Truth isn't just a Casualty at the BBC, Richard

I had a moment of some surprise today when I read Richard Littlejohn's column in the Daily Mail and realised that he was being quite nice to Animal Rights Activists.

Well, I say quite nice, I mean in the sense that he was saying they were less barbaric and murderous than extremist Muslim suicide bombers. It's a small start, I guess, but I assume the ALF may have now moved to a slightly less serious circle of the hell Littlejohn is convinced we are heading to in a handcart.

Ostensibly the whole column is about the BBC decision not to proceed with a storyline in Casualty which shows a Muslim suicide bomber detonating themselves on a bus. On the face of it, it does seem a pretty spineless decision by the editorial policy unit.

Littlejohn trots out all the ways that the BBC is seen to be happy to offend anybody except Muslims, and as is usual in this kind of run down, goes through the plot details of Series 5 of Spooks.

"The last series featured a fundamentalist Christian sect, hellbent on killing Muslims (yeah, right).

Then there was the bombing of an oil depot and a plot to blow up an airliner over London. Jihadists? Nope, rogue elements in the security services and a deranged, Tory-supporting newspaper baron.

And a special two-parter centred on the takeover of the Saudi Embassy by Islamist terrorists demanding the release of al-Qaeda prisoners.

Turns out - you're ahead of me here, aren't you? - that it wasn't Osama's boys after all, it was the evil Izza-ra-ay-lees in disguise, trying to destabilise the Saudis and blame it all on peace-loving Muslim freedom fighters.

So there you have it: the threat to life and limb in Britain today comes from, in no particular order, the provisional wing of Fleet Street; renegade members of MI6; Mossad; and genocidal Christian evangelicals."

It is funny, but whenever people list out the plotlines in Spooks to prove their point about the BBC kow-towing to Muslims, they always seem to omit Episode 3 from that very same Series 5 of Spooks.

It's the one right after the episode Littlejohn describes as being about 'rogue elements in the security services and a deranged, Tory-supporting newspaper baron.'

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he forgot to set the video that night.

You can still see a plot synopsis on the web though, and fans will no doubt remember it.

You see, that is the episode that featured, and you'll like this, Muslim terrorists.

Named - unlike the fictional African countries in the conference spying episode later in the series - after the real-life Al-Qaeda.

They were part of a plot to detonate a suicide bomb in Central London.

The chief of the gang was so ruthless that, not only was he prepared to cause massive casualties on the streets of London with a bomb, he was prepared to set it off early, to make sure that his Islamic terrorist suicide cell on the mission didn't bottle it at the last moment.

It was a plot that was seen on screen to be only thwarted at the very last seconds by the bravery, intelligence, and tenacity of the British Secret Services.

And as I say, people like Richard Littlejohn seldom seem to talk about that episode when they argue that Spooks never mentions Muslim terrorists acting in Britain.

You couldn't make it up really, could you?