MOSQUEBALLS

From page 10 of Private Eye 1211 - 30 May 2008
THE silliest of last summer's silly-season stories was finally laid to rest two weeks ago when West Midlands police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) admitted making false accusations against the producers of the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary Undercover Mosque.
Broadcast in January 2007, it showed preachers at various "moderate" British mosques - notably Green Lane in Birmingham -delivering hate-filled rants against kuffaar, ie non-Muslims. The local Knackers decided to investigate whether any offence had been committed. Seven months later they and the CPS issued a joint press release claiming that the real villains were not the preachers but the TV producers who exposed them. Bethan David, a CPS lawyer, said the film "completely distorted what the speakers were saying" by splicing together quotes out of context.
Anil Patani, who rejoices in the title "assistant chief constable (security and cohesion)", made a formal complaint to Ofcom. He said there had been "such an intensity of editing that those featured in the broadcast programme had been misrepresented", thus jeopardising "community cohesion" by creating an unfair perception of the hate-mongering preachers.
All this was seized on by newspapers and rival TV channels hungry for tales of TV fakery. But where was the evidence? Last August we asked the CPS and Knacker if they could give any examples to justify then phrase "complete distortion"; they couldn't.
And no wonder, since there weren't any. After exhaustive study of untransmitted footage, Ofcom announced in January this year that it found "no evidence" of misleading editing. Prominent speakers from certain mosques were shown denouncing kuffaar as "filthy", "accursed" and "criminals" because, er. this was what they said. In a public apology two weeks ago, forced out of them by the threat of libel action, West Midlands police and the CPS accepted as much: "We were wrong... there was no evidence that the broadcaster or programme makers had misled the audience. . . the programme accurately represented the material it had gathered." Damages of £100,000 will be paid to charity.
End of story? It shouldn't be. By their own admission, two leading figures in the criminal justice system made widely publicised accusations of serious dishonesty on the strength of no evidence whatsoever. Are they considering their position, or facing disciplinary action? Not at all.
Patani remains in charge of "security and cohesion" in Britain's second biggest police force, and David is now the CPS's "review lawyer" for terrorism prosecutions. Is someone who admits to making wholly false accusations really the best person to deal with such sensitive cases? The CPS assures us that David still has its "full confidence". But why?