Religious 'double standards' at the BBC

[Teddy Bear]

Richard Littlejohn writing in the Daily Mail notes the double standard at the BBC and how they feel free to persecute all religions with the notable exception of Islam.

Lyrical terrorist is no Joan of Arc
00:09am 7th December 2007
Comments (5)

The case of Samina Malik, the so- called "lyrical terrorist", has become a cause celebre.

According to some sections of the media, this woman is a modern-day Joan of Arc.

Malik was convicted at the Old Bailey of terrorism-related offences and was last night given a pathetic nine-month suspended sentence.

Is it any wonder Osama bin Laden thinks we don't have the stomach for the fight?

Most comment has centred upon a book of her poetry in which she fantasises about beheadings.

It is claimed she's a victim of thought crime, persecuted for what she thinks, not what she has done or was intending to do.

Cue Dr Abdul Bari, the senna-haired, Spike Milligan-lookalike " secretary-general" of the Muslim Council of Britain, who protests she has been criminalised merely for harbouring "silly thoughts".

He warns of serious consequences for the Government's plans to win "hearts and minds" and persuade young Muslims to reject the overtures of terrorists.

Malik has found enthusiastic supporters in the Press and the BBC. A soppy bird in The Times argued that her conviction was an "affront to society".

Another Times columnist, the admirable Matthew Parris, has equated her to the students who demonstrated in 1968 against the Vietnam War and suggested that she has been singled out for victimisation because of her faith and skin colour.

If writing leaden poems was all the Old Bill had on her, I'd be inclined to agree.

But there's more, much more.

The BBC sent a reporter to the street where she lives in Southall to solicit local opinion.

Inconveniently, and instructively, they found not all her neighbours shared the bien pensant view of a misguided innocent falling foul of a heavy-handed police state.

Malik was described on the BBC as a shop assistant from West London.

Which is true, up to a point. But that's a bit like describing the failed July 21 suicide bombers as "commuters".

What they didn't mention is that she works at Heathrow Airport, in W.H. Smith.

Anyone who has flown out of Heathrow, or any other British airport recently, will have been seriously inconvenienced by draconian security measures imposed after an Islamist plot to blow up transatlantic airliners was thwarted last year.

Millions of travellers over Christmas and the New Year face interminable queues and body searches.

Woe betide anyone who cracks a joke going through the screening process.

Prominent posters warn that any passenger talking about carrying a bomb, knife or any other weapon - even in jest - will be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

On the back of a till roll, Malik had written that "the desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom".

Would you take the risk? Imagine if the police had ignored it, or dismissed this as the ramblings of a "silly girl".

And then a couple of days later she'd made fantasy a reality, walked into the crowded terminal with a couple of pounds of Semtex and a box of two-inch nails in her handbag, lit the blue touchpaper and blown herself and God knows how many holidaymakers and airport workers to Kingdom Come.

Still think this is about free speech? Well, it wasn't just poetry.

Malik was a regular contributor to terrorist websites.

She was also found to be in possession of seditious material - including the Al Qaeda Manual, the Terrorist's Handbook, the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook, instructions in the use of a Dragunov sniper rifle, other firearms and an RPG, and a guide entitled How To Win Hand-to-Hand Fighting.

You can't pick up any of those choice publications alongside your Daily Mail on the racks of W.H. Smith, Heathrow.

Yet still her apologists bleat that she is a hapless victim of a racist witch-hunt.

Matthew Parris says we all "think and say silly things when we are young".

True.

But there's a world of difference between trust-fund LSE students wearing tie- dyed Che Guevara T- shirts and shouting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" in Grosvenor Square 40 years ago, before heading off back to the nearest boozer, and the clear and present danger we're facing today.

Plus, she's not a teenager, she's 23 years old.

I don't know what you were up to at 23, but I was married with a two-year-old daughter and on to my third mortgage.

Malik says she adopted the name the "lyrical terrorist" and wrote the poems about beheading only to attract men.

