A murrrain on all of you! I have now spent the better part of a morning I wanted to spend doing something else, reading this lot.

The problem seems to be that there is a quantity of andecdotal reportage of misconduct or worse by those reported to be Muslims - but there is no (this is an overstatement, there does seem to be some actual evidence of discriminatory laws) actual evidence that such misconduct is disproportionately commited by Muslims.

Unless there is no proper evidence, then to assert that such a thing is so (as distinct from "seems to/might be so") can only be a prejudice. Perhaps prejudice would be a better word than "bigotry".

We may postulate all we like about the possible causes of such a thing, but the fundamental problem here is that at present we do not actually know. We only suspect, and we only suspect because the media reportage can never be fully rigorous.

Suspicion may (or may not) turn out to be right. History may not be the whole answer, but most of the current rapportage points one way.

If we only knew that something actually was so, we might have a better chance of finding out why it was so. We may have our suspicions but so far that is all we can say with certainty.