At Glasgow Sheriff Court, Sheriff Andrew Mackie told the 36-year-old he appeared to be suffering from mental illness. McGregor will appear again in four weeks time after being assessed at Murray Royal Hospital in Perth.

MacGregor admitted telephoning and e-mailing Strathclyde Police to make the threats from a flat in Pollokshaws Road, Glasgow, between January and February 2007. The court heard that the e-mail read:

"I'm a proud racist and National Front member. We as an organisation have decided to deal with the current threat from Muslims in our own British way, like our proud ancestors. Our demands are very small. Close all mosques in Scotland. If our demands aren't met by next Friday, we'll kidnap one Muslim and execute him or her on the internet, just like they did to our Ken Bigley."

MacGregor then followed up the e-mail with a call threatening to blow up Central Mosque.

Ordering McGregor to undergo a psychiatric assessment, Sheriff Mackie told him: "It has been clear for some time your mental health has been causing concern. This may be related to you having previously served in the forces, although doubt has arisen as to whether you actually served in a combat zone."

BBC News, 3 July 2009

Meanwhile the Financial Times reports that Sir Norman Bettison, chief constable of West Yorkshire police, has told a security conference in London: "There is a growing right-wing threat, not just Al-Qaeda." And a spokeswoman for Searchlight is quoted as saying that police forces were paying increased attention to the threat but courts too often dismissed those caught as deluded loners. "Far-right terrorism is a serious problem. The courts have not always treated it so," she said.

Jewish Chronicle, 2 July 2009

Alas, it was not to be. Members of Ray's grandly titled English and Welsh Defence League turned up at the appointed meeting place for the demonstration, outside a pub at Trafalgar Square (see picture), only to find that they were the sole participants at the event.

According to Paul Ray: "With a no-show from 'Dave Shaw' and his group members, who all said they were going to be turning up on the day to protest for the sake of their country, no one really knew what we should do next, or where we should go to protest because it was not our organised event. After a few conversations it was decided that we would travel to Whitechapel and protest outside the East London Mosque, and take some group photographs."

Unfortunately, backward elements within the English and Welsh Defence League proved inadequate to the task. As Ray recounts indignantly:

"At this point sadly, there were deserters amongst the ranks, who chose to entertain themselves in Covent Garden rather than sticking in the ranks with their brothers, and entering enemy territory with the rest of us, as part of the group who had travelled in to protest against Islamic extremists for the sake of their country.

"Desertion is one of the very worst forms of betrayal in the armed forces, with a prison sentence for those who choose to take that path and if we look back to the First World War, deserters were shot for their betrayal against their countrymen."

So poor Paul Ray was left to march through the East End with what appears to be about a dozen of his mates.

Update:  See also Barthlomew's Notes on Religion

Last year a CNN investigation into Jamia Binoria quoted a US State Department spokesperson as saying that the madrassa was "known to U.S. officials as a moderate institution, favored by Pakistani-Americans for its moderate and tolerant Islamic instruction".

It is clear that Humphrys hasn't bothered to carry out the most basic background research into a subject of which he knows nothing. This is a man who blithely informs his readers that there are "relatively few Wahhabis compared to the Sunnis and Shias", evidently oblivious to the fact that Wahhabism is a variant of Sunni Islam.

Parent Mina Cheeba said in a speech that the representatives of the parents in the school council haven't heard of any social pressure to wear a headscarf and that if there are actual complaints, then they would like to take a look at them so they could come to a solution together.

Cheeba says the decision to ban the headscarf was made without asking the parents' advice. The school regulations shouldn't be changed autonomously, but by consultation with the parents.

Several students also expressed their displeasure. One said that they're supposedly under pressure to wear a headscarf, but that's nonsense. They are not feather-brains who accept everything without thinking.

Ayoub Aazzouti said that he's fed up of the men being portrayed as machos who force girls to wear headscarves, because it's not like that. "For us boys and girls are equal. We have a lot of respect for them and they are intelligent enough to decide on their own if they wear a headscarf or not. Stop using us as an excuse."

On Monday about 40 Muslim women showed up to protest in front of the Royal Athenaeum of Hoboken. Some of the slogans included: "distressed by the lack of understanding", "why a ban on my character", and "lies in order to discriminate".

One of the students spoke: "We have a right to study and to a headscarf. It's not one or the other, we have a right to both."

Islam in Europe, 2 July 2009