Thomas Sutcliffe: Intolerance – courtesy of the BBC

It isn't every day you hear someone issuing death threats on the Today programme, but yesterday morning's report on an arson attack on the home of the London publisher of The Jewel of the Medina, a novel about Mohamed's youngest wife, included one remark that struck me as coming close to an incitement to murder.

The finely judged proximity wasn't an accident, I believe, because the speaker is a trained lawyer – Anjem Choudary, introduced on the programme as the former head of Al-Muhajiroun. "Clearly with the publication of this book, there will be a predictable reaction," he said. "The messenger Mohamed said that whoever insults any messenger of God they will carry capital punishment so this has been clear with the case of Salman Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, Theo van Gogh."

Mr Choudary then went on to explain that although he himself argued that British Muslims lived under "a covenant of security" and cannot target the life or wealth of those they live among, the provocation the book would represent shouldn't be lightly underestimated. "We're talking about what appears to be soft-pornography," he concluded – though since the book hasn't actually been published anywhere it wasn't clear how he knew.

Mr Choudary's use of the word "predictable" wasn't sloppy either. He can confidently predict a reaction to the publication of the book because, failing a natural upwelling of outrage, he will almost certainly organise one himself. He's done it before – after the publication of cartoons of the Prophet in a Danish newspaper.

It was Anjem Choudary who coordinated the demonstration outside the Danish Embassy which featured such temperate expressions of wounded piety as "Behead those who insult Islam" and "Europe you will pay. Your extermination is on the way." He was fined for organising an illegal demonstration after that incident, but it didn't dampen his ardour in protection of Islam.

After Pope Benedict had offended Muslims, Mr Choudary demonstrated outside Westminster Cathedral and declared that "whoever insults the message of Mohamed is going to be subject to capital punishment. I am here to have a peaceful demonstration. But there may be people in Italy or other parts of the world who would carry that out". Mr Choudary was also a co-signatory on a document warning British Jews that support for Israel "financially, verbally or physically" would make them part of the Middle East conflict and he attracted attention to himself on the anniversary of the 7/7 bombings by admitting that he wouldn't alert the police if he was aware of another suicide bombing in the offing.

It's possible that Mr Choudary isn't typical of general Muslim opinion on this matter, the more tolerant types that Jim Naughtie alluded to a little later on during the programme when talking to the book's author, Sherry Jones. "There must be many Muslims in this country," Naughtie said, "even some who would find your book offensive who would nonetheless deprecate any efforts to prevent its publication or create violence around it." There must, one would assume, and it would be useful to hear them.

Jones understandably thinks so too: "Moderate Muslims in Great Britain and around the world need to stand up and be counted and have their voices heard," she said. Again hear, hear to that – but how do they get to the microphone if Anjem Choudary is standing in the way? If he's genuinely representative of Muslim opinion we surely need to know. But if he's a self-publicising and dangerous nuisance it's time he came out of the producer's Rolodex.

Spare us this awkward pantomime of simulated jocularity

The opening night of Come Dancing, Ray Davies' musical at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, was an unusually convivial affair – with the cast wandering around on stage before the lights went down doing a lot of candidate waving. You know the kind of thing – eyebrows lift in mute surprise ("Hey!... nice to see you!"), finger points to underline the moment of contact, then the waver moves on to perform another pantomime of delighted recognition in a different quarter.

I assumed this was because a lot of friends were in... but then it turned out that we were all to be treated as chums, as the characters crossed the blurred border between stage and auditorium (the front rows are like dancehall tables) to inflict jocular banter on the more accessible ticket-holders. At which point I felt less convivial and began to study cast biographies with the fierce and, I hoped, uninterruptible demeanour of a Talmudic scholar. And, in between dodging eye contact, I found myself wondering again who exactly this unconvincing simulation of intimacy is meant to serve.

A straw poll of theatre-goers failed to turn up a single person who enjoys such moments of ersatz communion. And I'm pretty sure that actors loathe them even more than punters. It's time we started a Restoration Fund for the dilapidated fourth wall.

Wired for God or wired for sound ...

The Bishop of Durham says he's not surprised that religiously minded guinea pigs should feel electric shocks a bit less acutely when contemplating a picture of the Virgin Mary than their atheistic counterparts. "The practice of faith should, and in many cases does, alter the person you are," he said, responding to an Oxford University experiment in which participants were asked to rate the severity of an electric shock, while contemplating either a painting of the Madonna or Leonardo's similar – but secular – Lady With An Ermine. I don't imagine atheists will be very surprised either. After all, the fact that religious faith is an anaesthetic is one of the things we have against it. Marx was nearly right, it seems – religion is the aspirin of the people.

* The trial of OJ Simpson on charges of armed robbery and kidnapping has focused on whether he was aware that one of his companions was carrying a gun. Until the verdict is in, that remains moot, but it's already clear that everyone was packing concealed recording devices. Remarkably, the heist was on tape, OJ's post-raid banter was on tape, and the discussions of investigators were on tape, not to mention a telephone call OJ made to his daughter discussing one of the witnesses – all recorded surreptitiously. Given the dollar value of an OJ confession, one assumes that he no longer spends time with anyone who isn't hopefully wired for sound.

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