Bearing in mind that the organs of the British state tend to pander to Islam and its followers, it’s rare that I have the opportunity to say that the state has done the right thing when it comes to Islam. Our state, including arms of the state that enforce the law, such as the police, the judiciary and the regulatory authorities are riddled with individuals who pander to Islam along with various Islamic grievance mongers and sinister pro Islam promotion groups. The presence of such groups and those in government who are eager to pander to Islam means that Islamic miscreants and violence promoters often end up getting a free pass to call for the deaths of the rest of us by the state. It’s getting far too common to see ordinary Britons persecuted by the state merely for telling the truth about the ideology of Islam whilst simultaneously Muslims are allowed to preach and incite the most appalling hatred about non Muslims. However, for a change, we have been recently presented with an occasion when a state entity has not just rolled over and pandered at the sound of some dishonest whine about ‘Islamophobia’.
The UK radio spectrum regulator OFCOM has at last done the right thing and taken the Sheffield Islamic community radio station Iman FM off the air. The station, as this blog reported earlier this month, was broadcasting speeches and lectures by an Islamic preacher, who was associated with Al Qaida and who had inspired both the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the Fort Hood shooting.
Iman FM had its broadcasting licence for the 101.3MHz frequency in the Sheffield area temporarily suspended earlier this year for putting out content that OFCOM said was:”material likely to encourage or incite the commission of crime or to lead to disorder’. Iman FM had broadcast 25 hours of lectures by hate preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone strike in Yemen in 2011. Now, finally, OFCOM have done the right thing and permanently shut down Iman FM.
The station had broadcast material from Awalaki that was said by OFCOM to be a ‘direct call to action to members of the Muslim community to prepare for and carry out violent action against non-Muslim people’. According to the Daily Mail, the station’s management were also informed by OFCOM that they were ‘unfit’ to hold a broadcast licence.
When confronted by OFCOM, who had got in touch with Iman FM following a complaint about the broadcast of incitement to murder non Muslims, the management of the station blatantly lied about the situation. They said that they had broadcast the 25 hours of vile Islamic hate preaching ‘by mistake’. Yeah right! Anybody in broadcasting can make a mistake such as loudly cough in front of an open mike, put on the wrong song or play the wrong clip but mistakes usually last five minutes or so, not 25 hours. This does not look to me like any form of ‘mistake’ this was deliberate promotion of violence and sedition.
The bare faced lies coming out of this Islamic radio station are truly astonishing and those who are speaking them are showing utter contempt for the truth and for the rest of us. Apart from saying that 25 hours of exhortations to Muslims to prepare and carry out acts of terror against non Muslims was a ‘mistake’, the station management also lied when they said that they had no ideal who Awalaki was. I call ‘bullshit’ on that. It would have taken about five minutes or less to use a search engine to ascertain who Awalaki was and to see that he’s not suitable for broadcast for more than a few minutes, let alone 25 hours. There were further obfuscations apparent in the statement of the station’s chief executive Mohammad Mughal who said: ‘This is very, very sad because none of us had any idea this lecture was preaching hatred.”
Have you ever heard such obvious falsehoods? Of course they must have known about Awalaki about who he was and about the content of his lectures. Mohammed Mughal then went on to hide behind some of the various idiotic Christians from the naïve interfaith circuit who have appeared as guests on Iman FM.
Mohammed Mughal said: ‘We are not just a Muslim radio station – we regularly feature Christian presenters.’ Again yet more bullshit. What is coming out of Mughal’s mouth is taqiyya, nothing but taqiyya. Even OFCOM themselves refer to the excuses made by the station and its management for the broadcasts in question as ‘not credible’. Mughal appears to think, or wants the rest of us to think that having some idiot liberal Vicar or Rabbi on a show to spout appeasing nonsense about Islam, makes up for broadcasting 25 hours of calls to kill the kufar. Well, it doesn’t.
What bothers me about this whole story is the question of what else have they been broadcasting that incites violence or excites the violent passions of the followers of the violent ideology of Islam? Iman FM were caught and sanctioned because of a complaint about the Awalaki broadcasts, but it does make me wonder about what they’ve been broadcasting in the past that has not been complained about? Maybe, and its a worrying thought, the Muslim audience for Iman FM in Sheffield were quite happy with listening to the sort of promulgation of hatred for non Muslims of which the Alwalaki tape was just the most egregious example? The station has been busted for the Awalaki audio but what other types of incitement to violence and hatred have they broadcast in the past, but have not been sanctioned for or complained about?