The kind of men who would be turned on by a woman who fantasises about beheading and lines her bookshelves with Al Qaeda literature are precisely those most likely to turn themselves into a human Hiroshima at Terminal 4.

Even if she is simply a silly slip of a girl on the pull, she has only herself to blame.

After the terror attacks on our own soil, not to mention 9/11 or Madrid, we have to take all threats seriously.

There are said to be thousands of people living among us who want to kill us and destroy our way of life.

If Malik isn't one of them, then she at least gives the impression of being more than willing to help them out when they're busy.

Our fellow citizens are being wiped out on the streets of London by Islamist headbangers who buy into precisely this kind of dangerous fanaticism.

There's nothing sophisticated about the useful idiots rallying to support her.

Save your sympathy for the victims of terrorism and their relatives.

Joan of Arc, she ain't.

Stupidity and ignorance are no defence, even if you believe her.

Which we do at our peril.

Malik deserved a serious, exemplary jail sentence. Nine months suspended really is an affront to society.

The Rise and Fall of Gordon Brown

A man who went missing several years ago has turned up in Central London claiming to remember nothing since the year 2000.

Gordon Brown disappeared at the time of the national fuel protests.

He was nowhere to be found during the cash-for-honours scandal and says he didn't even realise there had been a war in Iraq.

He was discovered hiding behind a sofa following an investigation into the disappearance of at least £100 billion in pension funds and a further £8 billion in gold bullion.

Police also want to interview him in connection with hundreds of thousands of pounds in illegal payments to Labour and two missing CDs containing the personal details of 25 million people, which could be used in a gigantic identity fraud scam.

Although he claims amnesia, suspicions were aroused when newspapers uncovered a picture of Brown grinning alongside his long-time partner Tony Blair in 2005.

When he walked into the House of Commons last week, he seemed to have aged at least 20 years.

His hair had gone grey, his skin tone was ashen, his hands were shaking and there were Gladstone bags under his eyes.

A police source said: "He has also undergone expensive cosmetic dental surgery in an attempt to change his appearance, which has resulted in a false, unnatural smile.

"But we knew it was him. The chewed fingernails were a dead giveaway"

And may none of your christmases be white!

It's not just Christmas under siege, it's Christianity itself. That's according to Tory MP Mark Pritchard.

He's right. But it's not being attacked by other faiths. As Mr Pritchard says: !I have never met a single Jew, Muslim, Sikh or Buddhist who has told me of their objection to Christians celebrating Christmas.!

Me neither, guv.

When the Asian website apnalounge.com conducted a survey of its subscribers, 62 per cent said they looked forward to Christmas and enthusiastically celebrated it. There was no evidence that religious minorities were in the slightest bit offended by Christian festivals. Sounds about right.

It's the purse-lipped, white, middle-class Guardianistas who hate Christmas, along with everything else about British tradition.

The BBC is celebrating victory over Christian groups who wanted the Corporation prosecuted for blasphemy over the screening of Jerry Springer: The Opera.

The problem with the Springer show was not that it was blasphemous - it was a parcel of pretentious, unfunny rubbish.

Mark Thompson, the BBC director-general, hailed the ruling as a triumph for freedom and common sense.

I happen to think he's right. But he'd never have shown a musical which portrayed the Prophet Mohammed as a gay, drug-snorting coprophiliac in a nappy.

And at the same time Thompson was cracking open the Wood Lane bubbly, BBC Radio Nottingham caved in to a protest by Muslim "leaders" and rushed out a craven apology for a lame crack by a local DJ about teddy-bear hostage Gillian Gibbons calling her dog "Mohammed".

Thompson says all religions must be respected but none should have the right of veto.

So perhaps he can explain why, when it comes to the BBC, some faiths are more equal than others.

[Teddy Bear]

Charles Moore in the Telegraph makes a similar observation to Littlejohn above. The title of his piece says it all.

