Donal Blaney, a senior partner with Griffin Law, asks a very good question on his blog. I repeat it in full here …

Is anyone else deafened by the silence of Britain’s self-styled Islamic community leaders? I say this in the context of the impending death of Yusef Nadarkhani, an Iranian Christian who is an apostate living in a nation that seems to have lost leave of its senses.This is despite the fact that the Iranian constitution guarantees the rights of minority religious groups.

Like many I have, in the past, referred to the War on Terror as a clash of civilisations. For that to be true, of course, those jihadists and their fundamentalist fellow-travellers would need to be civilised, instead of believing in the subjugation of women, criminalising homosexuality, stoning adulterers and underage sex in their warped effort to take the world back to some 7th century idyll.

We keep being told that Islam is the “religion of peace” and that British muslims condemn terrorism and extremism in all its forms. So why are we hearing nothing but silence from those media whores in the Islamic community who are the first to find the nearest microphone whenever someone suffers some slight, real or imagined, that merits condemnation in inflammatory terms?

Nothing from the Muslim Council of Britain. Nothing from the preposterous Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadan Foundation. Nothing from the Federation of Student Islamic Societies. Nothing from the Muslim Public Affairs Committee. Nothing from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

Not that any of these groups or individuals could stop the death of Yusef Nadarkhani. Of course not.

But if one or more of them had the courage to speak out publicly and repeatedly against what Iran and others are doing in the name of Islam then it would go quite some way to persuading those of us who are not adherents to the “religion of peace” that the jihadists and the mullahs in Iran do not speak for anyone other than a small group of extremists who are bastardising one of the Abrahamic faiths.