the latest dispatches documentary

[hearandobey]

assalam alaykum,

just when we thought that we got a little rest from the media and the constant anti-islamic documentaries that dispatches always gets to air, they had to make another one! and wait: IN RAMADHAN. and what's even more interesting is the TOPIC! it's about apostates of islam and the hardship they face from their families and the muslim community. please see this for more information.

now leaving the topic of apostasy aside, i'd like to raise a few points inshallah:

firstly, why is it that they're making it as if all "apostates of islam" have to go in hiding, they face the worst treatment from their loved ones, when i know of MANY non-muslims that became muslims and had the same problems as well! i think that this is common with all faiths, whether you're a hindu, sikh, jew or whatever. one of my closest friends got disowned from her family and they dismiss any efforts of hers when trying to fix ties with them. so is it really the muslims that are extreme?

secondly, the documentary's presenter wasn't happy about the fact that approx. 36% of muslims in MODERN BRITAIN (according to a recent survey) thought that apostates should be executed. i do not want to discuss the issue of "what is the stronger opinion", as there is a thread for that somewhere in the forum. but what i do want to discuss is the issue of who carries out the execution? isn't the correct belief that the khalifa is the one who carries out the execution and not the layman?

if that is the case, then the presenter mentioned to an imam in the documentary of prince charle's request of the muslim leaders to issue a statement saying "the law of apostasy does not apply in the uk".

im sorry if i sound really confusing, inshallah i'd just like to have a fruitful and beneficial discussion that is conducted in a decent manner.

[al-omari]

Are the useful idiots(Abdul-Hakim Murad, Irfan Alawi, Haras Rafiq, Taj Hargey) going to be on this program too?!

[hearandobey]

no they aren't but "sheikh mogra" (don't really know much about him other then that he's from mcb) was the interviewed imam.

[AkramUKConv]

Thanks hearandobey, let's use your thread, its better.

Watch it via a torrent: http://isohunt.com/download/26237900...hes+Unholy+War

Programme: Dispatches: Unholy War
Channel: Channel 4
Date: Monday 17 September
Time: 08:00PM-09:00PM[/CENTRE]

http://www.channel4.com/news/article...oly+war/802852

Dispatches investigates the violence and intimidation facing Muslims who convert to Christianity in Britain. Dispatches reporter Antony Barnett meets former Muslims who now live under the threat of reprisals from their former communities. Many are still living in fear. He interviews a family who have been driven out of their home and a convert whose brother was beaten close to death.

The investigation uncovers a network of churches supporting converts from Islam who have to worship under a veil of secrecy. It is estimated there are as many as 3,000 Muslims who have converted to Christianity living in Britain.

Converting to another religion for a Muslim is not just considered a taboo act by some believers. Certain Islamic texts demand converts - also known as apostates - be punished severely for deserting their faith. In several Islamic states, the death penalty is imposed. Here in Britain, Dispatches discovers a form of mob justice is taking place on our streets. A concerned Christian bishop tells Dispatches that it may not be long before a British convert is killed, and implores Muslim leaders to take action.

Dispatches discovers the situation for converts from Islam in Britain is a tinderbox waiting to explode. Increasingly asylum seekers from Islamic countries are exploring different faiths in Britain while a new strand of evangelical Christianity is targeting Britain's Muslims for conversion.

With radical British Islamic groups calling for apostates to be executed if they achieved their goal of a worldwide Islamic state, it's a potentially dangerous cocktail that has been exacerbated by the silence of both Muslim and Christian leaders on the subject.

[hearandobey]

no problem, akramukconv.

i highly recommend people watch this if they have time inshallah!

[Daniel]

no problem, akramukconv.

i highly recommend people watch this if they have time inshallah!

Why? These people have abandoned their share of the hereafter, so I fail to see why such miserable creatures deserve any attention from us.

[Burning Candle]

I watched bits and pieces of this - a real load of rubbish, an attempt to stir up trouble about murtids who most Muslims in the UK couldnt give two hoots about anyways. Most of them are Iranian. What was interesting was the presenter kept trying to blame HT for this hatred and violence although even he had to keep admitting that no violence has taken place against them yet.

Ibrahim Mogra should stop speaking in public. He is a threat to Islam. First his attack on sheikh riyadh and now this.

But people should watch this documentary as it also exposes the work of missionaries in the UK and how they target Muslim populations in places like Bradford and the Midlands. It shows how they prey on the vulnerable such as those experiencing domestic problems, divorce, drug abuse, etc and some even pose as English teachers. This is a bit of a wake-up call for us to begin to tackle these problems ourselves as the danger of leaving it to the kuffar is all too clear.

[Yasir]

This onslaught risks turning into a racist witch-hunt

Seumas Milne
Thursday September 20, 2007
The Guardian

The renewed anti-Muslim media campaign is partly driven by a political agenda which seeks to justify war.

