LAST year Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, Undercover Mosque, secretly filmed a nest of fanatical Muslim clerics and teachers in Birmingham doing what they do best: spewing hate.

Among the comments made by imams during the film were:

Take that homosexual man and throw him off the mountain.

and

We hate the kuffar [non-Muslims].

Other quotes from preachers and teachers included “Allah created the woman deficient” and “by the age of ten, it becomes an obligation on us to force her to wear hijab and if she doesn’t wear hijab, we hit her”.

West Midlands constabulary investigated carried out an investigation of the content of the documentary, but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) concluded there was not enough evidence to bring criminal charges for a breach of public order against any of the clerics.

Then, in a move that completely beggars belief, the police asked the CPS to consider a prosecution against Channel 4 for broadcasting a programme containing material likely to stir up racial hatred.

The police maintained that the documentary had edited the preachers’ words “to give them a more sinister meaning”, and that the documentary had had a negative impact in the community and the cohesion within it.

In other words:

Let’s capitulate to these lame-brained hate-mongers; let’s shoot the messenger instead.

When a prosecution against Channel 4 was ruled out, the police and the CPS reported the programme makers to Ofcom, the TV regulator, alleging “complete distortion” in the way the programme had been edited.

Once again the police and the CPS were left with egg on their faces. Ofcom rejected the complaints in a decision published in November 2007.

Despite Ofcom’s conclusion that the documentary was a “legitimate investigation, uncovering matters of important public interest”, West Midlands Police failed to take down the original press release, entitled Broadcast Out Of Context, from its website.

Channel 4 then took legal action to force its removal, and today news broke that the police are to pay Channel 4 £100,000 in damages and will apologise at the High Court for the false allegations it made.

Here is the police’s full apology.

Kevin Sutcliffe, deputy head of current affairs at Channel 4, said:

We have been very pleased to get the result.

And he asked:

Why did they go after the programme in such a way? It seems to us a large amount of public money and time spent trying to bring us down.

David Henshaw, executive producer and managing director of Hardcash Productions said:

This was a thorough and detailed one-hour documentary, made over nine months and at personal risk to the undercover reporter. The abhorrent and extreme comments made by fundamentalist preachers in the film speak for themselves.

They later claimed they had been taken out of context - but no one has explained the correct context for arguing that women are ‘born deficient’, that homosexuals should be thrown off mountains and that ten-year-old girls should be hit if they refuse to wear the hijab.

This is a clip of the imbecile Abu Usamah in full rant, from the Dispatches in question:

HAT TIP: Mediawatchwatch.

REASON alone is “dangerous” to society; it has to be tempered with faith if we are to avoid repeating horrors committed by the likes of Hitler and Stalin.

So said Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, leader of Roman Catholics in England and Wales, when interviewed this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, following a lecture he gave yesterday.

He lamented the fact that “the Christian voice” was increasingly being stifled in the UK, and made the astonishing claim that people in Britain want Church leaders to speak out on key policy issues.

The Cardinal sounded less than pleased when interviewer John Humphrys put it to him that that religious leaders, in the view of people like Professor Richard Dawkins – interviewed earlier on the programme – “talk rubbish”, and should, therefore, not be permitted to interfere in government matters.

The Cardinal’s then went on dish out some garbage about atheists “constructing God” simply in order to knock him down, and to repeat the claim that Britain was a “Christian country, with 70 percent of the population professing a belief in the Christian faith”.

He added:

Britain should not be allowed to become a God-free zone.

In his lecture, the Cardinal said:

There are social currents today that want to isolate religion from other forms of knowledge and experience in order to marginalise it.

One of the things which I challenge is the desire to separate Christianity from rational inquiry. Many of our ‘new atheists’ seem unable to cope with the notion of an intelligent, reflective Christian faith. But the Catholic Christian tradition is characterised by a close relationship between reasoned understanding and religious faith. Faith for us is the flowering of reason, not its betrayal.

Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society, lost no time in launching an excoriating attack on Cormac-O’Connor in this morning’s Guardian.

Murphy-O’Connor … speaks with forked tongue when he tries to portray the Catholic Church as some persecuted institution that means harm to no one. He says the Catholic Church is caricatured as ‘some heartless, insular institution that wants to deny people their freedom’.

Cardinal - this is not a caricature. It is the truth. Your own actions and pronouncements confirm it. You have tried to deny human rights to homosexuals, you have tried to rob women of the right to choose contraception and abortion and thereby take control of their lives, you have tried (and continue to try) to interfere with scientific research that may lead to the alleviation of enormous suffering.

You have attempted to manipulate the political process by pressurising Catholic MPs. On a personal level you - and your Church - try to control every aspect of your followers’ lives, from telling them what to think, what to eat and when to eat it, to telling them who they can sleep with and even what they can and cannot do when they get between the sheets …