PETER James Bridle of UKIP exhorts us all to be nicer to and about each other (Letters, June 11) as if the fact 500,000 unskilled British workers have been displaced since Poland joined the EU were mere coincidence and that British universities and prisons are used as recruitment grounds by Islamic extremists as a dispute in a children’s sandpit.

A policy of appeasement has been counselled by the intelligentsia over decades and it has availed us nothing in terms of integrating the Muslim community.

We have incubated in our midst the spawn of discord and can now watch at our leisure its crystallisation into proselytising bigotry, the core beliefs of which – that free speech should be curtailed, that the purpose of education is indoctrination and that women should not enjoy parity of treatment and equality with men in law – are radically incompatible with democracy.

Any immigrant group which regards its host community as tainted and decadent will, quite reasonably, resist integration and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East, most recently in the last few days in Iraq, will surely adversely affect race relations in the UK.

That so-called moderate Muslims have so far been muted in their response to the London bombings of 7/7 and the brutal murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight on a London street, should now give us pause.

They are without doubt the bridge between fanatics and non-Muslims and their tardiness in condemning such atrocities strongly suggest they are marching to a very different drum beat than we would hope.

The calls for publicly-funded madrassas or faith schools, halal meat, Islamic zones and Sharia law have become ever louder and more strident.

If we do not take a stance on the escalating demands of the Muslim community and their sense of entitlement in dictating terms to us, the majority and the indigenous population, I fear we may eventually find ourselves living in a starkly divided land or, far worse, an intransigent, intolerant and humourless theocracy in which homosexuals and women are routinely persecuted, marginalised and oppressed, and faith, or its absence, becomes a stick with which to beat one’s enemies.

A religion that opposes art, music and diversity of sexual orientation is, or should be, immediately suspect to a native of the Western world.

Despite the inflammatory tone of this letter, I hope with it to encourage debate and would say to those who would denounce me as a racist that I lived for 12 years in a predominantly Muslim area of Watford (known locally – and not without a degree of affection – as British West Watford), where I felt extremely comfortable.

If we are gagged by political correctness in supressing our mutual curiosity about one another, there can be no rapprochement and no mutual tolerance.

It would be rewarding to hear from readers, whether Muslim or otherwise, how they experience recent events in the Middle East, how immigration impinges upon them locally and how their sympathies lie.

Helen Tucker Brockhill Redditch