Foul beliefs no barrier

May 18th, 2008 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Nick Cohen looks at what happened with ‘Undercover Mosque,’ specifically the interesting question of why the police and the Crown Prosecution service saw fit to accused channel 4 of making stuff up.

Its undercover journalists infiltrated radical mosques. They recorded assorted preachers calling for the subjugation of women, the murder of homosexuals and Jews, the replacement of the ‘man-made’ laws of a democracy with the religious edicts of a theocratic state and the eternal damnation of Muslims who did not follow Wahhabi doctrine and infidels who did not accept the true faith.

Well…that’s racist stuff, right? That must be why the cops got involved.

Haras Rafiq of the Sufi Muslim Council, said: ‘Wahhabis and their offshoots are teaching Muslim youngsters that America and Britain are against them and therefore they need to get up and fight with them. The radicalising power of this ideology is extremely dangerous.’ Abdal-Hakim Murad of Cambridge University described Saudi influence as ‘potentially lethal for the future of the community’.

Oh. Maybe not exactly racist then.

The many who were foolish enough to believe the police’s accusations must have accepted that, for instance, Ijaz Mian, who preaches in Derby, was a good democrat. Only trick camerawork and sly editing had turned him into the man who appeared in the film raving: ‘King, Queen, House of Commons. If you accept it then you are a part of it. You don’t accept it but you have to dismantle it. So you being a Muslim you have to fix a target, there will be no House of Commons.’ Similarly, when Abu Usamah of the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham bellowed on air: ‘Take that homosexual man and throw him off the mountain’, his apparently murderous homophobia was not a genuine expression of his prejudice, but a Truman Show illusion.

No but – but – they’re just blowing off a little steam. They have genuine grievances. They’re upset about western foreign policy. So – exposing them is a crime of some sort. Has to be.

In the case of Channel 4, however, the CPS and West Midlands police have never condescended to explain their behaviour to the public. The National Secular Society wants an inquiry to force them into the open. Until we get one, the best explanation lies in Patani’s title: assistant chief constable (security and cohesion).

Oh, gawd – cohesion again. Cohesion and community, the dread words of the contemporary UK. (Over here it’s faith and family. Different alliteration, you see.)

Since 9/11, not only police officers, but New Labour ministers, the Home Office, Foreign Office and pseudo-left journalists and councils have sought to promote ‘cohesion’ by appeasing Islamist groups which aren’t quite as extreme as al-Qaeda…Elements within the government thought that if they could co-opt the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-i-Islami and ignore their foul beliefs, they would isolate the terrorists to their right.

So you got years and years of sucking up to the all-male ‘leaders’ in the MCB. What. a. trainwreck.

South Asian and Middle Eastern women’s groups reported an increasingly widespread trend. Officials who should treat all women equally were deciding that where their community’s religious and cultural practices conflicted with the law, the law had to give way…A worker in a women’s group in the north, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, added she had been ‘appalled’ by an Asian ‘chief inspector who had offered to help a family track a girl down’. The report’s authors noticed that women’s groups appeared to have problems with one force in particular. It was the West Midlands police.

All for cohesion, nothing for women’s rights.

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