Satardien's comments didn't go down well with other Muslim leaders, who made their displeasure known during the week in a number of media outlets. Neither did they please the watchdogs at Villagemagazine, which decided that this newspaper, merely by quoting Satardien, had defamed Muslims.

Hence the wee hours email, clearly written after a stressful day.

"In an article for Village magazine, " it said, "which includes interviews with a number of Irish Muslim leaders, refereeing [sic] to last weekend's Sunday Tribune's coverage of the Irish Muslim Community I am making reference to 'Ireland's Muslim Community is in a state of trepidation. It's not due to fear of racist attacks or rampant fundamentalism in their own community but what 'Islamic Fascist' scare story the media might throw up next."

Also that the Sunday Tribune had "so little concern for the complexities of Irish community relations that they were willing to spread fear to up dipping August circulations . . . (and that the fear Muslim leaders now have to face is) Not of a community that has embraced extremism in the fate of international outrages but of an Irish media seemingly egging on the replication of British problems in Ireland'."

The email concluded by asking us if we wanted to respond by 10.15am the same morning.

The article that eventually appeared was slightly better written than the gobbledegook quoted above.

But you get the drift. The Sunday Tribune, by giving a Muslim cleric the opportunity to speak out about his concerns in relation to some younger members of the 26,000-member Muslim community (not 40,000, as Village wrote), was spreading fear, writing scare stories and egging on the replication of British problems in Ireland. Whatever that means.

The article and an editorial on the same subject in the magazine was as cracked as you can get, a spectacular display of ignorance which, while purporting to offer debate on an important subject of our times, was actually doing its level best to close it down.

To the Village way of thinking, as outlined in that editorial, only one view of Islam is acceptable, in which the religion and its young followers "feel a sense of deep alienation because of poverty, exclusion from the cultural, economic and politic life of these countries, and a sense of personal disparagement because of what they perceive as the denigration of their religion". As far as I understood it, Dr Satardien's temerity in voicing his concerns, and this newspaper's willingness to help him be heard, is supposed to be part of this denigration.

There are many other reasons for the alienation mentioned above, of course, and in his Sunday Tribune interview, Satardien tried to get to grips with some of them. Particularly, over the last 12 months, he said, radicalism amongst young people had been increased by events in the Middle East. He specifically mentioned the occupation of Iraq and the Israel/Hezbollah war. "Ordinary Muslims are being radicalised by world events, " he said.

Any sensible analysis of world affairs at the moment will come to the conclusion that many young Muslims have been outraged by what they see as a war against Islam conducted mainly by the US on behalf of Israel, which has sometimes been encouraged, as in the recent attacks on Lebanon, to get its hands dirty itself.

"The 'last generation' of European Islamism was born with the war in Iraq, " a United States House of Representatives committee was told last year by the director general of European Strategic Intelligence and Security Centre. "This very young generation is starting to show up in various judicial inquiries into terrorist atrocities."

This is not to say that all Muslim youths have been radicalised, just some. It's been obvious across Europe for some years now, in France, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in Germany, in the United Kingdom. The Village analysis . . . such as it is . . . would have us believe that young Irish Muslims, alone in the universe, have remained unaffected by the world situation, merrily living their lives uninfluenced by events elsewhere.

That view is patronising beyond belief. It disallows any possibility that Irish Muslims have something in common with their co-religionists elsewhere, treats them as some ignorant Islamic outpost while simultaneously trying to quieten Muslim voices, like that of Dr Satardien, who point out that not all is as well as we might like to think.

Village's protective impulse towards Muslims is, I suppose, admirable at a time when much of the Islamic world feels under siege.

However, you can coddle somebody too much and, by depriving them of criticism, examination, investigation and debate, stop them from playing a full part in the society in which they live.

Tens of thousands of Muslims live here now; more will undoubtedly arrive over the next few years. We need to know more about them, about what they believe, about what they think, about what makes them tick. Dr Satardien's comments last weekend were just a part of that familiarisation process; so were the comments from other Muslim leaders disagreeing with him.

Shouting the odds about media denigration and defamation of Islam, particularly when the media is merely reporting the views of one particular Muslim leader, makes no contribution to the debate, although Village has no doubt convinced itself that it has done some service. All it has achieved, however, is to add a lazy and paranoid anti-Islam insult to a growing list that includes anti-Semite and anti-American. And as for that crack about boosting circulation, Village should investigate the concept some time. Before it's too late.