There are now enough Muslims in Britain that a few of them must be dangerously violent merely by the laws of human variation. Nevertheless, the fact that two Muslims, born and bred in England, should have volunteered for suicide duty in Israel, is not calculated to make us sleep sounder in our beds at night.

The question we should ask is whether we are doing anything to alienate young Muslims from our culture and civilisation. The answer is yes. By constantly uttering the mindlessly vague slogans of multiculturalism, we give the impression that we have no faith in ourselves, our culture and civilisation. And if we don’t ourselves value our traditions and accomplishments higher than those of other civilisations, why should anyone else?

We do not teach the accomplishments of our civilisation with any kind of confidence. The freedom and prosperity that we enjoy are the result of a long historical development, which has its less than creditable aspects, but also its accomplishments of universal significance. For example, modern science has been, for centuries, the tradition of Western civilisation alone, and Britain has contributed very significantly to that tradition. Had there been no Islam from the 16th century onward, Mankind’s current scientific knowledge would not have been diminished by one jot or tittle. Of course, individual Muslims can make contributions to science: but only if they accept this aspect of our intellectual tradition. Their own tradition, however important it might have been in medieval times, has contributed nothing to science for hundreds of years.

Our liberty, which is intimately linked to our prosperity, arises not only from a long and sometimes violent political process, but also from long, hard and deep philosophical reflection. The Western philosophical tradition, with its openness to inquiry, is unequalled, and we should have no hesitation in saying so. Our literary tradition is similarly glorious, but multiculturalism, with its insistence that there is only difference, no better nor worse, no higher nor lower, accords it no special place.

When you consider that modern British schoolchildren no longer know what happened in 1066, it is hardly surprising that young Muslims should not have any particular respect for the civilisation in which they find themselves. They take the freedom and prosperity of Western society for granted, as if they just descended on us at random, and take the less attractive aspects of our civilisation as being most characteristic of it.

Modern British culture gives them plenty of ammunition for their disdain. Our modern culture, especially in its most popular forms, is now vulgar and shallow and utterly lacking in refinement, grace or beauty. It encourages and even glorifies every form of social pathology; it mistakes libertinism for liberty. From the purely aesthetic point of view, it is hideously ugly and lumpen. It is scarcely surprising that at least some Muslims — indeed, the more reflective among them — turn their back on it.

On the one hand, young Muslims are not inducted into the best of our civilisation, largely because even the idea of there being a best is anathema to those relativists who determine our educational policy; on the other, they are personally acquainted with the worst, because they have seen it with their own eyes and lived among it. In the absence of a real faith in our civilisation, our tolerance appears to them what it is: weakness. They are therefore contemptuous of what they see, and not without reason. British suicide bombers are a true product of multiculturalism.

The author is an inner-city doctor.