Phew. I could have been in trouble for writing that. I could have been rounded up by an assiduous police force for “hate crime”. Fortunately I was not speaking for myself but quoting from a couple of random articles in Al-Jihaad, the online journal of the Supporters of Sharia (led by Abu Hamza, British citizen by marriage, who is proving so difficult to dislodge from the Finsbury Park Mosque). Its readers have little patience with the host community: “These animals who, some of them, claim Allah is three; Father, Son and Holy Ghost. They are filthy scum of the earth and Allah says about these kuffar, they are beneath the level of the cattle. So now it is time to make your decision ... make hijrah or stay amongst these filthy people with your families, wives, and children and become like them? Fight or run and hide? Love Allah and his Mujahidin or prefer the dajjal and the kuffar? (Antichrist and unbelievers).”

If you do fight and die, then Al-Jihaad says it will be OK, because the souls of martyrs are forgiven every sin, and go into green birds dwelling in Paradise, having felt no pain beyond “a pinch” while dying, and acquired the right to save 70 family members from judgment. Imagine the uproar if the St James’s parish newsletter in Crimplene-on-the-Wold chirpily suggested that the quickest route to redemption was to bomb, knife or poison some random Muslims for denying the Trinity. Or imagine the row if a UK newspaper were to say that Muslims were culturally paedophile. Yet here goes al-Jihaad: “We see what the West is all about with the recent exposure of their ‘Wonderland Club’. These kuffar who have sex with little babies as young as 3 months old are only following the footsteps of their pagan ancestors who worshipped the Moon, the Stars, man-made idols and other things ... What about our women when they must travel to get groceries and they see half-dressed men? Are we not angry and worried about this? Do we not care?”

Enough. These malevolent fanatics are a small minority; there are 800 mosques in Britain and only a couple are hotbeds of extremism. Al-Jihaad itself is pretty annoyed at “those who give speeches about Islam with designer thobes (prayer gowns) and say nothing ... Maybe it is because they themselves live very comfortable”. That gives the game away: the appeal of this spitting venom has little to do with the grave spirituality of Islam, and everything to do with envy, dispossession, revenge for real or imagined ills and the sort of fractured temperament that gave us Reid the “shoe bomber”, a Hamza trainee.

The other two million British Muslims are appalled and afraid of this stuff. It must make their daily lives and community relationships damnably hard. When Hamza crowed over the twin towers attack, Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council, said sadly: “For a long time we have felt that we must keep our heads down and let these people bring trouble on themselves. But if we don’t speak out they will do enormous damage to our community.” Dr Zaki Badawi said: “In normal times (these people) are just harmless lunatics but in times like these they are extremely dangerous.”.

Even without ricin, they certainly are. The Prime Minister, in his glum new year message, described 2003 as a “uniquely difficult and dangerous year” of big decisions. Yet the only one he appears to focus on is whether or not to join President Bush’s war, and whether the UN mandate matters. That is, admittedly, a very big decision indeed: but on the domestic front there is a defence issue even more pressing. It has been underlined by the poison plot and the death of DC Stephen Oake, but it was brewing long before that: we have been warned about it often enough by American, French, German and Indian security agencies, not to mention our own sane Muslim majority.

It is this. The link between asylum procedures, slapdash border controls and terrorist cells can no longer be hidden in a fog of timid, politically correct waffle. Even those who support moderate immigration, enjoy cultural diversity and abhor racism are losing patience. It is more than 18 months since a New York courtroom trying suspects for the African bombings heard that addresses in London and Manchester were cornerstones of what confiscated manuals called “the Holy War against Tyrants”. British tolerance of insult and reluctance to throw out terrorist suspects have made us a favourite haven for global mischief. Militant groups from Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Egypt and Turkey all fundraise in Britain; some of these countries have for years begged us to cut off this source of money, raised among romantic sympathisers and laundered through London banks. After September 11, Abu Hamza complacently said: “Many people will be happy, jumping up and down. America is a crazy superpower ... Bin Laden is a good guy.” Yet it has taken until now for him to be forcibly challenged, and then only by the Charity Commission complaining that the mosque is being used for “political purposes”. Well, surprise, surprise: have they only just noticed the prayers beginning “May Allah curse the United States and raise up the Mujahidin within her belly.”?

Only a tiny minority of asylum-seekers are involved with this toxic nonsense; only a minute sliver of our immigrant population has sympathy with it. Yet our spineless response to diatribes of hate, our pussyfooting round anybody who might call us racist, has enabled that extremism to put on airs of importance, and grow ever more attractive to the disaffected young. It has turned Britain into the headquarters for half-baked Holy Warriors.

The situation is aggravated by the other great problem: the disastrous incompetence of succeeding administrations in applying the existing asylum laws. Previously liberal citizens are now saying asylum law must be changed — that our blanket commitment to the world is out of date in an age of easy travel, and that we need an enforceable, home-designed law on our side rather than leaving ourselves open to ever more cunning legal challenges, nodded through by UK and European judges who bear no responsibility for sorting out the ensuing chaos. When Taleban soldiers can claim asylum here because they lost (against us) and when mass detention of immigrants without papers is now backed by a leading Liberal Democrat, Simon Hughes, it is evident that public opinion is moving faster than government.

But there is no point in new laws if we can’t put muscle behind the ones we have. We are currently so hopeless that we manage to expel only one in five of those to whom we refuse asylum, on whatever grounds. Thus, about 40,000 people a year are solemnly and time-consumingly judged by our creaking system to have no excuse to be here, yet they stay and disappear into what is ipso facto likely to become a criminal sub-world. Meanwhile, others — victims of torture, rape, and terror with every entitlement to shelter — are kept in limbo and poverty for months and years. Apparently we can no more set up a brisk, firm system for asylum than for immigration: our official attitude remains a dislikeable blend of the resentful and the supine. The latest Home Office wheeze — to buy up dreary, insecure, randomly placed country house hotels and then backtrack a few hours later when Sittingbourne gets annoyed — is enough to make you cry.

There are things which could be done now, and which would receive an unprecedently fair wind of opinion. We could briefly withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and frame a law to suit ourselves, based perhaps on the UN Refugee Convention (which gives a narrower and more realistic definition of persecution in the homeland than our judges have created). Then we could rejoin the Convention with reservations, as other countries have done. We could press sharply for the EU institutions to do something useful for a change and set up an agency to process all refugee applicants, insisting on fairness between countries. We could detain anybody arriving without papers until we know who they are.

And we could take as hard a line with Muslim hate-mongers as we do with white supremacists. That would be a good start.

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