Channel 4’s documentary “Undercover Mosque” was great investigative journalism, claims Andrew Anthony.
For earlier coverage of Andrew Anthony see here and here.
And over at the Daily Telegraph, “Undercover Mosque” also receives the backing of Charles Moore, who complains that “the West Midlands police and the Crown Prosecution Service decide that the target of their wrath should be not people who want to undermine this country, but some journalists who want to expose them”.
Yet another article by an ex-Islamist, this one by Shiraz Maher, a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, in the Sunday Times.
These articles follow the same formula. A connection is drawn between HT and acts of terrorism, and HT is presented as typical of “political Islam”. There appears to be an endless demand from the media for such “exposés”. Strangely enough, there is no equivalent market for articles pointing out that HT is a non-violent organisation which rejects terrorism and that its abstentionist position towards mainstream politics in the UK is rejected in favour of active engagement by most of those individuals and organisations whose political commitment is inspired by Islam.
Meanwhile, over at BBC News, a report on a Hizb ut-Tahrir conference in Jakarta states regarding HT: “Many experts see it as ideologically close to jihadist groups, and suspect its commitment to peaceful means is purely tactical.”
“The sordid world of Muslim Asian grooming of white under-age girls has been ‘exposed’ in the mainstream press; three years after the BNP first brought this scandal to the public attention. Today’s Sunday Times carries a report on the jailing of Zulfqar Hussain, 46, and Qaiser Naveed, 32, from east Lancashire, after exploiting two girls aged under 16 by plying them with alcohol and drugs before having sex with them….
“Fear of offending the Muslim communities appears to take precedence over helping our young daughters but every single craven police officer, every council official who fails to act in the interests of justice is as guilty as the Muslim predator who defiles a white schoolgirl.
“Labour MP Anne Cryer robustly said that there is a cultural difference: ‘I think there is a problem with the view Asian men generally have about white women. Their view about white women is generally fairly low’.”
Racist incidents across Scotland have soared following the terrorist attack on Glasgow Airport. New figures reveal a surge in cases of violent attacks, abuse and harassment in the four weeks after the car bombing, with the worst cases including attempts to blow up an Asian shop and a mosque.
The biggest increase has been recorded in the Strathclyde region, where there were more than 250 incidents, of which more than 10% were directly linked to the airport attack on June 30.
Politicians and Muslim leaders in Scotland said the attacks showed that a minority of people were targeting Asians because they wrongly believed they are potential terrorists. Other members of the Asian community claim that the real number of attacks is much higher, with many incidents going unreported to the police.
Scottish Muslims have balked at the staging of a satirical musical about “Islamic rebels” fearing it would strengthen Islamophobia against the backdrop of the failed Glasgow airport bombing. Sohaib Saeed, Manager of the Islam Festival Edinburgh (IFE), said of the musical that it would “make negative perceptions of Islam worse”. Saeed insisted Muslims should not be placed in one basket. “I urge producers and writers to make a difference between extremists and other people practising the faith,” he said.
The satirical show “Jihad the Musical” had its first world premiere at the Edinburgh festival at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the world’s largest arts festival, last Wednesday. The show tells the story of an Afghan peasant who becomes “brainwashed” by a Jihadi gang and features songs such as “I want to be like Osama” and “I only see your eyes”.
Saeed criticised the idea of staging a light-hearted entertainment about terror so soon after the Glasgow plot. “How can you make jokes of terrorism and laugh about people teaching extremism and preaching violent acts against innocent people?” He also disagreed with the British writer of the Lyrics, Zoe Samuel, who argued that the performance would appeal to the British tradition of laughing in the face of adversity.
“I cannot see what positive contributions such a musical would make to society or how we can call it a positive entertainment as it addresses a sensitive issue like terrorism,” he said. “They are making terrorism a joke. Many people were killed in terrorist operations. Many people will see the musical upsetting as it makes fun of a serious problem. All people are still trying to get to grips with terrorism; they want to understand what is going on to remove the scourge.”
Racist attacks against Muslims in Scotland have risen by almost one third in the wake of last month’s terrorist attempt at Glasgow airport.
A British resident held by the US as an alleged terrorist has claimed his captors repeatedly tortured him, subjecting him to beatings, sexual abuse and threats of execution.
Omar Deghayes, 37, is one of five British residents who the United Kingdom government last week asked the US to release from Guantanámo Bay, after years of refusing to help them because they were not UK citizens.
Yesterday the family of Mr Deghayes decided to release a detailed dossier of alleged torture which the former law student dictated to a lawyer who visited him in the Cuban internment camp.
The Ramadhan Foundation welcomes the complaint made by West Midlands Police to Ofcom that Channel 4 may have distorted the views of the people interviewed in the Dispatches programme Undercover Mosque (Channel 4 under fire over film on mosque preachers, August 9).
We totally condemn Channel 4 for its arrogance in defending this programme, when it was clear to us that the makers had taken contributions out of context and edited speeches.
We urge Channel 4 to suspend all the Dispatches programmes immediately so that corrective action can be taken to ensure that this sort of journalism is eliminated.
The Ramadhan Foundation has always been very clear that the mosques have an important role in promoting tolerance and peaceful coexistence, but to use these sensitive issues to demonise Muslims shown in the programme is shocking and deeply disturbing. There can be no justification for this kind of journalism. The complaint is total vindication for the Muslim organisations which complained that the Undercover Mosque programme had taken the views of contributors out of context.
Channel 4 should apologise immediately for the hurt they have caused those people. Channel 4 has given journalism a bad name and this adds to their failings over the past few months. We will also be urging Ofcom to investigate Channel 4’s behaviour.
Mohammed Shafiq
Ramadhan Foundation, Rochdale
Letter in Guardian, 10 August 2007
Inayat Bunglawala and others reply to Geoffrey Alderman’s article in last week’s JC.
“The atheist comedian Pat Condell (who we are pleased to say is a member of the NSS) placed a five minute ‘video monologue’ entitled ‘The Trouble with Islam’ on the web and it has now scored over a million hits. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look.
“Pat Condell reveals: ‘It has also received well over 100,000 hits on YouTube, proving that there is an enthusiastic audience for comedy ideas and opinions which are routinely censored out of existence in the UK’s mainstream media, thanks to misguided political correctness.’
“In May this year, members of the City of Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission drew widespread ridicule when they publicly condemned the video as racist hate speech.”
National Secular Society Newsline, 10 August 2007
Well, you can understand why Condell’s bigoted rant would attract a lot of traffic, given the way it has been enthusiastically embraced by the racist Right, including fascists. See for example here.
For the Berkeley controversy, see here.
When the Channel 4 documentary “Undercover Mosque” was broadcast last January it received an enthusiastic response from right-wing Islamophobes.
Guardian journalist Jemima Kiss reported that an online video of the Dispatches programme had been “leapt on by anti-Muslim bloggers, and the weight of traffic even threatened to bring down the infamous Little Green Footballs for a while”.
The British National Party was particularly taken with the documentary, which of course helped legitimise the fascists’ ravings about the Islamic threat to Western civilisation. The BNP website directed its supporters to a video of the programme, while Der Führer himself Nick Griffin sent off a pompous letter to West Midlands Police and the Met calling for the preachers “exposed” in the programme to be prosecuted and the mosques closed down.
So you can understand the fascists’ disappointment at the outcome of the West Midlands Police investigation. A news article on the BNP website solidarises with the progamme makers and expresses indignation that the police “at one stage bizarrely considered charging Channel 4 for broadcasting material likely to stir up racial hatred”.