DO YOU, DEMANDED the war-time leader of his large audience in February 1943, want a Total War? Absolutely, they yelled back, and the more total the better. If you listen to tapes it was one the most splendid moments in the history of the sectarian impulse. Let’s give it to ’em!

The sectarian impulse of this country is in much more diluted form, but it still exists. I felt it give a little kick while watching Aishah Azmi, the niqab-wearing teacher from Dewsbury at the weekend. “The children,” she declared, “are aware of my body language, my eye expressions, the way I’m saying things . . . I don’t think my wearing the veil affects the children at all.” She was, as my psychoanalyst friend remarked to me, a black-belt passive-aggressive.

“What me? I’m not a problem, I just want to teach, but they won’t let me!” Even if she takes to wearing a tweed skirt and bangs she shouldn’t be allowed to teach kids, because she doesn’t appear to give a toss about them.

They’re so unreasonable, I thought, as I listened to Lord Ahmed describe comments by Jack Straw and Phil Woolas on the wearing of the veil as Islamaphobic, and as “demonising the Muslim community”, a community that — he claimed — was suffering high levels of unemployment and low levels of educational attainment. There is no such thing as THE Muslim community, I reminded the absent Lord Ahmed; there are several communities that practise Islam, and in some of them up to one tenth of the girls of school age go missing between primary and secondary school.

They’re back in Pakistan getting betrothed; and if you really want to see social progress, then deal with that first. And if you genuinely want everyone to love organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain, then get it to stop its ludicrous and insensitive boycotting of Holocaust Day. You’re not demonised, I thought, you just enjoy the sensation of victimhood.

There, that feels better. Or would have done had it not been for an e-mail I received last week praising me for a recent Five documentary on terrorism, but asking me whether this meant that I now agreed with Rod Liddle, of The Spectator, that home-based Islam was an existential threat to the country as I know and love it.

Because I don’t agree with that. I not only think that Jeremiahs such as Liddle, and Melanie Phillips, of the Mail, are wrong, I think their approach could lead us into utter disaster. For a fortnight now we have been discussing veils — so just how many veil-wearing teachers are there? Ten? Five? Just Ms Azmi? What’s the problem for the rest of us once we have (rightly) taken the decision that she cannot teach while looking like a Dalek? Why should a Muslim cab- driver who is (also rightly) being sued for not carrying a guide dog make it to the banner front page of the London Evening Standard? Or a single Muslim chemist who refused to prescribe a “morning-after” Pill get half a page in the Telegraph?

In each case where a minister or an opposition spokesthing has given an opinion on matters Muslim in the past two weeks, I have agreed with much of what they have said, while wishing that they had spread the news more evenly over the national agenda. The interventions in the space of a fortnight, from at least four members of the Government and David Davis, have helped to create an atmosphere of assault. Mr Davis has said, for example, that “there is a growing feeling that the Muslim community is excessively sensitive to criticism”. Maybe, but if everyone says it every day for a week, the sensitivity becomes justified. Try it at home if you don’t believe me.

Put this together with the headlines and TV stories and, sure enough, we get the early signs of a physical response. There’s the woman on Merseyside who had her veil snatched from her; the Glasgow imam who was assaulted at an Islamic centre; the Falkirk mosque that was firebombed.

And the process of polarisation speeds up. The Muslim organisations feel under greater threat and the language turns increasingly intemperate.

Those youngsters who might well have been persuadable that they have a big stake in Britain become convinced that this is no country for brown men. The instincts of the sectarian — to emphasise difference, not similarity — begin to win out.

Here’s the question that each non-Muslim has to answer clearly. Are they — Muslims — ours? Are they in? Hijab, niqab or kebab, I say they are.

They are, even if they are anti-gay or backward on women’s rights. So, until very recently, was most of the British Establishment and almost all the churches. They are in, even if they hate my politics, excoriate Zionism, call me degenerate, loathe Darwin and want to build absurdly oversized mosques instead of social housing. To all of that we can say: “Very well, let the argument between fellow citizens commence.” All they — or we — have to do is obey the law. And in that regard the veil-wearer is far more a proper Briton than the veil-snatcher.

When I next blow on my birthday candles I shall wish that a million people would read Ian Buruma’s new book, Murder in Amsterdam, dealing with the killing of the Dutch controversialist Theo van Gogh by an Islamist terrorist. Exploring the impact of Muslim immigration into the Netherlands, Buruma concludes on the absolute necessity of making distinctions between who is an enemy and who needn’t be. It will be the Muslims’ choice, but, Buruma writes: “Such a choice depends partly on the way they are treated by the country in which they were born. And this depends on another choice: whether to accept an orthodox Muslim as a fellow free citizen of a European country.”

I do, when I remember. Of course there is an alternative that we are sizing up right now: we could march on towards a clash of civilisations, a Kulturkampf. But we won’t like it. “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?” asked Goebbels. “Ja!” they replied. “Nun,” said Goebbels, “Volk, steh auf und Sturm brich los!” (Now, Nation, arise and let the storm break loose!) And it did.

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