'Britain's Muslims are too extreme'..blares out the front page of the Daily Express'.

Sadly, in this day any little anti-Muslim news story can make headlines across the world.

But does anyone actually decided to check out the bare facts?

It makes no difference what the comments allegedly made by Dr Barham Salih were anymore. What matters in the day or so after they hit the headlines is that he meant something in a roundabout way that told us that Muslims in Britain need to sort their mosques out.

Or that Muslims in general are extreme in one way or another. Or we can say what we want about Muslims because no-one really bats an eyelid anymore.

Dr Salih visited Blackburn as a guest of Jack Straw in 2005 and during his visit Asian Image were there to report on it. We shadowed him as he met with local Labour Party supporters and canvassers.

His visit was if nothing else was a rushed and hurried affair. Due to the number of protests against the Iraq war and the attention the town was getting from all sorts of outside groups such visits had to be conducted with a certain level of secrecy.

At a community centre he met with selected Muslim individuals who at the time were receiving a difficult time from constituents concerning the Iraq.

These were people who had backed Jack Straw during the last election and were doing so again.

This was meant to be a visit to if nothing else to back-up the government's stance on the war in Iraq. Among the people Dr Salih met were local councillors from the Muslim community.

The meeting was pretty tame to say the least only one Labour Councillor had the nerve to ask some direct questions concerning the situation on the ground in Iraq. And another mentioned that how he felt strongly against the war.

Now, the visits to the mosque are in dispute. It is unlikely he visited more than one mosque during his visit. And to our knowledge that mosque was not the Masjid Al-Hidayah, based on Milham Street (pictured in the Daily Mail).

This remarkably was the very same mosque which invited Condoleeza Rice to visit when she came to the town in 2006. In the end she never went to the mosque but this is the same mosque which has held a number of open days and events encouraging non-Muslims to find out more about Islam.

It is a mosque which last year organised a visit to the local hospital to give Eid presents to patients in the Children's ward. And in recent years this has been the same mosque that had seen police officers at it's premises receiving probationary training!

If he did visit any mosque it was the Dar-Ul-Lum in the town. It is highly unlikely that even in 2005 any mosque in Blackburn would have had any sort of extremist literature of any sort on display.

The Dar-Ul-Lum had a year earlier been raided by anti-terror police after it was revealed Sajid Badat had studied there. It is therefore almost unthinkable the Madressa would have any sort of extremist literature in it's premises when such a high profile person was making a visit there.

During Dr Salih's visit understandably there were protests in Blackburn concerning the Iraq war. But none of these were extreme as such.

Bar from a peaceful national public lobby group many of the anti-war protestors were non-Muslims.

What this latest episode has once again proved to many Muslims, even to those who would be classed as mainstream' is how it is far too easy for any comments to be used to encourage more anti-Muslim' feeling.

The initial comments by Dr Salih, whatever they allegedly have again been lost in all too familiar rants, conjecture and assumption.