I'm not sure we can accurately judge public sentiment anyway, can we. Surely, if you remove violent lunatics from the equation, most people actually enjoy a bit of the other, don't they? Certainly I'd guess that most would class themselves fairly liberal on the topic anyway, wouldn't they?
"Plenty of strikers can score goals," he said, gesturing to the famous old stands casting shadows around us.
"But a lot have found it difficult wearing the number 9 shirt for The Arsenal."
To me this problem started with the support of the politicial and media classes for the muslim side in the Bosnian war. I was never aware of any sense of furious muslim grievance before then, but the hysterical calls for intervention on their behalf, fuelled by unverified propaganda stories circulated by PR companies, and in some cases completely fabricated by journalists, created the muslim-as-victim icon which has been with us ever since. Centre-stage in all this was The Guardian newspaper.