Much hype greeted Trevor Phillips Channel 4 documentary 'What British Muslims really think?’Promising to be a rigorous survey on issues from gender equality and homosexuality to sympathy for violence and terrorism, the result was a lazy perpetuation of stereotypes, misinterpretation of statistics, and fodder for Islamophobia.

Beginning with footage of the 7/7 bombings and al-Qaeda, Phillips prepared viewers for a distorted narrative: ‘Until now experts, community leaders, politicians of all stripes have tried to reassure that extremist views are held only by a tiny minority of British Muslims’.

Although the film was based on 615 pages of survey data, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission managed to cherry-pick the most sensational statistics.

At some points the attempts to over-dramatise bordered on the farcical. Even where the reconstruction of the survey was portrayed, I wondered when the permanently ‘angry Muslim’ male being surveyed in a very dark room was getting ready to kill the head scarf wearing pollster.

Time and time again Phillips glossed over any positive aspects of the survey. Some 86% of Muslims ‘strongly believe that they belonged to Britain’ - yet question after question was asked to produce a specific type of result. Nearly a quarter of the questions were about attitudes to Jews.

The fact that 4% sympathised with terrorist actions as a form of protest was extrapolated by Philips to represent the views of 100,000 British Muslims, but without any corroborative evidence it simply meant that 48 Muslims out of the 1081 polled held such views. The fact that 83% of Muslims condemned such violence didn’t even get a look in.

For some reason the survey only took place in areas where over 20% of the population was Muslim but in many instances those polled lived in areas where Muslims were over 70% of the local population. Why only survey Muslims from areas with a deep rooted history of poverty, segregation, unemployment and racism to represent the views of nearly three million Muslims?

As for the term ‘British Muslims’, surely Phillips as the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission would know you cannot lump over one hundred different nationalities into one homogeneous entity. So it came as no surprise that no effort was made to differentiate between the views of those who might be Sunnis, Shia, Ahmadiyah, Wahhabis or Deobandi.

As is the norm for any survey, a control group was set up by ICM to provide a comparison with non-Muslim views, yet there was no explanation of how or why. It might have made more sense to have selected those from the Jewish or Catholic community if you wanted to compare views on same sex marriage.

Of course to find that even a tiny 5% of Muslims supported stoning by adultery was shocking, but why did Phillips not mention that 2% of non-Muslims were also in support - using his calculations that should have meant 1.2 million non-Muslims.

When 3% of Muslims expressed support for ISIS trying to create a ‘Caliphate’, Phillips concluded that this meant 100,000 British Muslims backed ISIS, yet in essence this was merely the views of 32 Muslims. Even more disturbing was the attempt to gloss over an inconvenient fact that 1% of the control group of non-Muslims expressed similar support. I suspect Philips didn’t want to expose the absurdity of his calculations which essentially would mean 600,000 non-Muslims in the UK backed ISIS.

Time and time again the positive was ignored for hysterical ‘soundbites’. The general election showed the fallibility of pollsters. Following the inaccurate election, I had hoped that pollsters might have adopted some humility.

Instead Phillips described the poll results as proof of a ‘looming threat to our very way of life’ leaving the door wide open for the likes of Katie Hopkins with her 637,000 twitter followers to vent her racist bile.

Hopkins claimed ‘I cleared my mind of all preconceptions; grubby Rochdale cabbies passing white girls round for sex like a fried chicken bargain bucket, Imams beating kids into devotion, and the truly indoctrinated, blowing up Brussels to get 72 virgins in paradise.’

Although more elegantly packaged than Hopkin’s the treatment of Muslims was none too different by Trevor Phillips.

As for homophobia in the Muslim community of course it’s a matter of deep concern. Some 56% of those surveyed were against gay marriage but such attitudes are also systemic in other religious communities. How could Phillips forget that over 50% of Tory MPS voted against same sex marriage and a certain David Cameron voted against the repeal of Section 28 in 2003?

It was clear that Phillip’s mission was to conflate terror with religious beliefs. Whilst 87% of Muslims might not think it right to print pictures mocking the prophet that in no way equates with support for the murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo. Some 4% supported ‘suicide bombing to fight injustice’ but 85% of Muslims were against it.

When Phillips said 21% never go to a non-Muslim home, he presumed Muslims are to blame, but why not ask whether non-Muslims actually bother to invite them. As a child growing up in a relatively liberal Muslim household, I always wondered why non-Muslims rarely invited us to their homes as my parent’s home was always full of different faiths and communities. Segregation has never been a one way street.

Since the start of the “War on Terror” the British state offers those who follow Islam a stark choice: either you can be a “good Muslim” and accept Britain’s so-called ‘values’ or you will be cast out as a “freedom hating maniac” subjected to endless persecution. As a Muslim those are not the British values I so strongly believe in, but then I suppose like nearly three million I wasn’t asked.