Hell will freeze before a BBC Mohammed film
By Charles Moore
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 08/12/2007

Until recently, people who wrote letters protesting about insults to decency, the Royal Family, God, and so on, often used to end with the words: "Is nothing sacred?" I notice that they have mostly given up doing so. This must be because, in British public space today, the answer to their question is so clearly: "No - nothing at all."

This week, the High Court upheld a district judge's decision to refuse an attempt to prosecute the BBC for blasphemy in broadcasting Jerry Springer - The Opera. In the show, an adult Jesus was depicted as wearing a nappy.

The judges were Mr Justice Collins, who is the son of the famous nuclear disarmer, Canon Collins, and Lord Justice Hughes, who lists "bellringing" as one of his recreations in Who's Who. It seems unlikely that either is ignorant of, or unsympathetic to, the claims of Christianity. But both took the view that, in modern society, an attack on Christianity (which, by the way, they thought Jerry Springer - The Opera was not) did not necessarily endanger society. They said that "the identity of Church and state and the near universality of Christian conviction in this country" no longer existed.

Christians should surely not be upset by this decision. The founder of our own religion was crucified because the high priest declared: "He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses?" The use of the criminal law to uphold a religious belief is normally a power game, not a genuine defence of the honour of God.

In the 39 Articles, which still formally define the beliefs of the Church of England, Roman Catholic masses are described as "blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits". Would Britain be a more genuinely Christian society if, as was once the case, such masses were illegal?

There are many reasons why I should like to imprison most of those at the top of the BBC. The latest is that, with the money we are forced by law to give them, they pay £6 million a year to Jonathan Ross. God may be mocked by the BBC, but Mammon is worshipped - and at our expense.

Another might be the story in court this week that the BBC is alleged to have taken men later accused of Islamic terrorism on a paint-balling trip and failed to pass on information about the July 21 London bombers to the police. The corporation made a friendly programme with these men called Don't Panic, I'm Islamic.

But no, I shall suppress my punitive urges and try very hard, as our religion commands, to forgive the wretches instead.

What the judgment exposes, though, is how far we have travelled. Until perhaps the 1990s, it would have been inconceivable for the BBC to depict the adult Jesus wearing a nappy. It was at its founding, and for many years afterwards, an unashamedly, though non-denominational, Christian organisation. It saw part of its purpose as upholding and propagating Christian truths. Its longest-running programme, I believe, is The Daily Service.

During the Second World War, Dorothy Sayers's highly respectful play, The Man Born to be King, was broadcast on BBC radio. There were large protests at the blasphemy inherent in allowing a human being to take the part of Christ.

In more recent times, there were huge rows about The Life of Brian - misplaced, in my view, since the film is a satire of bogus religion, not an insult to Jesus. But it is only in the past 10 or 15 years that the BBC would not think twice before running excremental mockery of the man whom roughly two billion people worship as God. So a powerful organisation that helped to uphold something high is now contemptuous of it, and does something low. That is a shock.

Since a blasphemy law cannot be sustained in a society where many, even most people do not share the belief blasphemed against, some religious people have sought other legal avenues. Indeed, we now have a Religious Hatred Act, on the statute book since last year.

The idea behind such laws is that extreme forms of offence to believers should be punished. Instead of the notion of blasphemy, which is, in principle, objective, comes a notion that, if you feel very, very hurt, you should have recourse to law.

This is an invitation, of course, for everyone to start saying how hurt they are. The police have been stirred up to threaten legal proceedings against Christians who distribute pamphlets condemning the beliefs of Islam. Muslim activists were so successful in persuading people that the essentially innocuous cartoons published last year in a Danish newspaper were offensive that not a single British national newspaper dared republish them.

The way the game works is that the most huffy, bristling representative of a religion gets the most attention. Indeed, it was Stewart Lee, the author of Jerry Springer - The Opera, who explained the situation with a frankness that perhaps he did not intend. Last year, he said that Christians were fair game because they had degraded their own images, whereas Muslims were "conscientious about protecting the brand".

