Mick Hartley

Nick Cohen seems to have inside information about the forthcoming Ofcom ruling on the Channel 4 Undercover Mosque documentary. His article’s about the malign influence of Saudi petrodollars:

As with the Satanic Verses, Brick Lane, Behzti and the Danish cartoons, it is a little hard to see why Undercover Mosque provoked a fuss when you go back to the original. The camera shows Abu Usama, at the Saudi-influenced Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, denouncing unbelievers and saying of women: ‘Allah has created the woman, even if she gets a PhD, deficient. Her intellect is incomplete, deficient.’

The shots of the Saudi clerics pouring out their loathing of unbelievers are all genuine. So too are the pamphlets and DVDs that attack women, Jews, Christians and explain that Aids is a Western plot. They are available at the bookshop of London’s Regent’s Park mosque, which was built with Saudi money and is run by a Saudi diplomat.

With Blue Peter lying to children, condemnations of TV fakery are all the rage at the moment. But the rules governing television documentaries remain incredibly tight. Channel 4 stuck to them. It substantiated every allegation and then gave the people it criticised a right of reply. Even so, the West Midlands police referred it to the television watchdog and, in the process, sent a message to other journalists thinking of exposing religious extremism to back off if they didn’t want the cops on their case as well.

I could, if I wanted, go into a despairing peroration about a country so blinded by greed and stupefied by relativism it allows its police officers and libel lawyers to turn on those who report on hate-spouting imams.

Fortunately, there are a few grounds for optimism. Ofcom will rule on Undercover Mosque in a few weeks and it looks like it will dismiss as laughable the West Midlands police’s claims that Channel 4 framed innocent preachers. The 56 hours of film shot by the documentary makers show that the crew didn’t turn tolerant men into howling bigots by using trick camera work and crafty editing but merely reported what its journalists found.

The Crown Prosecution Service, whose lawyers played an ignoble role in this attack on investigative journalism, seems to have realised it has gone too far and is telling anyone who will listen that the complaint to Ofcom is the sole responsibility of the West Midlands police.

More cheeringly, moderate British Muslims are soon to lead an overdue attack on Saudi influence as the result of a long inquiry they have conducted. They are finding the courage to do what the Attorney General, high court, West Midlands police and Crown Prosecution Service won’t do and stand up for the best values of their country.

Let’s hope he’s right.