Alasdair Palmer’s column in The Sunday Telegraph on the whole Undercover Mosque business is essential reading. Undercover Mosque was the Channel 4 programme which revealed the extremism that was being preached inside a Mosque in Birmingham. Rather than examine that, the West Midlands Police decided to investigate the programme makers. It ended up referring the programme to Ofcom; claiming that it had “misrepresented” the preachers featured in the programme and had “undermined community cohesion”. This, worryingly, suggested that West Midlands Police wanted to set itself up as some sort of censor, controlling what could and could not be said in public.
The programme makers had, though, behaved entirely properly. West Midlands police has had to pay out a significant sum to charity to settle a libel suit from the programme makers who, understandably, objected to the charge that they had distorted anything.
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