Category Archives: UK

Sun defends ‘Undercover Mosque’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Channel 4 logo“TV documentary makers have had a rough ride lately, with claims of doctored footage. No allegations of this sort can be substantiated against Channel 4’s excellent Undercover Mosque.

“A highly professional team filmed preachers praising the Taliban for killing British soldiers and showed chilling propaganda against infidels and homosexuals…. The programme was in tune with authoritative surveys showing how young Muslims are being persuaded by imams and preachers to sympathise with terrorists.

“West Midlands police could have used some of the clips as evidence of glorifying terrorism. Instead, they urged the Crown Prosecution Service to put C4 in the dock for stirring up racial hatred … now Plod wants TV watchdogs Ofcom to step in.

“Why don’t they just get on with their job? And crack down on the fanatics who really are trying to stir up murderous feelings by turning gullible young Muslims into killing machines.”

Sun editorial, 9 August 2007

See also coverage in the Guardian, the Times, and the Telegraph.

And a statement by the Muslim Council of Britain.

See also the MCB statement from last January, when “Undercover Mosque” was broadcast. This accuses the programme makers of “resorting to the dishonest tactic of selectively quoting from some recorded speeches for the purpose of misrepresentation” – an accusation now endorsed by West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

Guantánamo inmates could finally go free

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Guantanamo inmatesHuman rights activists congratulated the Brown government on Tuesday for requesting the return of five British residents being detained at the US concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay. The Foreign Office and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith have announced that they will request the return to Britain of Jamil el-Banna, Omar Deghayes, Shaker Abdur Raheem Aamer, Binyam Mohammed and Abdennour Sameur. Foreign Secretary David Miliband has written to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to formally make the request.

Amnesty International campaigns director Tim Hancock called on the government to “move quickly. We’ve been saying for several years that Britain should have been seeking the fair trial or safe release of the British residents imprisoned at Guantánamo,” Mr Hancock pointed out. “Guantánamo is a travesty of justice and it’s important that the government starts speaking out about the hundreds of men who are still held there – they must not become Guantánamo’s forgotten prisoners,” he insisted.

Omar Deghayes’s sister Amina said that she was “getting mixed messages” and would not be able to celebrate until her brother is back in Britain. “Some people are telling me he is definitely coming back, but others are saying that they may not be successful for a while,” Ms Deghayes reported.

The British government has admitted that negotiations with Washington “may take some time.” US ambassador to London Robert Tuttle vowed to “study the request to release them very seriously and get back with all due, deliberate speed.”

Mr Aamer’s father-in-law Saeed Ahmed Siddique said that his family felt let down by the government because it had taken so long to seek his release. “The government should have done more because all his family members, his wife and four children are British nationals and it is not fair to separate a husband from his family,” Mr Siddique noted. “His youngest child has never seen his father. It’s not justice,” he added.

Progressive legal firm Reprieve, which has represented all five men in their challenges to their illegal detention, hailed “a significant change in British policy.” It noted that, until now, the British government had refused to intervene and had been standing in the way of cleared British residents – such as Mr el-Banna, who is the father of five British children – being allowed to return home to their families.

Reprieve legal director Clive Stafford Smith applauded the Brown government “on a huge step in the right direction. At last we are seeing an ethical foreign policy – action rather than words,” Mr Stafford Smith said. He added that, when the British government enforces human rights, “we have some chance of healing the rift with the Islamic world.”

Morning Star, 8 August 2007

Channel 4 accused of distortion over ‘Undercover Mosque’ programe

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Green Lane MosqueA documentary showing alleged extremist lectures at a Birmingham mosque “appears to have been completely distorted” by the film’s editors, lawyers said today.

Police today reported the makers of the Undercover Mosque programme to broadcasting watchdogs. No criminal charges are to be brought against any of the people featured in the programme.

The controversial Channel Four Dispatches programme featured footage of speakers allegedly delivering hate-filled lectures at Green Lane Mosque, in Small Heath. The programme sparked a six-month inquiry by West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service into three speakers and their comments in the programme.

But Crown Prosecution Service reviewing lawyer Bethan David said: “The splicing together of extracts from longer speeches appears to have completely distorted what the speakers were saying.” West Midlands Police has written to both Ofcom and Channel Four over the editing of the hour-long documentary.

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The radical Islamic group that acts as ‘conveyor belt’ for terror – Independent

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Shiv Malik continues the witch-hunt against Hizb ut-Tahrir. Although he comes down against a ban, the main thrust of his article is to provide a justification for it.

