Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain responds to Monday evening’s Dispatches programme “Undercover Mosque”:

“Following the 7/7 bombings it was always inevitable that Muslim organisations and mosques would be placed under the spotlight. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Documentary makers have an important responsibility though to do their research properly and carefully identify those who actually incite hatred. They must take great care to avoid unfairly stigmatising whole institutions and groups of people. The Dispatches team may have partly succeeded with the first bit, but I believe they failed quite badly with the second.”

Guardian Comment is Free, 17 January 2007

Osama Saeed has written: “… you will not find me defending the bigoted comments made on last night’s programme. They were out of order, full stop. In fact we did not see the people that made them finding much defence either. There were some inaccurate criticisms in the film, but this does not take away from the fact that there are some objectionable people who say seriously objectionable things in speeches. Muslims who hear these things must take them to task.”

See further comment from FOSIS, IHRC, Indigo Jo Blogs, Yahya Birt and Eteraz.