The real reason Lee Anderson’s comments have blown up is because it takes the heat off Keir Starmer, says Patrick Christys

And the useful idiots in the establishment media and, yes, the Wets of the Conservative party, are going along with this.

Now, for the sake of clarity I want to make it abundantly clear right away that I am not talking about all Muslims, anybody who does talk about all Muslims is Islamophobic and Islamophobia is bad, and illegal, and I am not talking about every single person who goes on these Pro-Palestine marches or has genuine concerns about the humanitarian situation taking place in Gaza.

I could not be more clear about that.

Sadiq Khan is not an Islamist, nor does he sympathise with them, and it would be wrong to suggest that.

But it is not wrong to point out the fact that he has had some uncomfortable close encounters with Islamist extremists.

The London Evening Standard reported in 2016 that Sadiq Khan shared a platform with five Islamist extremists at a political meeting where women were told to use a separate entrance.

This meeting reportedly included an activist who has threatened “fire throughout the world”, a supporter of terror group Hamas, a preacher who backs an Islamic state and a Muslim leader accused of advocating attacks on the Royal Navy if it stopped arms being smuggled into Gaza.

Also on the platform was a controversial Surrey vicar and conspiracy theorist who has claimed Israel could have been responsible for the terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers. That meeting was back in 2004.

It is also reported in the Daily Mail that Sadiq Khan shared a platform with Yasser al-Siri, a convicted terrorist and associate of hate preacher Abu Qatada, and Sajeel Shahid, a militant who helped to train the ringleader of the London bombings.

Sadiq Khan emphatically says he was attending many of these events as a human rights lawyer and he doesn’t share the same views as these people.

But I ask you this: Would it not be absolutely unconscionable to think that somebody could become one of this country’s top politicians if they had repeatedly shared a platform with Britain First or Nick Griffin’s British National Party?

Would that not be the millstone around their necks that meant they could never advance to a position of high office?

So is it not reasonable to raise the question of whether or not there is a double standard at play here?

Labour MPs have been getting absolutely hammered by activists on the street.

It is not Islamophobic to point out that so far Sadiq Khan has managed to swerve this kind of treatment and that he has a Mayoral election coming up and to pose the question: Is it really in his interests to want to clamp down on the protests we see outside Parliament every Saturday?

Last week we had absolute confirmation that terrorist threats were being made to MPs.

We had the allegation that the Labour Leader Sir Keir Starmer leant on the speaker of the House of Commons in a way that, in my view, deserves serious investigation, to fundamentally alter our political procedure because of extremist threats.

All of that happened last week. All of it. And here we are, on Monday, and all you’ve been hearing about on the media all day is that word again, the most powerful word in the English language: Islamophobia.

All things considered, I don’t think it is unreasonable, or Islamophobic, to pose the question: Maybe that word is sometimes bandied about to distract us from the real issue.