mediawatchwatch.org.uk

A German author has announced that he wants to read aloud from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses inside a Cologne mosque.

The author and investigative journalist Günter Wallraff, 64, famous for his undercover investigations uncovering social injustice, has denied that he wants to provoke the city’s Muslims. He considers his friend Rushdie’s book to be a masterpiece. The Muslim public should be talking about it, but instead it “currently is condemning something it does not know about.”

The secretary of the local Ditib religious foundation, Bekir Alboga, said the board was considering the proposal.

Channel 4’s Dispatches show last week exposed the growth of Christian fundamentalism in the UK. The predicted backlash has begun, with various bodies declaring their disappointment and anger.

Stephen Green was the first to get his word in, with a bitter press release in which he basically claimed that he was too deep for the documentary makers to understand. He concludes by expressing his bafflement at the Dispatches “peculiar” editorial policy:

where militant Islam in all its horror can be exposed one moment, then its peaceful Christian opponents are castigated the next.

On the contrary, both Undercover Mosque and In God’s Name fit neatly into a series of documentaries about dangerous idiots talking nonsense.

Joel Edwards, the outgoing director of the Evangelical Alliance, branded Green an “extremist” in an open letter to Channel 4. He also said Andrea Williams may have been “naive and controversial”, but did not appear to disagree with any of her views. Indeed, if you asked Mr Edwards how old the earth is – a question that is becoming a shibboleth for rationality – it is highly likely that he will prevaricate, just like Andrea and the headmaster of that creationist school in Bristol, before finally plumping for a figure around the 6,000 year mark.

Finally, the Christian Broadcasting Council complained that the recent rationalist victories in parliament concerning the Human Tissue and Embryos Bill were largely due to negative media coverage of the Christian position, particularly Dispatches, which

was wrong to pour ridicule and scorn on those who hold to Christian values. It was a wrong use of investigative journalism, presented as facts to the general public.

Actually, those Christians featured in the programme dug their own holes, much like the imams in Undercover Mosque. It is notable how similar to each other the Christians and Muslims sound in their complaints.

The backlash from In God’s Name, Channel 4’s latest religious-bigot-exposing documentary, has not yet begun – but it will be interesting to compare it to the uproar caused when the bigots being exposed were Muslims (as in Undercover Mosque), rather than Christians. MWW predicts that a handful of complaints to Ofcom about bias/misrepresentation will be made, then dismissed. And that will be the end of it.

It was an excellent documentary. Informative and entertaining at the same time. Stephen “Bird Shit” Green featured quite prominently (watch the doc to understand the new nickname, or read Bartholomew’s review), and he cut a rather pathetic figure. Almost pathologically obsessed with his image, he veered from cheerful bonhomie to the edge of violent irritation. He is obviously such a disturbed personality – a tragic example of the damage religion can do to the weak-minded – that we that almost felt bad about making fun of him so much. Almost.

But Andrea Minichiello Williams of the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship was the real star of the show. More media-savvy than any of the others, she was shown frantically running around an “pro-life” demo trying to get the cameras to stop filming the loonier elements of her natural constituency. But even she floundered when asked such basic questions as “How old is the earth?” (she reckons about 4,000 years) and “Is Islam the work of the Devil?” (she almost certainly thinks so, but does not want to say it in front of a camera).

We await the response with eager anticipation.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeTfW8-dCNE&feature=PlayList&p=6D4B9922B0593615&index=0&playnext=1[/youtube]

Bishop Nazir-Ali of Rochester, having made some comments critical of the socially divisive effects of Islamic extremism, gets death threats. The letters “Q”, “E” and “D” spring to mind.

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Channel 4’s Undercover Mosque, which recorded imams making hateful speeches to congregations in a Birmingham mosque and was as a result subjected to a slanderous barrage of abuse from Muslim groups and – most outrageously – a display of gesture-policing in the form of a bogus investigation by the West Midlands Police, has been nominated for a Royal Television Society award.

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Mediawatch-UK, the self-appointed authorities on what adults should and should not be permitted to watch on TV and in cinemas, is urging Catholics to support a private members bill by Julian Brazier MP (Canterbury), which aims to make the British Board of Film Classification more accountable to Parliament. They hope this will help stem the tide of filth engulfing the nation as a direct result of the BBFC’s depraved libertinism.

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Legalistic cyber-bullying raises its pig-ugly head again, this time in the form of a lawyer’s letter from Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) to Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads. Tim had posted an article accusing Guido of “stealing images and bandwidth”. Bartholomew notes with some amusement, Staines has already admitted to “ripping off images” anyway. But the real point is that the firing off of intimidating lawyer’s letters over such a trivial matter is the act of a cry-baby slimeball which brings shame upon us all. Grow up, Staines.

Channel 4 has responded robustly to the West Midlands Police and Crown Prosecution service. In last night’s Channel 4 News Krishnan Guru-Murthy investigated the CPS’s claim that Undercover Mosque “completely distorted” what the speakers had said by interviewing one of them – Abu Usamah At-Thahabi.

As the accusations are about misrepresenting the views of those filmed, Guru-Murthy asked Abu Usamah:

Which of these views that ‘women are deficient’, that ‘non-Muslims are pathological liars and terrorists’ and that and that ‘homosexuals are dogs that should be murdered’ do you not believe?

You can marvel at the demented imam’s squirming question-avoidance by downloading the 13-minute report from Channel 4’s website (if you are using Windows XP with IE 5.5 or 6 and WMP 10, that is).

Dispatches commissioning editor Kevin Sutcliffe is also interviewed. He continued to express bafflement at the police complaints, saying that they have presented “no evidence” that the views of the speakers had been distorted, or that Channel 4 deliberately tried to “undermine community relations”. Responding to Guru-Murthy’s observation that his integrity has been impugned by the police accusations, he replied

I will take advice from my legal department.

As Bartholomew notes, this would not be the first time the UK police have responded to a TV documentary with an investigation, only to turn on the documentary-maker:

In 1999 Donal MacIntyre went undercover for a programme about the abuse of adults with learning disabilities in care homes in Kent: when the subsequent police investigation floundered, they accused MacIntyre of wasting police time. MacIntyre sued for libel and won.

Tonight’s Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, Undercover Mosque , has prompted a pre-emptive squeal of paranoid outrage from Muhammad Abdul Bari, the Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain.

Channel 4 sent an undercover reporter into a few high-profile mosques and recorded Saudi-trained imams preaching radical nonsense about democracy, jihad, and how women are intellectually deficient.

Bari sees an evil media conspiracy at work behind the scenes:

From the latest transcript it is clear that Monday’s heavily hyped ‘Dispatches’ is an attempt to forment [sic] sectarian divisions among British Muslims

begins the press release. Indeed, it is easy to imagine a cabal of media conspirators sitting around a table figuring out ways to promote division among British Muslims – after they have fulfilled their “malicious agenda” against Christianity and succeeded in their “deliberate attempt to dilute the thinking of ordinary Hindus”.

Or maybe some religious groups adopt the status of persecuted victim in an attempt to silence any negative criticism of their faith? Hmm… which is the more likely scenario?

Bari does not attempt to deny that several outwardly moderate mosques have given platforms to some seriously nutty imams. What he is saying is that Channel 4 should shut up about it.

Undercover Mosque is broadcast tonight at 8pm.

Back in 2005 the MCB complained to Ofcom about a BBC documentary called “A Question of Leadership”. Ofcom dropped the investigation because the MCB did not provide the appropriate written authority to act on behalf of the named individuals they said they were complaining on behalf of, and also failed to complete a complaint form.