In the latest Radio Derb, he mentioned this story from Britain. The short version of it is Britain is slowly going halal. The natives are allowing Muslim fanatics to colonize the place and add it to the caliphate. That’s an exaggeration, sort of. For reasons no one knows, they have imported millions of Muslim crazies, who now make up 4% of the population. The results are predictable. Bombings, consanguineous marriages resulting in a rash of pinheads and, of course, demands for special rights.

Then there is this story. It is easy to get sucked into believing things that you want to believe, so it is a good idea to seek out contrary opinion. In this case, the New Statesman is a left-wing site, which in this context means they will be in favor of unlimited immigration and cosmopolitanism. The headlines promises the counter argument to the resistance to open borders.

I am sitting in one of London’s finest Indian restaurants, Benares, in the heart of Mayfair. I’ve just placed an order for the “Tandoori Ratan” mixed-grill appetiser – a trio of fennel lamb chop, chicken cutlet and king prawn.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m pretty excited. Most of the upmarket restaurants in London do not cater for the city’s burgeoning Muslim population. Benares is one of the few exceptions: all of the lamb and chicken dishes on its menu are halal.

The restaurant opened in 2003 and its owner, Atul Kochhar, is a Michelin-starred chef. “Right from day one, we’ve kept our lamb and chicken halal,” Kochhar says. “It was a very conscious decision because I grew up in India, a secular country, where I was taught to have respect for all religions.” Kochhar, who is a Hindu, says Muslims make up “easily between 10 and 20 per cent” of his regular diners. It isn’t just a taste for religious pluralism that has dictated the contents of his menu; serving halal meat makes commercial, as well as cultural, sense.

At this point, the B.S. detector is flashing. One of the oldest gags the Left employs is to conjure the too good to be true example that just happens to prove their point. In this case, the choice of this one restaurant is supposed to be emblematic of the market at work. If the market resulted in a refusal to go hala, the author would have an entirely different view of the market. That’s always how the Left views the market.

To other, perhaps less tolerant types, however, the rise and rise of halal meat in the west and here in the UK, in particular, is a source of tension, controversy, fear and loathing. British Muslims are living through a period of halal hysteria, a moral panic over our meat. First there came 9/11, 7/7 and the “Islamic” terror threat; then there was the row over the niqab (face veil) and hijab (headscarf); now, astonishingly, it’s the frenzy over halal meat.

Now the B.S. detector is flashing so much it is starting to smoke. The fake outrage is an old standard from lefty. If you want to know when he is about to slather on a layer of bravo sierra, look for the mock outrage. That’s the tell. Of coruse, once we learn about Mehdi Hasan it comes into perspective. The brief bio says he is a regular around Fleet Street. Then there is this bit from the Spectator.

As displays of duplicity go, Mehdi Hasan’s performance on the BBC discussion show Question Time seemed hard to beat. Hasan delighted leftists by hounding the Daily Mail. Who really “hated Britain”? he asked. Not Ed Miliband’s father, as the Mail had claimed, but the “immigrant-bashing, women-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail.”

How the audience clapped and cheered. How they loved the sight of a principled left-wing journalist taking on the “Daily Hate” without fear of the consequences. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the Mail showed within a day that Hasan’s outrage was phoney: a piece of cynical crowd-pleasing by a manipulative hack. He had sent Paul Dacre a begging letter asking for work. Although he was on the left, Hasan said, he admired the paper’s

“passion, rigour, boldness and, of course, news values. I believe the Mail has a vitally important role to play in the national debate, and I admire your relentless focus on the need for integrity and morality in public life, and your outspoken defence of faith, and Christian culture, in the face of attacks from militant atheists and secularists.”

The Mail attracts writers, who ought to oppose it, because it pays them top rates on one condition only: they say exactly what the editor wants them to say. You can get at least £1,000 for a morning’s work, and Dacre will fill your pockets even if he decides not to use your piece. Writers will bark like a performing seal for money as easy as that. My colleague Polly Toynbee once revealed that Geoffrey Wheatcroft, an author she regarded as a friend, produced a “stinking” attack on her at the Mail’s behest. He then “had the nerve to write me a cringing [private] letter claiming his copy had been doctored and, anyway, he had a lot of little Wheatcrofts to keep in shoe leather”.

Wheatcroft was being too modest. If you obey orders at the Mail, you can keep them in Louboutins.

But leftists should pause before denouncing Hasan as a charlatan and a sell-out. They are the purer hypocrites and greater fools. Hasan is from the Islamist religious right. He disputes how closely he has pushed up against the extremes – ever the politician, he says that old clips of him denouncing non-Muslims as “cattle” have been “taken out of context”. But he was being sincere when he told Dacre he was

“attracted by the Mail’s social conservatism on issues like marriage, the family, abortion and teenage pregnancies”.

Of course he was attracted. He is a religious reactionary. I have no doubt either that if Dacre had offered him work, he would have taken it and the opprobrium that would have followed, not only for the money but for the love as well.

Just when it looked like Mehdi was nothing more than a liberal crank, we learn he is something worse. He was born in Britain and lives there now. He passes himself off as a moderate Muslim adapting well to life in a civilized country. In reality he is loyal to Islam above all else. According to his Wiki, he has been caught, in unguarded moments, saying the sorts of things one expected from Muslim lunatics.

It is why no civilized country should permit the entrance of citizens from Muslim countries, outside of diplomatic delegations and narrow business reasons. Allowing any settlement of Muslims in your lands is asking for trouble. They simply refuse to adapt or get along with non-Muslims. What they believe, what Mehdi Hasan believes, is incompatible with Western liberal democracy. Why on earth would sane people is a western democracy invite these people to settle in their lands?