It is a thought-provoking idea that, to defend one's religion in the modern world, one must behave like Coca-Cola or Hoover and uphold one's copyright in the civil courts. It would certainly be heaven on earth for lawyers. But what Mr Lee was really saying was that he was too frightened to mock a faith unless he could be confident that its supporters would not, literally, hit back.

And that, in essence, is the position of the BBC. In this newspaper, the director-general, Mark Thompson, wrote that no religion should ever be "accorded a veto". Indeed not, but let us suppose that the BBC made a drama about the life of Mohammed. Even if such a film were sympathetic in its treatment, it would offend many Muslims by its mere existence, since the depiction of their Prophet is forbidden in most branches of Islam today. I would bet Jonathan Ross's salary - if I had it - that the BBC will not dare make such a film.

This week, the BBC quickly apologised on air after a presenter joked that Gillian Gibbons, the teacher with the Sudanese teddy bear called Mohammed, also had a dog of that name. It has never apologised for Jesus in his nappy.

The obvious temptation for Christians in these circumstances is to become more menacing in their protests. That, perhaps, is why the attempt was made to prosecute Jerry Springer - The Opera in the first place.

But I cannot believe that it is a productive use of valuable faith-time to run round litigating and prosecuting and hiring QCs. Nor can the Prince of Peace have intended that we use violence to protect his reputation. As soon as he was condemned to death, "Then did they spit in his face, and buffeted him", but he offered no physical resistance.

What, then? Few want a society where religion has the force of law, but I wonder if many really want the society that we are getting where, as I said at the beginning, nothing is sacred.

Our culture, our rule of law, our political institutions, our family life, even our broadcasting, have their roots in the sacred, and in the specifically Christian idea of what that means.

Christians can no longer rely on the wider society to sustain them. Therefore they have all the more duty to promote the sacred, which does so much to sustain what is good in that society. Christmas, the feast that almost everyone knows something about, might be a good season to start.

[Teddy Bear]

Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC is gleeful over his 'victory' against the Christians, after a court found the BBC not guilty of blasphemy over their screening last year of 'Jerry Springer the Opera', despite complaints from thousands of Christians even prior to screening.

What especially irritates me about this insidious self-righteous head of this similar insidious self-righteous corporation is that he doesn't apply his 'philosophy' to religions across the board, just those who will abide by civilised standards to try and counter efforts to undermine their faith. Islam, and the threat of retalliation by its militants, can do no wrong as far as their concerned. Why should the BBC respect the religion that shows the least respect for our society and beliefs, if it's not from fear and appeasement?

Sense prevailed over Springer 'blasphemy'
By Mark Thompson, BBC Director General

Gordon Brown's reaction to the news that the Sudanese President had pardoned Gillian Gibbons was to remark that common sense had finally prevailed. Many will take the same view of the High Court's decision to throw out blasphemy proceedings in relation to Jerry Springer – The Opera.

The group Christian Voice had attempted to launch a private prosecution for blasphemous libel against Jon Thoday as producer of the show and against me as Director General of the BBC – this last because, after successful stage performances from the Edinburgh fringe to the West End, a television version of Jerry Springer was broadcast by BBC2 almost three years ago.

Though there have been no successful prosecutions in the last 30 years, blasphemous libel remains a criminal offence. It is punishable by a fine and imprisonment – a reminder perhaps that the gulf between our own legal tradition and that of Sudan is not as great as we might imagine.

The recent track record of our respective courts could hardly be more different, however. The High Court has upheld an earlier decision by a district judge not to allow the prosecution to proceed.

The court not only rejected the charge that Jerry Springer itself was blasphemous but set out a series of legal arguments which makes it hard to see how any future prosecution for blasphemous libel could succeed, at least against a theatrical producer or a broadcaster. It is a landmark ruling in other words, and a welcome one.

