BOLTON South East MP, Ms Yasmin Qureshi’s, rejection of the Prime Minister’s statement that Muslims ‘quietly condone’ acts of terror (Monday, June 22) would appear to confirm that the Prime Minister is correct, rather than prove that the Prime Minister is ‘wrong’.

Ms Qureshi indicates that the Prime Minister was including all Muslims in his statement when in fact he said ‘too many Muslims quietly condone extremism’. Ms Quereshi then proceeds to accuse him of confusing religious conservatism with support for extremism. Yet there is no evidence of this in the his statement.

It is she who introduces the confusing argument that religious conservatism condones extremism. She refers to her community as being ‘overtly religious’ and her constituents who are ’very religious’— ‘who shake their heads and actually say that our religion is being maligned’. If this is the case then perhaps the Bolton MP’s community needs to protest a little louder as other constituents in Bolton South East and the British public in general are not hearing a Muslim protest against the atrocities committed by Isil in the name of Islam.

Ms Quereshi's descriptions seem to exclude the thousands in her community and thousands of constituents who are not religious or members of the Muslim religion. Who then is representing these constituents in parliament?

Islam is a religion of peace with the theme of helping others at its very core, yet apart from a very few British Muslim scholars and leaders writing articles in national newspapers, the general British Muslim population has been very quiet in denouncing the atrocities committed by Isil.

Ms Qureshi claims that she is tired of apologising for the actions of extremists and then introduces skin colour into her argument, referring to the tragic killing of nine black people in Charleston by one deluded, drug abusing, and possibly mentally unstable white man.

She says” I don’t hear anybody saying the white population has to apologise for the actions of one white man.” This is possibly because there has been no need to ask the white population to apologise. The shootings have been universally decried by all sections of society.

It is difficult to understand how the Bolton South East MP can try to equate this heinous action of a lone white gunman with the murder and atrocities committed by tens of thousands of Isil members against tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen.

There is no need for Ms Qureshi to apologise for the actions of others who claim to carry out atrocities in the name of Islam but if one does not speak out against Isil and acts of terror then one is ‘quietly condoning’ them.

J. Brierley

Bolton