There are times as a convinced infidel when it's hard not to blanket-hate Islam - when you're worn-out, angry and reading up on yet another likely long-bearded, odium-spitting Islamist radical who hates you, your family, your country and everything you stand for yet lives amongst you and lives off you. It can be so easy to forget that there is a massive difference - a great gulf called civilisation - between Islam and Muslims on the one side and extreme Islamism on the other. It's hard to remember that no man can think clearly when his fists are clenched.

Bin Laden must love it when we get tired and fall into his desired trap - how he and his sort would love us to make that undemanding mistake; how he must rattle his beads all night long hoping that we all get tired and split the world into his Manichean madness of Muslim and Non-Muslim at war until the last man's standing. It's a surprise Zawahiri's forehead hasn't split open all over the floor of whichever Rawalpindi mansion he's staying in, as he prays endlessly for this explosive demarcation.

It is when you've had enough of examining why apparently grown men explode themselves on trains and buses - when you've seen for yourself the Islamist crazies on the streets of London recently celebrating the end of capitalism (benefits giros in pocket) or declaring the innocence of another blatantly guilty prisoner - that you throw your hands and your papers in the air and head for a beer convinced that Mohammed was just a sick paedophile and that all Muslims are hegemonistic, all privately desiring Flintstone Talibanesque Khalifah. Even the Pakistani guy in the shop who flogs you a six-pack of over-priced liver-eating Boddingtons appears to have a glint of absolute superiority in his kuffar-hating head - when you're in those Islam-swiping doldrums. 

No wonder Muslims are all savage attackers, you think, as you recall sura after sura of bloodthirsty commands from the Qu'ran; that hate-ridden face of vertically-challenged Mohammed Atta emblazoned across your mind in all its wickedness as it perspires sweat of neat evil. This is a battle between Light and Darkness you convince yourself - even the word veil is a conundrum of the word evil - and soon you're lulled into the falsehood that being Muslim inevitably involves selling your soul to the devil and a one-way ticket to hell.

I'm honest enough to admit that I've had a few moments like these in the last decade, though astute enough not to recall them in much detail. Each time it has taken less time for the penny to drop afterwards - that the vast majority of men and women who happen to be Muslims are salt of the earth; decent blokes. Each time I have woken from my melancholy feeling human again - shocked at how my lazy thinking has made me scorn a whole bunch of people who have personally done nothing wrong; who have contributed in so many ways to so many aspects of what makes me feel like their brother and supporter in the West at a time when lazy thinkers worldwide are falling headlong into the Bin Laden trap.

I wish it was easier for these decent Muslims to advertise their normalness - how tiring it must be for the more noticeable amongst them to meet someone new and have to overcome the same prejudices time after time, again and again - opting for shopping bags instead of rucksacks on the tube or refraining from undoing shoelaces on the plane even though they want to relax their feet. As a Muslim friend told me recently, "the worst thing is being introduced to a girl and overhearing her girlfriends wondering amongst themselves if I belonged to Al Qaeda."  

I'd be lying if I said that after 7/7 I turned from the news to the sports pages bothered by stories I'd just read about a mosque burning down or an attack on another Muslim in a British street. I'm not proud of such aloofness. There have been times I have wondered why the armed gangs of Oregon hadn't yet ripped the self-satisfied heads off CAIR or why the ranks of Combat 18 hadn't yet appeared at an Al Muhajiroun meeting and saved Bakri adherents from having to pay for the journey to Afghanistan by turning them then and there into shrapnel-charred mincemeat. I still sometimes wonder when such days will come. I am not proud of such wondering. Nor do I look back with pride on the occasion soon after 911 when I jogged the boat I was sitting in off the island of Java as a passenger wearing a Bin Laden t-shirt attempted, in vain, to step onto shore. I tell the truth when I say I've dreamt blissfully of that awful harridan Yvonne Ridley choking mid-rant on a burkha or Anjem Choudary's beard getting irretrievably caught in George Michael's fly in the full glare of a News of the World camera. Dare I say it, I've had an even more ridiculous dream - that Omar Bakri's daughter should one day be driven by the remarkable powers of Karma and become a lap dancer ... I know.....wishful thinking indeed. Get real, Whiteman, get real.

There are commentators out there who too frequently fail to make the crucial distinction between Islamism and Islam. Either they are lazy thinkers or need to brush up on what can be a complicated dosage of terminology. Words have perhaps never mattered so much - I've made the mistake before of using the word Islamofascist in a speech when what I meant to say was ExtremeIslamistofascist but couldn't be bothered at the time because Islamofascist seemed less of a mouthful. Now I am careful to remind myself that the easy way to upset a whole crowd is to blanket-classify them as w*****s when, if you take the time to look, clearly only ten percent of them have their hands in their pockets.

Too many commentators fail to spot the innocent hands of the Muslim majority and need to be more observant - make some Pulao-Yakni acquaintances or add comedian Omid Djalili as a friend on Facebook. Just as they might ask themselves why men have nipples, so they might ask themselves why their views are dismissed as pointless by the mainstream even though they have clearly expressed them...

The way forward - without slipping into Bin Laden's trap - is to recognise that the vast majority of Muslims in Britain are good'uns. From that premise, bridges can be built and the cancer called extreme Islamism that eats away at Muslims in Britain can be successfully reached and dosed with constructive chemotherapy until eventually it has been erased (as all things are eventually erased which rely on nihilist roots).

Those who class all Muslims in Britain as crazed usurpers don't stand a chance. Firstly they expect the rest of us to ditch our friends. Then they expect us to drive all our Muslim neighbours into the sea with pitchfork or broom. Next they expect us to agree to an all-out blitz of all Muslim lands. This isn't a workable strategy. It's madness. They can't see the irony - that they have caught the cancer themselves. Where does their madness end? The answer is that their madness does not end - soon they have metamorphosed into the fundies, the crazies, the usurpers that they wanted to be rid of in the first place and Bin Laden has won.

There are some politically incorrect hurdles ahead where those with strong words will be vital when they back up their words with well-investigated, strong facts. Who wants to have to tell Tablighi Jamaat to shape up or ship out? Who has the patience to deal with the whining of human rights lawyers when Abu Qatada is sent to Jordan where he belongs?  Who is going to close the majority of British Muslim Faith Schools whose management is bent? Who's going to set up the all-jihadist prisons in the dark shadow of Guantanamo? Who's going to tackle the mess down at the Charity Commission with extreme Islamist abuse of charities? Who's going to shut up Hizb ut Tahrir? Who's going to address the problem of mass benefits fraud, especially concerning house acquisition, in the so-called "No-go" areas? Alas, the list continues.

There are certainly some interesting battles ahead, which no doubt will come to the fore should appeasers fall from power and backbones suddenly come back into vogue in Westminster. Such battles will require sharp thinking, precise eloquence, dispatching of invertebrates and resistance of blanket judgements. Failure to spot the fine line will reduce all battles to one battle that only the warped and foolish like Bin Laden want; a battle hopefully only ever mustered in their sick fantasies and never realised in all of time. Civilisation will hopefully never be seriously breached as civilisation - prism-like - tends to monopolise the best ideas. But beware the fine line. 

Dominic Whiteman is the Editor of Westminster Journal and Director of the V7 Investigation team.  

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