LONDON, 22 August 2005 — The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) yesterday attacked the BBC for conducting a witch hunt against Muslims in the UK and for showing a “pro-Israeli bias” through a BBC Panorama documentary on Muslim organizations. The documentary, titled ‘A Question of Leadership’, was broadcast last night.
It suggested that the MCB had failed to provide stronger leadership and that groups affiliated to it were propagating extremist hard-line views. These groups include the Birmingham-based Markazi Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith, which has 41 branches across the country, and which MCB Secretary General Sir Iqbal Sacranie defended in a press statement as “respected among British Muslims for their Da’wah programs.”
Sir Iqbal accused Panorama of using “deliberately garbled quotes in an attempt to malign the Muslim Council of Britain. It is unfortunate that just when Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims are beginning to make progress in terms of their political participation in the mainstream, there are those who are purposefully trying to sabotage that process. The MCB urges British Muslims to remain calm and vigilant in the face of recent concerted attempts being made by known hostile elements to divide them.”
But in a war of words, the BBC hit back, saying that the MCB is “in denial” about the prevalence of extreme views among its members. It had made a formal complaint about the program even before seeing it.
Mike Robinson, the producer of the Panorama program, said he was “confident the program will be a timely contribution to the present debate. The BBC rejects completely any allegation of institutional or program bias. Despite some critical comments to the contrary, it is certainly not the case that nearly all the questioning of Sir Iqbal Sacranie was about Israel.”
In the aftermath of the 7/7 suicide bombings in London, the MCB like many other Muslim organizations in the UK pledged to tackle extremism “head on”. The MCB has over 400 affiliated Muslim organizations and mosques in the UK, which account for about a third of the 1.8 million Muslims in Britain.
The Panorama special interviewed Mehbood Kantharia, an MCB central working committee member between 1997 and 2004, and other “prominent British Muslims”, who all questioned the MCB’s commitment to meeting this challenge.
“It is my personal view that because they (the MCB) are in a state of denial they cannot become real, you know, sort of like, forthright, really forthright about wanting to do something about the kind of extremism that prevails. I think the MCB is overreacting in this matter,” said Kantharia.
In an interview with Panorama reporter John Ware, Sir Iqbal refused to disown Markazi Ahl-e-Hadith, which allegedly has been disparaging about Christians and Jews. “We must accept the reality” of the diversity within the Muslim community in the UK, he told Ware. The program further questioned the MCB’s links with the Islamic Foundation, which it said promoted the teachings of Jamaat-e-Islami founder Syed Maududi; it tackled Sir Iqbal on his decision not to attend the Holocaust Day Memorial and his attendance of a memorial service for Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Last week, the Observer newspaper ran a similar “investigation” of the MCB and its affiliates and stressed that the organizations had failed mainstream Muslims in the UK.
But in an apparent olive branch to the BBC, Sir Iqbal concluded in his statement: “The BBC has a fairly good record in portraying a balanced view of Islam and its followers. That makes the mischievous efforts of the Panorama team behind next week’s program — especially in the current climate — all the more disappointing and divisive. The Panorama program can only undermine the solidarity that has been achieved in our country between various communities since the July 7th atrocities.”
Meanwhile, Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said in an interview in the News of the World yesterday that he did not know his officers had shot an innocent man until 24 hours after Jean Charles de Menezes, the 27-year-old Brazilian electrician was killed on 22 July, a day after the failed suicide bombings in London.
The family of de Menezes has accused Sir Ian of lying about the events leading up to the shooting and of a cover-up after leaked documents from the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) investigation into the shooting contradicted earlier police accounts of the incident at Stockwell tube station. The family subsequently called on Sir Ian to resign and Home Secretary Charles Clarke to order a public inquiry into the shooting including the Metropolitan Police’s so-called “shoot-to-kill” policy.
