Andrew Gilligan

Why does the BBC air Islamist propaganda?

The Islamic Forum of Europe is decried by most Muslims as vicious and unrepresentative, says Andrew Gilligan. So why did Any Questions air its views?

Down at that self-proclaimed centre of ‘tolerance and harmony’, the East London Mosque, they’ve been holding some pretty tolerant and harmonious meetings lately. On 9 July last year, for instance, there was the half-day conference on ‘social ills’. One of the ‘social ills’ — with an entire session to itself — was ‘music’, described by one of the speakers, Haitham al-Haddad, as a ‘prohibited and fake message of love and peace’.

Then there was the talk, on 26 June, by a certain Bilal Philips — named by the US government as an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And if that particular outrage was a little too small-time for the dedicated holy warrior — only six people died — the East London Mosque was also kind enough to host, on 1 January last year, a video address by Anwar al-Awlaki, spiritual leader to two of the 9/11 hijackers. This event was advertised with a poster showing Manhattan under bombardment.

Over the past 12 months, the East London Mosque has hosted at least 18 hate, fundamentalist and extremist speakers, many of them more than once. Over the past few years, there have been dozens — all approved, and many explicitly endorsed, by the mosque authorities themselves (in March 2008, for instance, Mr Philips was invited to deliver the Friday sermon). But perhaps the most bizarre event of all involved that notorious apostle of jihad, Jonathan Dimbleby, and the hated extremist propaganda network, BBC Radio 4.

Last week Any Questions, the station’s flagship political discussion show, conferred the honour and prestige of its presence on a mosque whose true nature can be found with little more than a Google search. Less than five weeks before the programme, the very hall from which it was broadcast hosted a speaker, Murtaza Khan, who has called for women who use perfume to be flogged.

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