20071119

British broadcaster vindicated over "Undercover Mosque" documentary

"Ofcom rejects 'perverse' police complaints about C4 expose of Muslim extremists"-
UK Daily Mail
Watch scenes from the documentary program, "Undercover Mosque":



Media watchdog Ofcom has rejected complaints by West Midlands Police about a Channel 4 undercover programme that exposed extremism in British mosques.

The programme, called Undercover Mosque, was part of its current affairs Dispatches series and was broadcast in January. It featured TV footage of an Islamic preacher praising the death of a British soldier.

Police claimed that the programme had misrepresented the views of Muslim preachers and clerics with misleading editing.

Following the 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."

The programme featured undercover recordings from speakers alleged to be homophobic, anti-Semitic, sexist and condemnatory of non-Muslims.

Comments by imams in the film were: "Take that homosexual man and throw him off the mountain", "those whom the wrath of Allah is upon, is the Jew and the Christian", and "it takes two witnesses of a woman to equal the one witness of the man".

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