Perhaps it is possible that rather than being bigots who make assumptions about vast swathes of people without any evidence, the young people who answered the Radio 1 poll were simply guilty of reading the news. After all, how much higher would the polling numbers have been regarding levels of distrust of Jews or Christians if two extremist Jews or fundamentalist Christians had slaughtered a British soldier in broad daylight only days earlier? Much though it might be lamented, the people who were asked their opinions in that poll and who connected Islam and Muslims with violence did so because on their streets Islam had very recently been associated with extreme violence.

A similar story emerged shortly afterwards when a school in Dundee in Scotland asked some of its pupils to list words they associated with Muslims. Among the words volunteered by the children were ‘terrorists’, ‘scary’ and ‘9/11’. The shocked teachers responded by calling up a local Muslim centre and asking someone to come and correct the pupil’s answers. Soon a charity was up and running that sent Muslim women around Scottish schools to ‘correct’ schoolchildren’s views on Islam and Muslims. A report of one such occasion noted that two headscarf-wearing Muslim women explained to the children that the 9/11 hijackers had ‘nothing to do with Islam’.6

Unfortunately for those involved in re-educating the public, such efforts have been dwarfed by the growing public awareness of a problem. Almost the entire European political establishment and media have failed to persuade the public that the problem has been exaggerated. This is partly because the internet has diversified the sources of information, but mainly because of the simple passage of events. When you consider what Europe’s political leaders say and do with what their public now think, the divide is startling.

A poll carried out in the Netherlands in 2013 revealed that 77 per cent of respondents said that Islam does not enrich their country. Some 73 per cent said that ‘a relationship exists’ between Islam and terror attacks and 68 per cent responded that they thought there was ‘enough’ Islam in the Netherlands. The view was not confined to voters for any one particular party but was shared by a majority of voters from all Dutch political parties.7 The same views have emerged across the continent. In France in the same year – that is two years before the Paris terror attacks in 2015 – 73 per cent of people polled said that they viewed Islam negatively8 and 74 per cent said that they regarded Islam as intolerant.9 It is worth remembering that around 10 per cent of the French population are Muslim.