POLICE AS CENSORS?

21/08/2013 00:00
TW
0

by MONITOR
PERHAPS it was all just a misunderstanding but if so it should be cleared up quickly. Last week it became known that the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service had referred Channel 4 TV to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom because a documentary film, Undercover Mosque, which it showed last January, appeared to be open to the accusation that it would stir up racial hatred. The documentary included a number of recorded sermons by Islamic clerics in British mosques.

It is unusual, to say the least, to find the police trailing through TV programmes or, for that matter, newspapers, in search of racially inflammatory material.

But someone must have prompted the West Midlands Police to look at this documentary even though, in fact, what Channel 4 had done was to reveal Islamic clerics stirring up hatred against non-Muslims. For instance, the cleric Usa Musamah was caught on camera talking about the “kuffaar”, a derogatory term for non-Muslims: “No one loves the kuffaar. Not a single person here from the Muslims loves the Kuffaar. Whether those kuffaar are from the UK or the from the US. We love the people of Islam and hate the people of kuffaar. We hate the kuffaar.” Many people will think that the general public in Britain should have a better idea of what is being said in mosques and the Channel 4 film was designed to do this. The police should not be acting as TV censor.

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