Shooting the Messenger

The Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham, UK, originally a library built in 1890

Back in January, Britain's Channel 4 ran a documentary called "Undercover Mosque" which filmed many radical statements by Imams and other speakers, mostly at the Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham, UK. Some examples:

"Whoever changes his religion from Islam to anything else, kill him in the Islamic state. If the imam wants to crucify him he should crucify him"

"God help us in our fight against the kafir [a non-Muslim], in every field, in every department of life. We beg you to help us fight against the enemies of our religion."

"The time is fast approaching where the tables are going to turn and the Muslims are going to be in the position of being uppermost in strength and, when that happens, people won't get killed - unjustly."

You get the idea.

Since the UK has pretty strict laws against hate speech, you would think that the authorities might be interested here. After all, how much more hate can you find than this?:

No one loves the kafir. No one loves the kafir! Not a single person here from the Muslims, love the kafir. Whether those kafir are from the UK, or from the US - We love the peope of Islam, and we hate the people of kafir. We hate the kafir!

Well, the authorities investigated, and strangely, found no evidence of wrongdoing - on the part of the mosques involved. They then decided to file a formal complaint against...the TV producers!

From their official statement:

West Midlands Police Assistant Chief Constable Anil Patani, said: "As a result of our initial findings, the investigation was then extended to include issues relating to the editing and portrayal of the documentary.

"The priority has been to investigate the documentary and its making with as much rigour as the extremism the programme sought to portray."

Their theory is that the television program stirred up ethnic hatred, by presenting the subjects in an unfair light:

"The splicing together of extracts from longer speeches appears to have completely distorted what the speakers were saying."

Well, here's the problem with that. How do you splice a comment like this or take it out of context?:

in response to the news that a British Muslim solider was killed fighting the Taliban, the speaker was filmed saying: "The hero of Islam is the one who separated his head from his shoulders."

The subjects of the video had their own complaints:

Abu Usamah, one of the preachers from Green Lane Mosque featured in the programme, said he was shocked when he saw himself depicted...

"To try and demonise the efforts of these people by taking their comments out of context was shocking."

Mr Usamah said he had been featured as saying homosexuals should be thrown from a mountain when in fact he was explaining it was an opinion featured in some books, which was not one he believed.

OK, let me get this straight. This Imam is preaching things in his own mosque that he doesn't believe? He was only speaking about innocent hypotheticals? That's just about the lamest excuse I have ever heard, but I guess it's the only one he can fall back on when faced with his own words on video.

In any case, the Crown Prosecution Service, showing a little sanity, advised the police that there was not enough evidence to charge Channel 4 with a crime. But this police force decided to try and find other ways to harass the producers (with the likely goal of stifling any new documentaries from exposing the Islamic fundamentalists again):

West Midlands Police have taken account of this advice and explored options available to them and has now referred the matter to the broadcasting regulators Ofcom as a formal complaint.

"Ofcom" is the Office of Communications, that handles formal complaints against the media in the UK.

In any case, going after the television producers requires quite a strange leap of logic - since Channel 4 only reported the offensive remarks, why would you prosecute them without prosecuting those that actually made these remarks?

Well, the names of some of the officials involved might give us a little clue. Anyone want to take a bet on what religion the above-mentioned Police Assistant Chief Constable "Anil Patani" is? Or how about "Lord Ahmed" (also known as Nazir Ahmed)?:

Lord Ahmed, the convener of the government's Preventing Extremism taskforce, said he was worried about the programme's consequences.

Nazir Ahmed is a labour peer of Rotherham in the UK's house of lords, but was born in Pakistan. He is a controversial figure, having made his public oath on the Koran. He was intensely critical to the knighthood awarded to Salman Rushdie and once called the 9/11 hijackers "martyrs".

Incidentally, UK commentators points out some of the double standards involved, since the police prosecuted the BNP last year, over less inflammatory remarks.

Finally, this war on free speech in the UK is not exactly a fluke. It's happening again:

The Metropolitan Police said on Wednesday that a second Dispatches programme was also being investigated.

Britain Under Attack featured a man known as "Abu Mohammed".

He disguised his face with a scarf in the programme, which was shown on Monday, and said British Muslims were in "a state of war" and the 7 July bombings were "justified".

A Met spokesman said: "We are assessing the content of a Dispatches programme broadcast on Monday 6 August to determine if any offences may have been disclosed."

Also, some great comments on this story here.




Interested in reading more? Click on any of the labels below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my  RSS Feed