The crooning voice is soft. “Maryam, my little sweetheart, I love you lots and lots. You are my little baby with big fat little feet.”

The father of the little girl, cradled in the crook of his right arm, caresses her pudgy limbs as she squirms and babbles in his lap. “Remember me in your dua [prayers]. I will certainly remember you, and, inshallah, things will work out for the best,” he says, voice muffled as he buries his face in her downy hair. “Maryam, be strong, learn to fight – fighting is good. Be Mummy’s best friend. Take care of Mummy – you can both do things together, like fighting and stuff.”

As anyone who saw it on the television news last week will confirm, this diary-room-style home video reworking of the WB Yeats poem A Prayer for My Daughter for our modern era of suicide bombers and Al-Qaeda plots is, quite simply, off the scale.

Only two days after this doting daddy outlined to camera his hopes and dreams for his only child (not Yeats’s “courtesy” and “natural kindness”, but “fighting and stuff” and how Allah, not Dad, would look after her) we know that Mohammad Sidique Khan flew to Pakistan to fight against the West. Then he returned to England in February 2005 to plan and carry out the London 7/7 bombings.

There is another clip, in which the subtitle reads: “The martyr Mohammad Sidique, one of the knights of the blessed raids of London.” The terrible contrast between the family man, full of tenderness for his baby daughter, and the cold-blooded terrorist who killed six on the Tube (and decapitated himself in the process) that July morning is beyond comprehension.

It is for this reason that the launch of the Quilliam Foundation last week, reported all over the world, is such good news. Named after a Liverpudlian convert to Islam, Quilliam intends to put up solid, scripture-based rebuttals to the kind of arguments used to recruit vulnerable young men into the murderous cult of jihadi extremists.

Quilliam’s driving forces are Maajid Nawaz, a former member of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and Ed Husain, former jihadist and author of The Islamist, who has also publicly rejected extremism.

The foundation will have a “deradicalisation” unit to penetrate cells and schools and the poor, excluded areas where extremism breeds. And Quilliam will explain why Islamist views are incompatible with a real knowledge of the Koran (many of these former extremists were converted away from violence when they studied Islamic texts themselves, rather than just listening to radical preachers).

Needless to say, everyone associated with the foundation, from Jemima Khan downwards, has been smeared and received death threats directed at not just them but often their families too.

Peter Neumann, director of the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, says of Quilliam: “These guys are uniquely positioned to take on the arguments. They have credibility. This is definitely a step in the right direction.”

Of course, it’s deeply insulting to the majority of Muslims that those who grab the headlines are either extremists (Sidique Khan and his ilk) or former radicals (Nawaz and Husain). Of course, it feels like another attempt at marginalising the overwhelming majority who would never, for one second, use their Islamic faith to sanction murder or terrorism. But, however insulted the majority may feel (and if the blogs are anything to go by, feelings are running high), the Quilliam Foundation has reminded Muslims that although they may be blameless individually, the community has not yet lived up to its moral obligation to confront the dark side, the lunatic, fanatic fringes of its own.

So it’s a huge relief to me to hear that teams of young Muslims are going to go out, into schools and mosques, to argue that freedom of speech and the right to life are nonnegotiable, and that the double standards of extremists are inimical to natural justice. “Just as British Muslims condemn the deaths of Muslim civilians in Iraq or Palestine, they must also condemn suicide bombings that kill non-Muslim civilians,” Nawaz says.

As that clip of Sidique Khan and his innocent daughter reminds us, there are some dangerous, deluded souls out there. If Quilliam can change any potential bomber’s mind, then it is worth a try.

“Ja, and sometimes, on Hitler’s birthday, crazy people, they come and leave candles at the site of the Berghof,” said Margit, over wienerschnitzel, fried potatoes, dumplings, pancakes and apple sauce with whipped cream. I was in southern Germany last week, as our light lunch menu might suggest.

I do know it’s not cool to visit upper Bavaria and bang on about the Third Reich as if it were yesterday. As Margit explained: “It is not our fault. We are sick of it.” And I know it’s especially insensitive when all anyone wanted to talk about was the triumphant trip to Washington of that son of their soil, the very first Bavarian pope.

Bavaria is a conservative region, where they greet you politely by saying “Grüss Gott” when you enter shops, instead of ignoring you. On Sundays, men and boys go to church wearing lederhosen and collarless jackets, and the women and girls wear dirndls cinched by basques over white puffy blouses. They look very fine.

But still, sometimes the taint of history can be hard to avoid. For a start, our hotel, the glistening new Intercontinental, is situated just a dumpling’s throw from the site of the Berghof of which Margit spoke (it was razed after the war). And second – it was Hitler’s birthday the following day.

Late that evening, the moon was full. Stars glittered. Clouds raced past the moon and over jagged peaks still capped with snow. As we drove past the now overgrown valley that once contained the Berghof, I swear I felt something. Whatever it was, it made my heart thud with nameless dread and anxiety.

The next morning I woke early and walked fast down to the Berghof site a hundred yards away. Mist was lifting off the lake in the valley below. There was no one there. Certainly no neo-Nazi nutters in uniform, lighting candles. Only a woman, with a dog, was standing pensively, looking down the valley. “Grüss Gott,” she said, smiling.

You’re a journalist, I reminded myself. She’s standing on the site of Hitler’s house on his birthday, looking at his view. Ask her why.

“Nice place to walk a dog,” I said, and we went our separate ways.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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