And yet they could not simply reproduce their fathers’ mental world. They were part modern British too, with many of the same debased tastes as their white contemporaries. They would listen to the same music, eat the same fast food, play the same games. (One sign of the acculturation of Asian youth is the adoption of body-piercing and tattooing, the latter despite the natural unsuitability of Asian skin for it.) They would be attracted by the same baubles, such as mobile phones and designer trainers; but they would feel guilty about their lack of cultural purity. From guilty desire and surreptitious identification it is but a short step to insensate hatred and rage; and perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that the three most rabidly anti-Yankee Latin American countries — Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela — are those in which the most baseball is played.

So all Asif and Shafiq ever knew of Western civilisation was Tipton and its discontents. And they were deliberately kept from any deeper knowledge of our civilisation by the kind of ideological self-hatred that has been so strong a current of British (and Western) intellectual life for the last three or more decades, that precludes any pedagogic affirmation of the Western tradition. This self-hatred explains in part the kind of hatred (and contempt) that the Asifs and Shafiqs of Britain, of whom I suspect there are uncomfortably many, must feel. Not only does the ideological self-hatred of Western intellectuals prevent the likes of Asif and Shafiq from learning anything of the Western tradition, other than Radio One and McDonald’s, but it actually supplies them with the tropes with which to justify their pre-existing anger and violence.

Needless to say, the self-hatred of Western intellectuals is not genuine or sincere: they do not really want to beat our supermarkets into souks, as swords into ploughshares (though I must say that, from the human point of view, I personally do prefer souks to supermarkets). Rather, the intellectual’s expression of self-hatred is directed at other Western intellectuals, to prove the self-hater’s broadness of mind, moral superiority and lack of prejudice, and thus earn the approval of his peers. It isn’t only rebellious youth who experience peer pressure; and anyone who pointed out, for example, that for a very long time now the Western medical tradition has been incomparably superior to all other medical traditions in the world combined and multiplied a thousandfold, would forfeit approval, even though what he said was true, and obviously so.