Next Monday evening at 8pm, Channel Four is scheduled to broadcast a Dispatches programme which promises to make compulsive viewing for all concerned with how little progress the British authorities have seemingly made since 7 July 2005 in curbing the propagation of Islamist extremism.
Entitled ‘Undercover Mosques’ and reportedly twelve months in the making, the programme is an expose, using secretly filmed footage, of several British mosques playing host to, as well as selling dvds of, radical imams disseminating hate-filled messages that no responsible government should allow to be purveyed.
One of the mosques accused of selling such inflammatory dvds is the Central London Mosque situated in Regent’s Park whose attached bookshop is accused of selling dvds of incendiary speeches by two radical preachers, Sheikh Feiz and Sheikh Khalid Yasin.
It is interesting to note the contrast in the reaction of the bookshop in question to this news about it with that of Inayat Bunglawa, spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain.
According to yesterday's London Lite (clearly not just a pretty face!), the bookshop denied that selling the dvds meant it necessarily endorsed their contents. It neither denied knowledge of their contents, nor expressed any regret for having sold them.
By contrast, Mr Bunglawa is reported to have rightly suggested the dvds should not have been sold, if they incited racial hatred, something the programme suggests one of them had done. (The other was merely said to have advocated wife-beating!) But he suggested the Regent's Park mosque may not have known the dvds in question were on sale in the bookshop located on its premises. He is also reported to have said ‘it is a ludicrous claim the mosque had fallen under the influence of Wahhabism’.
Is the claim so ludicrous, and could the Regent's Park mosque have been as entirely innocent of what the bookshop on its presmises was selling as Mr Bunglawa suggests, given that, on the its web-site, the mosque boasts among its famous visitors one of the preachers featured in the dvds on sale?