WHEN I READ “Al-Qaeda sympathisers have been trying to infiltrate the British security service MI5, the BBC has learned” I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Or should this piece of “valuable” information from the mouthpiece of the establishment be taken as a first, veiled acknowledgement of the relationship between MI5 and “al- Qaeda”? Oh, before you wonder about the liberal use of inverted commas, I am adapting to the style of the BBC.

They use those mostly for ideological reasons, for example, after an Israeli raid on Gaza they would carry a headline: “One dead” in Gaza missile strike. I did write to them whether this indicated that they were not sure yet about the fatality or whether the poor Palestinian had maybe, mysteriously, been resurrected, but received no reply.

Here is another example: “Two Palestinians killed” in Gaza. In the world of the BBC Palestinians only die a virtual death. Only Israeli deaths are real.

Back to MI5. According to the report mentioned at the outset, MI5 believes, from polls, that around 400,000 people in the UK are “sympathetic to violent jihad around the world”. That’s a lot of people.

According to the government’s latest census there are some 1.6 million Muslims living in the UK. This would mean that a whole quarter of them are suspected as potential terrorists by MI5. Given, however, that one third of those 1.6 million Muslims are children and probably excluded from the poll, and another quarter are old-age pensioners, almost every other Muslim becomes a suspect.

This would explain why some of the Muslims MI5 have tried to busily recruiting during recent months must have been considered by them to be terrorist infiltrators.

Yes indeed, such claims are laughable, but to think that our security services actually believe such nonsense and want the public to believe it too, makes you cry. We must guard against blame, recrimination, speculation or myths taking the place of solid public information, says Peter Clarke, head of the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist branch, the same force responsible for shooting innocent people based on bogus intelligence.

Having said this, it would be folly to deny that there is crossfertilisation between MI5 and al- Qaedah, but the relationship is more akin to the way the CIA infiltrated, and even set up, Communist cells during the dark days of McCarthyism where even Charlie Chaplin was suspected of being a red sympathiser.

There has not been a proper public enquiry into the events of July 7 in London, and numerous inconsistencies have since emerged, from train cancellations to the contradictions about explosive grades and timers which I have previously referred to. Conveniently all the plentiful CCTV cameras anywhere near the events were broken or, at least, the images were said not to be available.

At the same time the alleged “mastermind” of the bombings, Rashid Aswat, was quickly moved to safety and away from being apprehended by MI6, who are also looking for speakers of Muslim languages.

If al-Qaeda was not the invention of the CIA, they certainly contributed greatly to make it the brand name it is today. And, naturally, their British counterparts wouldn’t want to be left out.

In trying to convince the rest of us that they are really on to something and spending our hard-earned tax contributions in order to protect us, they ought to try a little bit harder than blaming to be the victim of a concerted attempt by al-Qaeda to infiltrate them whilst at the same time declaring half the Muslim population to be enemy combatants