Editorial decisions like that to broadcast Jerry Springer – The Opera typically turn on a delicate judgement between competing claims and rights. The claim of minorities to have their beliefs treated with dignity and respect. The claim of writers and directors to enjoy freedom of opinion and artistic expression. The right of the public at large to decide for themselves whether or not to watch something they may or may not find offensive.

Such decisions are often difficult and contentious and should certainly be subject to challenge and review. But independent regulators working within a context of clear public purposes and values and with continuous access to information about public attitudes and responses are in a stronger position to conduct such reviews than the criminal justice system.

Anyone who finds any television or radio programme offensive to their faith has the right to complain either to the BBC Trust or to Ofcom. Whereas the common law offence of blasphemous libel applies only to the Christian religion, both The Trust and Ofcom can and would entertain complaints about the depiction of any religion or indeed any other belief system.

And whereas, to succeed, a prosecution for blasphemy must demonstrate the risk of a serious threat to society as a whole, complaints to the broadcasting regulators can succeed on the immediate merits of their case.

They represent, in other words, a better, fairer and more practical means of redress for anyone who believes that a particular programme has given grave and unjustifiable religious offence. If they are thought to have failed in their duties, they themselves can be challenged in the courts.

But welcoming the High Court's decision on blasphemy does not mean that broadcasters should show any less responsibility in the way they cover different faiths and beliefs.

As events both here and abroad remind us almost every week, we are living through a period of febrile anxiety and bitter recrimination about religion. Groups who extend along a spectrum from the most devout atheists to the most fervent fundamentalists can be oddly at one in seeing themselves as minorities under siege and with rights – to be heard, to be respected or even just to be left alone – which need protection from opposing majorities.

There's an asymmetry too at the heart of many of the arguments about religion and free speech. Non-believers tend to regard religion as just one more set of propositions and opinions. For them, faith should be as subject to debate and ridicule as any other ideology. While many believers would accept that religion contains propositional content, for them what they believe goes deeper – into identity, into self: it is not just a matter of what I happen to believe but of who I am.

But there is no consensus about exactly where religion sits between, let's say, race – where society has decided to erect both legal protections and strong social prohibitions – and politics – where our democratic tradition suggests there should be almost no limit to the range and intensity of the debate.

In the absence of such a consensus, a public broadcaster like the BBC has a particular responsibility to tread carefully. In an open society, our starting point should always be a presumption of the public's right to hear and see and decide for themselves.

Many of those who feel confident in their faith welcome debate and welcome the placing of religion in the middle of our culture, in popular drama and comedy and documentary. But we should never assume that everyone takes that view.

I do not believe that any group or any religion can be accorded a veto, either on their own behalf or on behalf of society as a whole. But we should never offend the religious sensibilities of any group carelessly or without good cause.

There will be more hard cases like Jerry Springer and nothing that the High Court has said will make them any less hard. There are some who would like the BBC to adopt a stance at one or other extreme of the argument: either publish and be damned, no matter what the religious sensitivities; or a guarantee never to offend anyone, no matter what the cost to creativity and plurality.

The path we have to walk is a harder one. It is, wherever possible, to respect and celebrate human faith and belief in all its forms, but where necessary to stand up resolutely for fundamental freedoms too.

[Teddy Bear]

Listening to Nick Ferrari on LBC Monday morning, it appears that the BBC will be pursuing a damage suit of £90,000 against the Christian group that tried to sue them for blasphemy over screening the Jerry Springer opera.
The head of the group was saying that he would be bankrupt if he had to pay the charges in full and he would try to cut a deal to reduce them.
It's really about time these Christian groups used a bit of gumption instead of 'turning the other cheek'. Let the charge stay at £90k, but get 90,000 Christians to turn up at the BBC offices where this fine is to be paid with each paying a £1 and also asking for a receipt.
The negative publicity alone for the BBC would be well worth the money.