At the Spectator, Rod Liddle asks, Why do we tolerate intolerance? (Hat tip: Beagle.)

The answer, of course, is that we’re afraid of being accused of intolerance.

I have heard no reports of Christian or Jewish combatants firing on Red Crescent vehicles. Our loathing of whatever enemy we are up against, it seems to me, is less visceral and far less rooted in notions of certainty. We are rather less inclined, these days, to wish hell upon an entire people. The totalitarian flavour of Islam — the unshakeable belief in its own rectitude and a terrible paranoia directed towards serried ranks of enemies, real and imagined — makes the thought of firing on an ambulance carrying wounded infidel soldiers at least permissible and quite possibly, according to Islam’s more rigorous disciples, a beholden duty. And this is where I believe our Prime Minister has got it the wrong way around: it is the core ideology of Islam that is the problem, not a handful of incendiary preachers. But maybe he’s beginning to realise that right now.

According to the Daily Telegraph, a Muslim barrister who ‘advises’ the Prime Minister has said that Mr Blair is the victim of a sinister conspiracy between the Freemasons and the Jews, who control him and took us to war in Iraq. Ahmad Thomson, from the Muslim Association of Lawyers, has previously denied that six million Jews died in the Holocaust: that’s a ‘big lie’, he avers. There are quite a few people who think along similar lines to Mr Thomson, particularly in the United States. Mr Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, was one such. These people call the US government ZOG — the Zionist Occupation Government — and they tend to have rather too many canisters of weedkiller in their basements. You might have heard similar sentiments from David Icke, too, although David believes that it is giant lizards rather than Jews pulling the strings. My point is that these people are usually lumped together under the generic heading of ‘nutters’. And sometimes ‘psychos,’ ‘weirdoes’, ‘loonies’, etc. But in Britain you can believe such paranoid, irrational gibberish and not merely be tolerated and excused the eponym ‘barking madman’ but actually be invited to divulge your stupidity to the Prime Minister personally. Because you are a Muslim and such poisonous paranoia is sort of expected from you, instead of being sectioned and maybe having a spot of ECT, you get to have your fantasies indulged.