You might have heard about the furore about the Dispatches programme on mosques of Channel 4. Read the second part of this drama. Some of the comments are hair raising: I quote:
What should be done to a Muslim who converts to another faith? "We kill him," she says, "kill him, kill, kill…You have to kill him, you understand?"
Adulterers, she says, are to be stoned to death - and as for homosexuals, and women who "make themselves like a man, a woman like a man ... the punishment is kill, kill them, throw them from the highest place".
These punishments, the preacher says, are to be implemented in a future Islamic state. "This is not to tell you to start killing people," she continues. "There must be a Muslim leader, when the Muslim army becomes stronger, when Islam has grown enough."
A young female student from the group interrupts her: the punishment should also be to stone the homosexuals to death, once they have been thrown from a high place.
Friendship with non-Muslims is discouraged because "loyalty is only to the Muslim, not to the kaffir [disbeliever]".
A woman who was friendly with a non-Muslim woman was heavily criticised: "It's part of Islam, of the correct belief, that you love those who love Allah and that you hate those who hate Allah."
One preacher even says Muslims shouldn't live in Britain at all: "It is not befitting for Muslims that he should reside in the land of evil, the land of the kuffaar, the land of the disbelievers."
Another, Um Saleem, says Muslims should not take British citizenship as their loyalty is to Allah.
"Some conditions can take you into disbelief, to take the British citizenship, whether you like it or not, for these people, you are selling your religion, it's a very serious thing, it is not allowed to give allegiance to other than Allah."
Channel 4 asked one of these worthies, Sheikh Yasin, to comment via this letter:
"Hardcash Productions Ltd" <hardcash@hardcashproductions.com> wrote:
BY FAX, EMAIL AND POST
Private and Confidential
12 August 2008
Dear Sheikh Yasin,
Dispatches TX. 1 September 2008
Hardcash Productions is an independent production company making a programme for Channel 4's current affairs series Dispatches, which is due to be broadcast on 1 September 2008.
The film investigates claims that the Saudi Arabian religious establishment, with the involvement of the Saudi Arabian government, is promoting a theology of intolerance, separatism and extremism around the world and, in particular, in Britain.
As part of the investigation, we have looked into the activities of some mainstream British Islamic organisations which have strong links to the Saudi Arabian religious establishment and government.
As you are aware, in a Dispatches investigation in January 2007 entitled Dispatches: Undercover Mosque, undercover reporters purchased DVDs of your speeches at the official bookshop of the Islamic Cultural Centre and London Central Mosque. These DVDs contained intolerant comments aimed at the beliefs of Jews and Christians, and claims that AIDS was a Western and Christian plot.
At the time, the ICC promised to remove your speeches from the bookshop pending an investigation into the content, but our reporters have returned and found they continue to sell your works. They bought a number of titles by you which continue to contain similar radical, intolerant comments.
In particular, we intend to include within our programme the following comments by you in a DVD entitled "Building a Muslim Community", copyright "One Islam Productions", in which you praise the beheadings practised in Saudi Arabia, saying: "At least I say, we Muslims should have that kind of power all over the world".
You say Muslims all over the world should have the power to implement an extreme version of sharia law, which includes public beheadings, amputations, lashings and crucifixions, saying; "and then people can see, people without hands, people can see in public heads rolling down the street, people can see in public people got their hands and feet from opposite sides chopped off and they see them crucified, they see people get punished they see people put up against the pole ?.. and because they see it, it acts as a deterrent for them because they say I don't want that to happen to me".
We intend to include your comments within the programme in the context of revealing that the ICC/Regents Park Mosque official bookshop continues to sell material which is promoting a radical, intolerant ideology which, amongst other things, promotes an extreme version of sharia law practised in Saudi Arabia. We also note in the film that you learned Arabic in Saudi Arabia.
If you wish to comment on the above please let us have any comments in writing, to be edited into the broadcast programme, by no later than noon on Tuesday, 26 August. After that time, we will not be able to guarantee that your comments are incorporated.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Smith
Producer
Hardcash Productions
Fax: 0207 253 2761
Email: hardcash@hardcashproductions.com
Copy: Jan Tomalin, Controller, Legal and Compliance, Channel 4
(Fax: 0207 306 8367, Email: JTomalin@channel4.co.uk)
Kevin Sutcliffe, Deputy Head, News & Current Affairs
(Fax: 020 7306 8359, Email: ksutcliffe@channel4.co.uk)
Nigel Abbas, Media Lawyer
(Email: nigel.abbas@btinternet.com, Fax: 0871 661 7061)
Now check out what this wonderful chap says in response:
14/08/08
Dear Mr. Smith:
I am replying to you only as a courtesy, and not because I am concerned about your intended broadcast. I expect, in fact, I am certain, that your intended broadcast, will contain the usual anti-Islamic rhetoric and soundbites that are designed to provoke an already conditioned public into a fear about the Islamic system, and a fear and contempt for Muslims in general.
