THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: There are lots of stories running at the moment about how television makes things up to suit its purposes. It was into this pattern that prominent press reports on Thursday appeared to fit. The reports said that the Crown Prosecution Service and the West Midlands police had decided that a programme called Undercover Mosque, made for Dispatches on Channel 4, had "completely distorted" the remarks of Muslim preachers featured in the programme. The CPS and the police announced that they were making a complaint about the programme to the television regulator, Ofcom.
Few seemed to notice what a strange story this was. Why is it the business of the CPS or the police to make complaints, which are nothing to do with the law, about what appears on television? Aren't they supposed to be fighting crime, not acting as television critics?
When you poke around a bit, the story becomes a little clearer, but no less strange.
After the programme appeared earlier this year, many people who watched it were horrified by the extremism it depicted. It was, indeed, horrifying. The programme, all of whose material was collected, sometimes covertly, from British mosques, mainly in Birmingham, showed film, DVDs and internet messages from Islamist sermons and speeches. One preacher speaks of a British Muslim soldier killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan and says: "The hero is the one who separated his head from his shoulders." Another says that all Jews will be killed at the end of time, and makes a snorting noise as if imitating a pig.
One pronounces that woman is "deficient" and that homosexual men should be "thrown off the mountain", another that children should offer themselves for Islamic martyrdom, a third that Aids was deliberately spread in Africa by Christian missionaries who slipped it into inoculations.
As a result of all this, people, including, I believe, local MPs, asked the police to investigate the preachers to see if prosecutions for crimes of racial hatred could be brought against them. C4 itself did not ask for these investigations, but co-operated with police inquiries.
But then, on Wednesday, without any warning to Channel 4, the CPS and the West Midlands police issued their fatwa. Not only had they investigated, and decided, as they were entitled to do, that there were no charges to bring against people featured in the programme: they also announced that they had investigated the programme itself for stirring up racial hatred.
Again, they had decided not to press charges. But, said West Midlands police smugly, they had pursued the making of the programme "with as much rigour as the extremism portrayed within the documentary itself". They had concluded that comments had been "broadcast out of context" and so they and the CPS had complained to Ofcom. Stirring up racial hatred – not the medium (more) By Charles Moore
Mark Alexander
