I REALLY enjoyed last weekend. I felt so reassured, so much at peace with myself and the world.

This reassurance was provided for me by our wonderful BBC, peace be upon it, which cheerfully announced that 75 per cent of British Muslims oppose violent action against those who insult the Prophet, while only one in four British Muslims believe that such violence, including murder, beheadings and the like, are justified against critics of Islam.

Oh, when it comes to spin and politically-correct euphemism our beloved BBC is unbeatable!

There are about 2.8 million Muslims in Britain. So only 700,000 of these might wish me harm for saying anything other than that Islam is the well-known religion of peace and love. So now you understand why I rested so peacefully in my bed all weekend.

Are there tensions between the Muslim population of Britain and non-Muslims? Well, if there are, this is all my fault; for 46 per cent of Muslims say that being a Muslim in Britain is difficult owing to prejudice against Islam.

They cite outrageous acts committed in the name of “Islamophobia.” Now the word “phobia” means an irrational fear. But is it irrational to fear those who murdered thousands in New York on 9/11 and scores on the London Underground in 2005, or the sorts of sadists and psychopaths who killed Lee Rigby?

Nothing to do with Islam, of course. So why are the perpetrators of such atrocities invariably and unfailingly Muslim?

Now attackers in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka have hacked to death a US-Bangladeshi blogger whose writings on religion upset Muslims. Avijit Roy, an atheist who advocated secularism, was murdered as he walked back from a book fair. No-one has been arrested. And no one will be arrested.

But if, on the outside chance that someone is arrested, any judge convicting him is likely to be murdered by the same fundamentalist thugs. It has happened before.

I apologise for returning to this subject again. I would much rather write about my own religion, which is cricket and which doesn’t, incidentally, kill people in such large numbers. But I feel I have to.

Because what we call western civilisation is under existential threat. From Boko Haram in Nigeria, to the murderous adherents of Al Q’aida in Sudan, Somalia and Kenya; all across North Africa, in Paris, in Copenhagen, in Sydney; in the killing fields of Syria and Iraq; in the apocalyptic despotism that is Iran; in Mumbai and out to the failed states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is not a clash of civilisations but a terminal opposition between civilisation and barbarism.

In the face of this threat to our very lives, all we hear from our leaders is dismissal and denial.

There are “extremists” and there are “lone wolves.” Islamic State is “a death cult,” says David Cameron.

I should like, meekly, to ask a question which I know will be dismissed as naïve by all our politicians: if all these murders on four continents have nothing to do with Islam, why do the perpetrators celebrate their crimes with the cry “Allahu Akbar”?

You might as well argue that, when I say Grace at a City dinner and pronounce, “Through Jesus Christ Our Lord,” that this has nothing to do with Christianity.

We are back in the 1930s when all “enlightened” opinion was on the side of appeasement and Winston Churchill was denounced as a warmonger. But who was proved right by events?

The issue is simple and terrifying: either we cut out the politically-correct appeasement of our enemies or we are done for.