As for the constant use of the words "intolerant" and "extremism", I think that you, and your colleagues at Channel 4, or HardCash Productions, have been indelibly and consistently exhibiting the most vehement and malicious religious intolerance and journalistic extremism, of nearly anyone in the entire television industry of the United Kingdom!
Not only are you inaccurate, but you are scandalous, unethical and merchants of jounalistic vomit. Your motives are not morally driven, nor aimed at the intellectualization of your viewers. Rather, you are resorting to the use of cheap sensational journalism, to exploit an unaware and pre-conditioned public, in order to make the "bottom line" profit that sustains your "Channel 4 - HardCore" vomit factory.
Your allegations of my statements on a DVD, titled "Building a Muslim Community", and I must say allegations, because, in every lecture, writing, or communication of any kind, there is something called the "context", which can only be appreciated when someone objectively, sincerely, and intellectually, forms an opinion, after making a comprehensive and thorough examination.
I want to remind you, that capital punishment, including, but limited to: decapitation, lethal injection, firing squad, gas chamber, electrocution, and hanging by the neck, has been, and is still resorted to by Governments and States throughout the modern world as both a punishment and a deterrent for criminal behavior in the society. It is not a practice limited to Muslim countries, whether past or present.
Whatever statements I made in that lecture was aimed at reforming the Muslim people, the Muslim society, and the Muslim world, to know that Islam is not merely a system of religious rituals and theological observances, but is a comprehensive system of Law and Justice, legislated by Almighty
God, and adjudicated by the Sovereign Islamic State, when there exists such a state.
Due to historically documented conspiracies between criminal Muslim States and the immoral empirical ambitions of countries like Great Britain (as the United Kingdom was referred to at that time) and the United States of America, the legitimate ambition to have and sustain a Sovereign Islamic State in the world, has been almost completely annihilated and in most Muslim countries today, criminalized.
If you call yourselves educating and alarming the UK society about radical, Saudi-based intolerance and extremism, why are you using my alleged words "to Muslims", "about Muslims" and the reformation and development of their countries and societies, to make your *******ized point? I have visited Saudi Arabia for
Hajj and Umrah, and yes, I have learned some Arabic there, but does that make me a purveyor of what you characterize for your illicit media purposes as a "Saudi - based theology based upon intolerance, separatism, and extremism?
Suppose you or some other "good Christian visited Ireland, and studied their language, would that itself an indictment of your support for what used to be at one time, the very criminal, intolerant, separatist, and
extremist Irish Republican Army? Of couse not! So why the double and blatantly hypocritical standards? I am not, and have never been a supporter or a promoter of Saudi Arabian government policy or
religious rhetoric, and most objective intellectuals in the world of multi-media would know that, except you and your ignorant Islamophobic colleagues.
As for the alleged promise of the bookstore in the Islamic Cultural Centre at the Regents Park Mosque, to stop selling my DVD's based upon your now very infamous "Dispatches Series", titled: "Undercover Mosques", if they made such a promise,(which I have no evidence that they did) that would have been very shameful, cowardly, unIslamic, and unconstitutional!
Firstly, because that bookstore is privately owned, and secondly, because it is the constitutional right of every person in a free and democratic society like the United Kingdom, to express any view they wish, so long as it is not politically seditious, inciting hatred, promoting violence, maligning or attacking any lifestyle or religion, or seeking to commit or conspire to commit, any act of terrorism. I can say without the least
reservation - I have never, and will never knowingly support or advocate any such behavior!
Why doesn't "Channel 4, and your HardCore", "Hard4Cash" Group, collaborate and review some of the hundreds of magazines and periodicals that are sold on newstands and bookstores all over the United Kingdom and Europe, promoting and endorsing, pornography, gambling, pedophilia, bestiality, violent sports, mercenary activities, bigotry, and other forms of unsocial behaviors? Why... because, the simple fact is that it freedom of speech, even though most of it is clearly immoral and socially destructive!
You and your colleagues are not only hypocritical and exploitive bigots, you are audacious liars and opportunistic media vermin, who have never allowed anyone whom you attack, the chance to respond on your actual television platform, which is the subject of my concluding remarks. You has cleverly invited me to respond in writing, to what you will be broadcasting by television. What you don't say, is that you will pick and choose from even that written response, to try to find further flaws and ammunition for your "stealth attack" and character assassination!
It doesn't really matter, what part you choose to mutilate, the response in it's entirety will be broadcast on seventeen television platforms around the world, and made available to hundreds of magazines and periodicals, for their comparison edification. I will utilize my relationship with these media platforms to counter your evil intent.
In addition to that, I am challenging "Channel 4 and Hard4Cash (or HardCore) Ltd. to an unedited open-ended interview, to discuss my views and responses to their media productions, past and present! If you do not accept, hundreds of millions viewers will be aware of your one-sided, prejudicial campaigns against Islam and Muslims!
I await your response, whatever it may be...
Shaykh Khalid Yasin
Chairman
Purpose Media Group
Hmmm, just what is going on in those mosques and just what kind of leaders is that community producing?
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