It is likely that Iman FM and its management will get away with just with the licence revocation and will not face the sort of charges of inciting acts of terrorism that broadcasting 25 hours of a known hate preacher should attract. Can you imagine what the response of the state would be if the boot was on the other foot and it was a local Christian or Jewish community or restricted service radio (RSL) station that was broadcasting stuff that was only a fraction as dangerous as what Iman FM had broadcast? If in the hypothetical and unlikely case that one of these stations had broadcast 25 hours of clerics calling for people to prepare for a violent conflict with people outside their faith then not only would they lose their licence but the management and presenters would find themselves subject to all manner of ‘hate speech’ charges. It’s yet another example of the double standard that the state applies to Islam. Others in the position of Iman FM, who were not Muslim, would have found themselves facing prison, but in all likelihood the management will just walk away with the loss of licence and being left with broadcast equipment that they cannot use.
OFCOM have done the right thing here in taking Iman FM off the air but they need to be much more proactive in monitoring what Islamic radio stations are up to. At present OFCOM appears to rely on the public complaining about inappropriate broadcasts from community and restricted service licence stations, something they are not going to get in areas where the local Muslims may quite like hours upon hours of ‘kill the kufar’ rhetoric coming out of their radios. In future OFCOM should be specifically wary about giving Islamic organisations community or RSL permissions as it is these Islamic groups who are the major problem when it comes to fomenting violence and hatred. OFCOM should also place conditions on any Islamic group wishing to run a community or RSL station that requires them to clear in advance with OFCOM any programme of an Islamic religious or political nature with the radio regulator. This will of course be burdensome to both the broadcaster and to OFCOM but it is better than having hours upon hours of ‘kill the kuffar’ stuff going out over the air. Personally I’d ban Islamic groups from having any access to the community or RSL systems because they have proven to us all that they cannot be trusted with this resource one little bit. After all it’s not the first time that Muslim groups have used the broadcast systems to promote hatred is it? In December 2012 Radio Asian Fever the former pirate station that now occupies both the 107.3 MHz frequency and has a DAB slot in the Manchester area was fined £4000 for broadcasting calls for gays to be tortured. There are also the ongoing problems of Islamic TV stations, some which are carried by platforms such as Sky, which continue to ignore OFCOM’s instructions to not promote hatred against either non Muslims or Islamic dissidents such as the Ahmediyya. Britain must be very careful about allowing Islamic groups unfettered access to broadcast systems whether they are intended for an international or national audience, such as the Islam channel which has been criticised by OFCOM, or whether their signal is only for local consumption as with Iman FM. This is because many of these Islamic stations have used the privilege of access to the broadcast spectrum not to bring people together or to help society as a whole, but to drive wedges between individuals and groups and to destroy societal cohesion.
It seems that along with our children, weapons, explosives and trucks, we can now add the radio frequency spectrum to the list of things that we cannot trust the followers of Islam to treat responsibly or with any respect. As we can see with the Iman FM case, not only can we not trust the followers of Islam to behave in a fit and proper manner as befitting the holder of a broadcast licence we also can’t trust them to tell the truth when caught out broadcasting 25 hours of pro Al Qaida rants from someone like Awalaki. OFCOM have done the right thing here but they need to look much more closely at the output of Islamic radio and TV stations and also deal much more harshly with the inevitable breaches of broadcast regulations for which these stations seem to have a great proclivity.
Links
Iman FM lose broadcast licence permanently
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4738792/Muslim-radio-station-Iman-FM-closed-down.html
The bare faced liars of Iman FM
Serious and ongoing breaches of broadcasting code by Islamic TV and Radio stations
It isn’t only the community radio stations; BBC Radio itself is very eager to shout down and denigrate anyone who doesn’t follow the “Party Line”. BBC interviewer Catrin Nye was happy to allow muslim activist Ruqaiya Haris to give a free pass to terrorism, but both women launched into an hysterical onslaught on a passer-by who pointed out that Great Britain did not yet have Shariah Law, and the BBC published a slanderous edited version on-line accusing the man of “Islamophobia”, whilst refusing to allow other media outlets to see film of the complete incident.
A presenter on BBC’s Asian Network asked her audience to ‘phone in with their suggestions for the “right punishment” for blasphemy, and there was a television debate in which an audience member who asked the panel why FGM was being permitted, found himself being shrieked at by hysterical harpies accusing him of “racism”.
Anyone who opposes mass migration from the Third World into Europe is automatically described by the BBC as “right wing”, “far right” or – in the case of Milo Yianniopoulos, who simply wanted to discuss Islam with the supposedly-enquiring minds of university students – as “extreme right-wing”……