Here is the news: in Australia, a plot by Islamic State sympathisers to capture random members of the public and chop their heads off has been foiled by security services; in Syria, two Americans and a British hostage have been beheaded by an Islamist nicknamed Jihadi John – and another innocent Briton (a taxi driver captured while working for an aid convoy) has been told he is next on the list; across Britain, in the aftermath of the Rotherham enquiry, more and more evidence is emerging that in towns and cities all over the country mostly underage white girls have been systematically groomed, raped and trafficked by organised Muslim gangs, with the complicity of local government authorities, charity workers, police officers and the broader Muslim community.

Luckily, thanks to the BBC, we know what the real problem is here. It is, of course, our old friends, “Islamophobia” and “the spectre of a far right” backlash.

Both of these alleged threats featured prominently on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, including an interview with a former, self-confessed “far right” thug who revealed – presumably to no listener’s especial surprise – that the organisation to which he had belonged was racist, prone to violence, and likely to react strongly to issues like the Rotherham rape gangs.

Today also ran an interview with Tell Mama – the one-man activist organisation run by Fiyaz Mughal which has long since been exposed for its exaggerations and its threadbare methodology in cooking up an alleged spate of “anti-Muslim” hate crimes.

When, for example, last year Tell Mama reported that there had been 212 anti-Muslim incidents, it turned out that 57 per cent of these comprised disobliging comments on Twitter or Facebook, many of them emanating from outside Britain.

And the BBC Today show rounded off with a Muslim spokeswoman who was given space to assure listeners that mosques around Britain were already doing a great deal to combat extremism but hadn’t been given credit for it.

Phew. So that’s all right then.

Except, of course, it’s really not all right.

Perhaps it wouldn’t matter so much if this BBC feature were a rare aberration. But it’s not. It’s long-term house policy. Barely were the bodies of the 52 victims of the 7/7 London bus and tube suicide bombings cold than the BBC’s reporters were out pounding the streets looking for evidence of the real issue of concern – not Islamist extremism and its numerous fellow-travellers, of course, but yes, for the spectre of Islamophobia and an anti-Muslim backlash by “the far right.” It responded in the same way after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby – complete, of course, with an interview about the “cycle of violence against Muslims” and the “underlying Islamophobia in our society” by our friend Fiyaz Mughal of Tell Mama.

It’s not just the BBC which plays this game. Earlier this week Sky News afforded a similar indulgence to convicted terrorist Shahid Butt, allowing him to justify the atrocities being committed by Islamic State by blaming them on the alleged culture of violence created by video games.

The left wing Daily Mirror meanwhile decided to hail the northern Muslim stronghold of Bradford the “second-most peaceful of Britain’s top ten cities” – in contradiction of a survey which suggested quite the opposite.

But the BBC is the worst. For as long as I can remember, it has been talking up the “Far Right” threat, not just in its news bulletins but even in its dramas with neo-Nazis and their ilk often being invoked as the sinister bad guys in thriller series from The Professionals to Bonekickers and Spooks.

If the “Far Right” really is the pre-eminent menace in Britain today, though, it has a funny way of showing it. How many schoolgirls has it raped, recently? How many people has it killed or maimed? How many bombs has it exploded?

The grand total for all the above, I believe, is as near as makes no difference to zero.

Now this isn’t to say that the boot-boys who join these fascistic organisations are the loveliest of people nor that they don’t hold racist views. But it seems to me that if we are to use our limited resources to address the most pressing problems of our time, we ought to bend our attentions to those dangers which are most clear and present rather than to politically correct chimeras like “Islamophobia” and the “spectre of the Far Right”. (The clue for the latter is in the name: a spectre is, by nature, ghostly, insubstantial).

Otherwise what will happen is what is already happening now: you get the police turning a blind eye to antisocial behaviour by the Muslim “community”, the better to concentrate on arresting louts from the English Defence League or dads (both white and Sikh) who have had the temerity to try to take action against the gangs which have been raping their daughters. And you get a media culture which fails in its duty to expose, without fear or favour, corruption and wrongdoing wherever they are found.

As we have reported before, those 1400 victims of the Rotherham rape gangs are just the tip of the iceberg. The first case involved girls trafficked and raped by Muslim gangs dates as far back as 1989. We also know that this has been going on in towns and cities across Britain, from genteel Henley-on-Thames to Telford to parts of Norfolk.

A scandal like this on so epic a scale ought to be meat and drink to any half-way decent reporter, even in an organisation as ideologically-blinkered as the BBC. How can it not be a major story that over a period of 25 years communities across the country have been terrorised by gangs operating with near impunity, for all the world as if they were bandits on the lawless North West Frontier, not citizens of a liberal democracy? Why is not the BBC devoting its still fairly lavish resources to harrying all the bent councillors and police chiefs who have turned a blind eye to the problem and who have yet refused to resign?

And how, in all conscience, can it be so insensitive as to insult its licence-fee-paying listeners by preaching to them a gospel which most of them know not to be true: that a “far right backlash” that might happen is more worthy of our attention than a spate of rapes, bombings and murders that actually has happened, is continuing to happen, and will go on happening for as long as our politically correct establishment (of which the BBC is chief Cultural Commissar) goes on ducking the issue for fear of sounding “Islamophobic”?