Britons are now more suspicious of Muslims than are Americans or citizens of any other major western European country, including France. According to an international Harris poll last month, nearly 30% of British people believe it's impossible to be both a Muslim and a Briton (compared with 14% who think you can't be French and a Muslim); 38% think the presence of Muslims in the country is a threat to national security (compared with 21% in the US); and 46% believe that Muslims have too much political power in Britain, far above the level of any other surveyed country. You might think that these findings, reported in the Financial Times, would have been the occasion for some soul-searching about where British society is going, the state of community relations, and a new self-restraint in the way Muslim stories are covered in the media.

Not a bit of it. The fact that a large minority of Britons have some of the most Islamophobic attitudes in the western world has passed without comment. Instead, we have since been treated to a renewed barrage of lurid and hostile stories about Muslims which can only have further inflamed anti-Muslim opinion and the community's own sense of being under permanent siege. This isn't just a problem of hate-filled tabloid rants, such as the Express's denunciation of Muslims' "alien and threatening outfits", or Richard Littlejohn's Muslim-baiting in the Mail. For the past three weeks, there has been a stream of hostile coverage in the heavyweight press and on TV current affairs programmes.

This week it is was an hour-long Channel 4 Dispatches about attacks on Muslim converts to Christianity; last week it was the BBC Newsnight programme's 20-minute interview with the latest defector from the non-violent Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir; the week before that it was a Newsnight special on radical Islamist books in east London libraries, complete with sinister music and a round-table debate. The same week there was a Times front-page splash about the "hardline takeover of British mosques", focused on the deeply conservative Deobandi religious movement which has long had a strong presence among British Muslims of Pakistani origin. For both Newsnight programmes, it was apparently felt that Patrick Mercer - the Tory MP sacked by David Cameron for making racially inflammatory remarks and appointed a security adviser by Gordon Brown - was the ideal person to comment on Muslim issues. Meanwhile, the novelist Martin Amis denounced "liberal relativist appeasers" of a "racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitorial, imperialist and genocidal" doctrine.

The problem isn't necessarily with the stories themselves. There are obviously legitimate issues to report about jihadist or anti-Jewish strains within the Deobandi school, the agenda of a group like Hizb ut-Tahrir that the government originally wanted to ban, or intimidation of converts to any religion. But in a climate of anti-Muslim prejudice, their disproportionate and sensationalist treatment can only feed ethnic tensions ("Christians in Britain are under attack", this week's Dispatches programme began, even if the numbers were tiny). Nor is the record of these kinds of reports impressive - an earlier Dispatches programme on the preaching of hate in British mosques was recently found by the police and Crown Prosecution Service to have "completely distorted" what speakers had said.

The level of Islamophobia highlighted by the Harris poll is obviously partly a response to the July 2005 bombings and later failed terror attacks. But given the fact that most British people have little contact with Muslims, some are bound to be swayed by the media campaigns of the past couple of years - which have not only focused on jihadist groups but also the niqab and multiculturalism. What has given the anti-Muslim onslaught particular force is that many secular liberals have convinced themselves that since Islam is an ideology rather than an ethnicity - and because they see themselves as defending liberal values - they are on the righteous side of racism. In reality, of course, religion isn't only about beliefs, it's also about culture and identity and, as the British National party has worked out, Islam has become a toxic racial proxy.

The relentless public invective against Muslims and Islamism is also clearly fuelled by a political agenda, which seeks to demonstrate that jihadist violence is driven, as Tony Blair and the US neoconservatives always insisted, by a socially disconnected ideology rather than decades of western invasion, occupation and support for dictatorships across the Muslim world. That is certainly the view of Richard Watson, the reporter behind Newsnight's Muslim coverage, who recently wrote that extreme Islamism and terror are the product of a "seductive cult", not western foreign policy, and demanded that British Muslims find new leaders. And the co-author of the thinktank report which formed the basis of Newsnight's programme on Islamist books in Tower Hamlets libraries is the self-proclaimed neocon Douglas Murray.

Gordon Brown is said to want to mimic the clandestine methods used by the CIA against communism during the cold war in the cultural field to win Muslim hearts and minds. If the government's sponsorship of the pliant Sufi Muslim Council is any indication of the way he wants to go, that won't work - nor will any approach that tries to load responsibility for jihadist violence on to the Muslim community while refusing to take responsibility for the government's own role in fanning the flames by supporting aggression and occupation in the Muslim world.

None of this is an argument for refraining from criticising Muslims or their organisations - but it does highlight the need for context and sensitivity in a climate in which Muslims are under a crude assault that would simply not be accepted if targeted on any other community. The relentless media onslaught in Britain on Muslims, their culture and institutions risks turning into a racist witch-hunt. On the ground, it translates into violent attacks - and Crown Prosecution Service figures show that 82% of convictions for identified religiously aggravated offences last year involved attacks on Muslims. Those attacks reportedly spike not only after terrorist incidents but also in response to media feeding frenzies. Some pro-war liberals like to argue that Islamophobia doesn't exist - try telling that to those at the sharp end.

Source: Guardian - Comment is Free