Independent on Sunday, 7 August 2005

Predictably, the authority quoted for the “conveyor belt” claim is US right-winger Zeyno Baran. As we have pointed out before with regard Ms Baran, she is associated with such reliable institutions as
National Review Online and The Counterterrorism Blog

See Yusuf Smith’s comments at Indigo Jo Blogs, 7 August 2005

Thousands more are stopped and searched after car bomb plot

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Stop and SearchPolice are stopping 366 people every day in London under stringent anti-terror powers described by the official security legislation watchdog as “a significant intrusion into personal liberties”.

The number of random checks carried out in the capital increased fivefold to almost 11,000 last month in the aftermath of attempted car bomb attacks, when the threat level was raised to severe.

Scotland Yard said yesterday that it was encouraging beat officers to use their stop-and-search powers more often and more widely to deter further terrorist attacks. Commander Rod Jarman predicted “an increase in overt counter-terrorism activities by the police over the coming months”.

Scotland Yard said that 54 per cent of those stopped last month were white, compared with a 71 per cent white population in Greater London. The proportion of people of Asian ethnicity stopped was 24 per cent – double the percentage in the capital’s population.

Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: “It is perhaps unsurprising that we have seen this massive increase in the number of stop-and-searches carried out in the immediate aftermath of the attempted car bomb attacks in June. However, questions remain regarding the actual effectiveness of such a strategy based on disruption – given the very low number of charges brought as a result – and whether it is actually doing more harm than good.”

Gareth Crossman, of Liberty, said: “Thousands of Terrorism Act stop-and-searches have produced hardly a single terrorism arrest. When not targeted against specific threats, Section 44 undermines community relations and wastes police resources.”

Times, 7 August 2007

Martin Bright repeats call for left-right alliance against ‘radical Islam’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

James Silver interviews Martin Bright, political editor of the New Statesman and obsessive enemy of the Muslim Council of Britain. It contains the welcome news that Bright’s contact in the FCO, from whom he acquired the internal documents used in his witch-hunt of “Islamists”, has been identified and arrested. Bright also explains why he chose the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange to publish his pamphlet When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries: “I believe a coalition of left and right need to be built around this issue.”

Guardian, 6 August 2007

Kids told to write ‘Allah is God’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Angry parents have blasted a teacher for telling ten-year-olds to copy a Muslim prayer saying ‘There is no God but Allah’. Helen Green is said to have picked the Muslim call to prayer as HAND-WRITING practice. It includes the lines ‘Allah is the greatest’ and ‘I bear witness that there is no God but Allah’.

“Pupil Billy Darbyshire’s stepmum Hayley Clayton said: ‘The explanation was that the children were learning about Islam in RE. But this was like he was taking an oath. A Muslim child would never be asked to write a Bible passage. Why didn’t she choose a passage from a normal story book to teach handwriting?’ Hayley, 23, said Mrs Green – deputy head of Newlands Primary School in Wakefield, West Yorks – had acknowledged it was a ‘sensitive issue’ because three of the 7/7 suicide bombers came from Leeds, 15 miles away.”

Sun, 6 August 2007

European mosque plans face protests

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Petitions in London, protests in Cologne, a court case in Marseille and a violent clash in Berlin – Muslims in Europe are meeting resistance to plans for mosques that befit Islam’s status as the continent’s second religion.

Across Europe, Muslims who have long prayed in garages and old factories now face skepticism and concern for wanting to build stately mosques to give proud testimony to the faith and solidity of their Islamic communities.

Some critics reject them as signs of “Islamisation”. Others say minarets would scar their city’s skyline. Given the role some mosques have played as centers for terrorists, others see Muslim houses of worship as potential security threats.

“The increasingly visible presence of Muslims has prompted questions in all European societies,” Tariq Ramadan, one of Europe’s leading Muslim spokesmen, argued when far-right groups proposed this year to ban minarets in his native Switzerland.

The issue hit the headlines in Britain in late July when a petition against a “mega-mosque” next to the 2012 London Olympics site was posted on Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Web site. It attracted more than 275,000 signatures before it was taken down.

In Germany last month, there were anti-mosque protests in Cologne and Berlin and a local council voted against one in Munich. A French far-right group vowed to sue the city of Marseille for a second time for helping build a “grand mosque”.

Bekir Alboga of the Turkish Islamic Union (DITIB) in Cologne said critics who see these new mosques as signs of separatism or of an Islamic colonization of Europe miss the point.

“The desire of Muslims to build a house of worship means they want to feel at home and live in harmony with their religion in a society they have accepted as theirs,” he said.

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Schools are run by Islamic group Blair pledged to ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Shiv Malik continues the witch-hunt of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Sunday Times, 5 August 2007

See also the article in the Sunday Times Review by Tory shadow home secretary David Davis, which falsely accuses Hizb ut-Tahrir of sympathising with the recent terrorist attacks in Glasgow and London (read HT statement here) and concludes by asking us to “expect further calls to ban it”. No prizes for guessing where those calls will come from.