Racial and Religious Hatred Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord. Just as in mainstream British society we have diverse opinions on everything, in the Muslim community we, too, have diverse opinions. However, I organised meetings of imams and community leaders in Birmingham, Manchester and Bradford. After a huge debate, every one of those said that they would be supporting this type of legislation. They were not all watching that programme—next time when the noble Lord is on television I shall urge them to do so. Nevertheless there has been such a debate within the Muslim community. I support the Government and I wish that this debate, which I thought was about protecting the faith communities and some people have taken it beyond that, had been a broader debate about whether the extremism was within or outside mosques and whether such extremists had anything to do with Islam.