Spooks Islamophobia complaints rejected
MediaGuardian Thursday July 31 2003
BBC1 spy drama Spooks today escaped censure by TV watchdogs after viewers accused the programme of promoting offensive stereotypes and inciting racial hatred.
Viewers contacted the corporation to complain about a controversial episode broadcast on June 9, which featured a radical Muslim cleric recruiting suicide bombers and making inflammatory anti-western speeches from a fictional Birmingham mosque.
In the programme, which was watched by 7.8 million viewers, a 16-year-old Muslim boy strapped with explosives wandered in a brainwashed daze around a playground before blowing himself up.
Muslim students were also shown shouting "death to America" and "death to infidels".
After the Spooks episode was shown the BBC received about 1,000 complaints, understood to be the highest number for a single drama this year.
Inayat Bunglawala, the secretary of the media committee of the Muslim Council of Britain, wrote to the BBC1 controller, Lorraine Heggessey, complaining the show "pandered to grossly offensive and Islamophobic caricatures of imams, Muslim students and mosques" and "served to reinforce many negative stereotypes of British Muslims".
The broadcasting standards commission cleared the programme although it admitted some Muslims would have found it "an affront to their faith and dignity".
The BSC said it had decided not to uphold the complaints despite acknowledging concerns at the "excessive emphasis on the tiny minority advocating violence in the name of Islam".
The watchdog said: "While expressing sympathy with the complainant's concerns, the BSC considered this programme had been clearly presented as a drama, rather than a factual account.
"As in other episodes of the series, the extremists had been clearly labelled as such. While the imam of the mosque was shown as a corrupt character, the drama also contained sympathetic Muslim characters."
The BSC said it decided the drama was not Islamophobic, nor did it suggest followers of Islam were prepared to resort to violence.
Police complaints over mosque documentary rejectedNov 19 2007
Media watchdog Ofcom has rejected complaints by West Midlands Police about a Channel 4 undercover programme that exposed extremism in British mosques. Police claimed that the Dispatches programme had misrepresented the views of Muslim preachers and clerics in Birmingham with misleading editing.
Following today's ruling, the broadcaster called the police's actions "perverse" and said they had, in some people's eyes, given "legitimacy to people preaching a message of hate".
Ofcom said: "Undercover Mosque was a legitimate investigation, uncovering matters of important public interest. Ofcom found no evidence that the broadcaster had misled the audience or that the programme was likely to encourage or incite criminal activity.
"On the evidence (including untransmitted footage and scripts), Ofcom found that the broadcaster had accurately represented the material it had gathered and dealt with the subject matter responsibly and in context."
**Case never should have been brought, plain & simple a massive waste of police time, tax payers money and has just given support to mad jihadists here in the UK.
I covered this here and can be viewed here
and some more here
A handy Jens Byskov award go's to the police asshat who thought of bringing this case.
Anyway some amusement with "Strangers on my flight."
Not that all moslems are trying to kill us off, some know how to rave it up big time...
Tags: Islam
Jihad
Channel 4
Grand Mufti
Haras Rafiq
Dr Al Alawi
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