New Undercover Mosque programme finds that little has changed
Hate-mongering continues unabated
Channel 4 is to broadcast a follow-up to its controversial documentary Dispatches: Undercover Mosque. The new programme shows that, apparently, little has changed in the intervening period.
The original programme used hidden cameras to expose the shocking extent of hate-mongering going on in mosques throughout Britain. After the broadcast of the original programme, Channel Four gave its evidence to the West Midlands Police (most of the worst examples of extremism had been filmed on its patch) on the assumption that they would want to prosecute the miscreants.
But instead of pursuing the imams who were inciting hatred and murder, the West Midlands Police tried to prosecute the programme-makers for “inciting religious hatred” against Muslims. When this failed, West Midlands police referred the critically acclaimed programme to media regulator Ofcom and, in conjunction with the Crown Prosecution Service, issued a statement saying the words of three preachers featured had been “heavily edited” so their meaning was “completely distorted”.
The NSS protested at the time that neither the CPS nor West Midlands Police had any business making such a complaint. Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the NSS, said: “We tried to complain to several different police bodies about the behaviour of West Midlands Police but in each instance our complaint was ruled inadmissible because we were a third party.”
Predictably, Ofcom cleared the programme of any attempt to mislead and said it had been a responsible piece of investigative journalism and added that the complaints had been orchestrated. The programme-makers sued, and the West Midlands police and the Crown Prosecution Service were made to pay out a six-figure sum to Channel 4 and Hardcash, the independent producer responsible for the documentary.
Hardcash has now followed up the original programme, to be broadcast on Channel 4 on September 1 at 8pm. It finds that very little has changed. In the new film, a female reporter attends prayer meetings at a mainstream British mosque which claims to be dedicated to moderation and “dialogue with other faiths”.
According to Channel 4, “she secretly films sermons given to the women-only congregation in which female preachers recite extremist and intolerant beliefs”.
In one scene, as hundreds of women and some children come to pray, a preacher calls for adulterers, homosexuals, women who act like men and Muslim converts to other faiths to be killed, saying: “Kill him, kill him. You have to kill him, you understand. This is Islam.”
Channel 4 also said that in the same mosque, “the reporter visits the bookshop and discovers books and DVDs still on sale, promoting extremist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and intolerant messages”.
The undercover reporter also “films inside a key Saudi-funded Muslim organisation, which claims to promote tolerance and integration yet distributes literature which promotes intolerance for non-Muslims, an extreme version of sharia law and teachings which support discrimination against women”.
In addition, Undercover Mosque: The Return also “investigates the role of the Saudi Arabian religious establishment in spreading a hard-line, fundamentalist Islamic ideology in the UK – the very ideology the government claims to be tackling”.
Keith Porteous Wood commented: “Let us hope that this time the police and the CPS are going to pursue the real criminals in this matter. The Government introduced the Racial and Religious Hatred Act to protect Muslims from hatred, but who is going to protect everyone else from the hate-mongering going on in even Britain’s supposedly most respectable mosques? Let the police and CPS demonstrate to the public that the religiously aggravated and hatred offences are not off limits to any section of the community.”
See also: Taxpayers’ millions poured into mosques to try to make them behave
29 August 2008
