Mr Patel subsequently threatened to take the department to court and DCLG allowed the event to continue, “following careful consideration”.

Recordings of Mr Bham’s sermons can be found on the website of South Africa’s Council of Muslim Theologians, of which he is secretary general.

In one he says: “Goebbel [sic] was a very famous minister of the Nazis, and he tried to justify the killing of the Jews. Now as far as we are concerned, we do not need to feel apologetic because it was not done by Muslims.

“The Muslims did not do it, but they had to suffer the consequences of the Holocaust. Because Europe, because of its guilt, had to shed its Jews. And they couldn’t put them in Europe, they put them in Palestine at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian Muslim people.”

Quoting Goebbels, he adds: “One day he said that ‘People tell me that Jews are human beings. Yes, I know they are human beings. Just as fleas are also animals. Just as fleas are also animals, they are also part of human beings like that.’

“Using that example, the psyche of the whole people [Jews] seems to be to mete out the very same treatment to others the way it was meted out toward them.”