on the utterly twisted belief that acts of self-defence against such acts of mass murder are not self-defence but unprovoked aggression.

Among the home truths that people like Malik have to begin to deliver to their own community is that Afghanistan was the training ground for Islamists who were waging holy war on the west; that Saddam Hussein was the godfather of Arab and Muslim terror; and – most difficult and most urgent of all – that Muslims have for decades been told systematic lies about the Jews and about the history and present circumstances of Israel and the Arabs of the disputed territories, and that far from seeking to oppress those Arabs the Jews of Israel have been defending themselves for half a century against the unprovoked aggression of Arab states determined to ethnically cleanse the Jews from their ancient homeland.

When Muslim MPs or other community leaders start saying this, then and only then will we know that they are seriously and honestly facing what they need to face, for all our sakes.