During 2003 and 04 Islamophobia in Britain had more or less doubled yet the three years for which Dr Stone had revived the Islamophobia Commission after he came out of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry were coming to an end and two final reports were published in 2004. New ways of addressing Islamophobia were needed and Dr Stone taking on the slogan “the personal is the political” recognised that all non-Muslim communities need, for the sake of all who live in Britain, to reach out to British Muslim communities to make positive contacts in whatever seemed appropriate. As a middle class white middle-aged man, he gathered a small group of British Jews to meet with some of the many British Muslims who had shown an extra interest in him as Chair of the Islamophobia Commission by recognising that he always introduced himself as Chair of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality. For many of the eighty per cent of British Muslims whose families come from the Indian sub-continent, he was the first Jew he had met. Some Muslims were involved in dynamic positive activities with British Jews.

It took years of quiet, steady listening and dialogue for a core group of about sixty people, to develop relationships of trust and friendship to the point that they felt they could produce a Manifesto of positive contact between the two communities which, incidentally, could act as a good practice model not just for non-Muslims and Muslims, but also for all communities in the UK which find themselves divided from each other, often by events spilling over from abroad.

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