Twenty
years ago, a young black man walked into a pub in Bristol and
ordered a drink. Behind him, a gang of white youths started a chant:
Nig nogs on the starboard bow, starboard bow…
Straightforward, everyday racism. Only this time, it was caught on
camera and broadcast on BBC1.
Fast forward 20 years, and another young man walks into a mosque in
Birmingham, one apparently committed to interfaith dialogue. The
preacher, however, seems less than committed. Christians and Jews
are enemies to Muslims, he says. What about a gay man? Throw
him off the mountain. And women? Allah created the women
deficient. Again, all caught on film, this time broadcast on
Channel 4.
Two clear cases of antisocial, illiberal behaviour. But here's the
difference. Twenty years ago, Avon and Somerset Police were full of
praise for our undercover exposé; at last, people could see what
they were up against, that racism wasn't the invention of an
oversensitive race relations industry. How naïve we were to imagine
that such a sensible reaction would follow the broadcast of
Dispatches: Undercover Mosque.
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When the film was first shown, local politicians in the West
Midlands were understandably horrified. The police went to court to
obtain an order to go through our rushes, convinced there was enough
to investigate a possible breach of the law, including the
encouragement of terrorism.
We said they were wasting their time - what we had filmed was
offensive, but we couldn't see that it broke any laws. It was just
plain nasty, and clearly at odds with Green Lane Mosque's supposed
commitment to moderation. This was the job of investigative
journalism - to expose what was really going on, rather than what we
were being told was going on.
So it was no great surprise that we heard nothing for months. We
assumed it had all gone away. What we really didn't expect was a
press statement out of the blue from West Midlands Police and the
Crown Prosecution Service saying that not only did the featured
imams have no case to answer, but that they had turned their
attentions on us.
They had considered prosecuting us for inciting racial hatred, but
decided there wasn't quite enough evidence, so had referred the case
to Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator. A CPS lawyer, Bethan David,
made one of the most damaging allegations: The splicing together
of extracts from longer speeches, she was quoted as saying,
appears to have completely distorted what the speakers were saying.
Well, we knew all along what Ofcom has now shown to be the case,
that what was going on was the everyday television technique of
editing, reducing material to broadcast length. Distortion? At no
point in any of the diatribes we recorded, or broadcast from DVDs
and tapes, did any of the preachers renege on the offensive
statements they made in the film.
Context? No one from the West Midlands Police, the CPS or Green Lane
Mosque has yet given us the correct context for the notion that
women are born deficient, that homosexuals should be thrown off a
mountain or that young girls who refuse to wear the hijab should be
hit.
So what was the police's intervention about? Why did the police and
the CPS feel entitled to act as television critics and, in effect,
as potential censors of what we could watch? Clues to the motive, I
think, lie in the slightly sinister phrase "community cohesion".
Anil Patani, the Assistant Chief Constable who reported the
programme to Ofcom, is in charge of "cohesion" in the West Midlands
force. He said he was worried that those featured in the programme
"had been misrepresented".
His chief was worried that our alleged "distorted editing" would
create an unfair perception of sections of the Muslim community in
the West Midlands. Feelings of public reassurance and safety would
be undermined. (The feelings of gays and women, apparently, were not
so high on the agenda.)
But here's the strange thing. It emerged that, in the aftermath of
Dispatches: Undercover Mosque, the West Midlands Police
received no formal complaint about the programme. Not one.
I have now written to the DPP and the Chief Constable of the West
Midlands Police asking for an explanation for the highly damaging
allegations made in August - allegations that sought to undermine
legitimate investigative journalism and that unjustly blackened the
reputation of my company and my courageous and entirely honest team
of programme makers.
The lingering suspicion must be that here was a police force
over-anxious to placate local "community leaders" - and that those
efforts took precedence over protecting free speech.