“It is utterly absurd that the British authorities have decided to censure a major broadcaster for inciting racial discord rather than investigating the violent and hate-filled rhetoric of the religious leaders depicted in a film. This is, however, the position in which Channel Four Television finds itself in the dark days of August.

“I attended a seminar in London earlier this year in which Dr Mohamed Abdul Bari, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, said that he thought the Channel Four ‘Dispatches’ programme, ‘Undercover Mosque,’ generated Islamophobia and stirred racial hatred. Putting two and two together in the past fortnight since attending the Policy Exchange event on ‘Undercover Mosque’ and the implications for free speeech and free expression by broadcasters, it is clear that the MCB had something to do with the police turning their attentions to the programme-makers rather than to the radicals in the film….

“At the risk of being dubbed a ‘racist ape,’ as I was two weeks ago by an enraged Muslim gentleman in my sweet little local Costa Coffee shop in London, dare I say that the concept of an Englishman has been so distorted as to be unrecognisable? In the same country in which men used to tip their hats to me and cabbies called my father ‘Guv’nor,’ we now have British citizens and naturalised immigrants who rant and rave and want women subjugated, gay men thrown off mountains and the ‘Infidel’ beheaded, and whose entire demeanour is so alien to anything in my entire life experience that I wonder if I have left planet Earth.”

Carol Gould at Jewish Comment, 27 August 2007