Monday 12 January 2015

Panorama: The Battle for British Islam


Credit where credit's due.

Tonight's Panorama by John Ware was an outstanding piece of reporting. 

Although some will doubtless carp and quibble...It didn't pretend that the attacks we've seen on the streets of London and Paris have nothing to do with Islam. It fully faced up to the fact that Islam is the problem, and that a radical reformation of Islam is needed. It showed us just how bad the situation really is. It showed the very ugly things influential British Muslims say behind closed doors. It confronted the 'grievance narrative' of non-violent Islamists that excuses the crimes of violent Islamists, including all that blaming of Western foreign policy. It showed how small the gap is between those two kinds of Islam. It confronted the Trojan Horse Affair and took on the 'Islamophobia' narrative that developed around it. It gave the lie to the 'Islamophobia' narrative as a whole. It showed the grievance mongers for what they are, and gave voice to those Muslims who want to fashion a genuinely moderate, reformed, pro-British Islam that none of us need fear (though how representative these voices are is a moot point). It even showed the most famous Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Mohammad, holding it in focus for several seconds..

It was a very big step forward for the BBC, broadcast at peak viewing time on BBC One. Please watch it if you can.

12 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. quick comment:

    It was so shocking to watch, the show was so biased it was unbelievable and because it was by the BBC people will believe it :( They took this 1 lecture out of context so badly **off youtube** and said it was extreme, referring to sheikh haitham al-haddad :(

    Plus they kept showing the real Extremists like ISIS and some extremist sheikhs/lecturers - and then blaming islam - but they're ideologies are far from islam. Using this, they want to start reforming islam...Time to read Surah An-Nasr.

    (I just deleted prev comment, because i wanted 'notify me' enabled)

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  3. A very good programme, yes a real step forward (though I seem to recall John Ware has done some good work previously (didn't he expose what literature was on sale in so called "moderate" Mosques).

    This has been a good night for the BBC. The report on Pegida on Newsnight moved beyond the caricatures and focussed on the reality of the impact of asylum-based immigration in a small East German village.

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    1. That report by Gabriel Gatehouse did give a deeper sense of what was going on than, say, Jenny Hill's report on this morning's 'Today.

      The forcing of a large number of male refugees from Muslim countries on a tiny village without the consent of the villagers might well provoke a surge of support for Pegida.

      The introduction by Evan Davis, however, bracketed Pegida with the hate-mongering anti-Semite Dieudonné: "Instead of trying to love other people more it's about hating them more".

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  4. Judging by this BBC production, I can only assume that the tipping point on the "Islamic question" is closer than we would otherwise have expected....

    The useful idiot Bob Pitt has abandoned his "Islamophobia watch" blog, Hope not Hate are stepping back from their "everyone who disagrees with us on Islam is a racist" rhetoric, and now only the ghastly UAF/SWP can be found sucking up to the Isamists..

    The next piece in the jigsaw is for these leftist voices to admit that they got it wrong....I wont hold my breath, as I have no idea how close we are to the twelfth of never.

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    1. I think this was Europe 9-11 as one of the marchers said. And I did judge this to be a tipping point.

      TS Eliot said there is only so much reality humankind can accept. But equally, there's only so much reality they can ignore.

      Self-interest has to show itself at some point, and leftists, journalists, comedians, artists, feminists, gays, atheists, and agnostics are all targets for followers of Sharia.

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    2. They certainly must have received a huge amount of complaints in order to allow this to be greenlighted, never mind broadcast. I'm just wondering if they're all ashamed of what they've been saying for the last few years, or if the majority mood is one of resentment that management caved in to pressure from the far-Right or something.

      I'm sure there will be a load of "complaints from both sides" tomorrow.

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  5. It was good, certainly the most honest thing by far that the BBC has ever produced on this topic. If I still hung out at B-BBC, I would be rubbing dez's and Scott's noses in this, because it's proof of everything we've been saying, and refutes everything they claim.

    Also, unless this is some sort of bizarre error, it seems as if the BBC owes the public an apology, because it refutes everything they've been telling us for years. This is way, way, more than, "We got it wrong that one time twenty years ago."

    I don't want to spend time quibbling because I don't want to detract from the credit the BBC deserves for allowing this to be broadcast. But I would like to point out that they ignored the immigration elephant in the room, and for whatever reason left out the problem that politicians and the media bear some responsibility for allowing the extremist version to become more mainstream by stifling any criticism of the phenomenon. Showing that one bit of Theresa May's speech without including her lecture on what proper Islam is left a bad taste, and I'm sure most viewers wouldn't even know about the rest of her speech.

    Laugh out loud moment:

    Cut to a a sequence of stills with the following voice-over: (@18:10) The claim that Muslims are forever oppressed by the West has long been asserted by non-violent activists disdainful of Western values

    The third picture, which appeared when Ware says the words "asserted by non-violent activists" featured Cameron, May and Clegg.

    But this really only highlights the irony, as it misses out the equally, if not more important, problem that the BBC and the Left and PC right-on politicians and pundits seizing on this grievance narrative.

    Still, 9 out of 10, with bonus points for breaking the BBC's wall of silence. I repeat, the BBC owes everyone an apology, because this basically shows that everything they've been saying for years has been wrong, and they knew it. White Girl, Don't Panic, I'm Islamic, redacting key elements of videos and stories, blaming the victims and society for Rotherham, and all the rest of their disgraceful output.

    Will this change anything, or is it one of those anomalies the BBC likes to let out once in a while so they can carry on with the usual agenda but hold it up as evidence that they're not biased because they did that one thing a while back.

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  6. One note of reservation - I still think that the BBC would only a programme like this to be made in the context of "counter terrorism" and "security concerns"...it's a bit like in the old days you were only allowed to discuss sexual matters in the context of a particular framework like "family planning".

    I doubt John Ware would be allowed to make such a programme if it was simply presented as "this is what most Muslim clerics teach and what Muslims are expected to believe and act on".

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  7. http://www.islam21c.com/politics/in-response-to-last-nights-shocking-bbc-panorama/

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    1. Nice try, but most of that is pretty easily rebutted. The author is disqualified by describing a broadcast which spent a few minutes celebrating that video of happy thoroughly modern Muslims dancing to some pop tune as scaremongering.

      At least he didn't blame the Jews for it, which is refreshing.

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    2. People here normally say what they mean rather than just posting links.

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