Tuesday, October 06, 2009 

Paxman vs Johnson.

Some seem to be having something approaching a sense of humour bypass over last night's performance of Paxman vs Johnson, but I'll be damned if this wasn't the funniest political interview in years, even if it doesn't really have the greatness of Paxman vs Howard or Paxman vs Blears:

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10/06/2009 10:04:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, September 22, 2008 

A special plea.

If anyone attending the Labour party conference happens to come across that fat Republican twat Frank Luntz, would they kindly knock him over and repeatedly jump on his head until his skull shatters, so that the nation can be spared the pointless, meaningless, boring and beyond endurance focus groups which he keeps holding for Newsnight? Thanks in advance.

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9/22/2008 10:49:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, September 18, 2008 

Let's sabotage the Newsnight vote.

Boy oh boy, if there's one thing that we most certainly need more of it's pointless votes. The latest is being hosted by Newsnight, which asks you to vote for the best post-war prime minister. As Unity says, this is a pretty much naked attempt to get stories out of the fact that Gordon Brown is almost guaranteed to come last.

Well, two can play that game. Considering that it's likely to be a straight fight between Thatcher and Attlee, let's go completely into leftfield and choose Thatcher's old nemesis Grocer Heath for the top spot, as Anton Vowl suggests. Go for Gordon Brown for second just to truly stuff the whole thing up, and then put someone like Anthony "Suez" Eden in third for further potential comedy. Attlee can go somewhere in the middle, and Blair and Thatcher can go fight it out for last place.

Who's with me?

Update: Guess it's just me then.

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9/18/2008 09:51:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, February 06, 2008 

Biting Newsnight in Private Eye.

Private Eye is generally one of the few remaining shining beacons of investigative and fearless journalism in this country. It can also however be pompous, smug and on occasion, downright wrong.

In this case, it isn't quite the latter, but it's almost as close to it as it could possibly be. Despite nearly a month of no new dispatches from either Newsnight or Policy Exchange, who've had a considerable amount of time to conduct their own investigations, which they said they were going to, or to launch a legal action, as they implied they might do, "Ratbiter" is today given nearly half a page in the Eye (1203, page 8) on the fracas between the two over Policy Exchange's "Hijacking of British Islam report".

Ratbiter brings only one new thing to the table, and more on that at the end. Apart from that, it's as if he'd been hired by Policy Exchange themselves to defend their report. According to his piece, which implies that because Newsnight sat on the report and that rather than reporting its findings it doesn't believe there's any problems with Islam in this country, something hardly borne out by Richard Watson's repeated investigations over the past year into Hizb-ut-Tahrir, other Islamist organisations and similar allegations to PE's in Tower Hamlets' libraries, "the evidence that Policy Exchange was basically right about the extremist literature available is overwhelming". Indeed it is, as long as you as selectively decide which "evidence" to include in your piece as Ratbiter has.

The only two mosques which Ratbiter mentions are the Muslim Education Centre in High Wycombe, where Newsnight openly broadcast that it had one of the books bought from it on the shelves, but that the shop had a completely different invoice to the one which backed up PE's research, one that Newsnight alleged was a forgery, and the Al-Muntada mosque in west London, where again the invoice was considered dodgy, but also never convincingly claimed that the books didn't come from there. As Ratbiter points out, one of the books apparently bought from there is still available on its website. Well, according to when the Eye went to press it was, but looking at their website now the shop link only provides a phone number and a couple of paragraphs on what's available there.

If Newsnight's evidence had relied on just those two mosques, then it would indeed have been ridiculous for it to have broadcast its lengthy report on the PE publication. Instead, as Ratbiter doesn't acknowledge at any point, the programme featured another four mosques, as my post giving a comprehensive run-down of all the accusations makes clear, one of which looks like a prima facie case of forgery that libels the mosque accused of selling the literature. Since then, allegations about material found at the Edinburgh mosque featured in the report and at a least a couple of others has been called into question.

As with the other PE operatives who defended the report at the time, rather than being angry about the allegations made by Newsnight, Ratbiter appears to be most miffed that Newsnight bothered to double-check the information in the report, and also the invoices which PE supplied to back it up. I'm currently reading Nick Davies' Flat Earth News (expect a review once I'm done), serialised in the Eye in the last issue, and one of the main points he makes in it when defining "churnalism" is that most journalists now, whether working for the Press Association, local newspapers, the big national players or indeed the BBC, simply don't have adequate time to check the sources of their material to ensure that what they're writing and providing as fact is actually true, which ought after all to be the number one service that a journalist should provide. As Ratbiter himself acknowledges, most of the rest of the media ran with it, without even bothering one would assume to so much as check that what the PE report said was accurate. That, after all, was their job, and would have prevented the journos involved from bashing out the other stories they're expected to. In other words, Newsnight provided the very base service that journalists ought to, which is to check for bullshit, and because it did, it's been hammered for it. What a sad state of affairs British journalism really is in for this to be more important than accuracy itself.

Ratbiter's main rhetorical flourish is that the researchers themselves fear for their lives as a result of threats from the extremists that Newsnight pretended didn't exist. Ratbiter's main backing for this is that the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, whose site comes off as almost a Muslim Daily Mail, but who can be hardly described as extremists, allegations about anti-semitism and funding of David Irving by one of its founders aside, put on its website while describing the researchers as "zio-con frauds", that "if you know who they are - please write in and we will expose these men and women for all the Muslim community to see." Thing is, those extremists within the community have now been enormously helped by, err, Ratbiter. Before his piece, we neither knew where the researchers currently were, or how many of them there were, with Newsnight told they were on a jaunt in Mauritania. He/she informs us that there are 8 of them, and that they are currently "somewhere in London". Doubtless those self-same researchers that have been put in danger by Newsnight's refusal to cooperate with the slide to "churnalism" will greatly thank their latest defender for narrowing the search down that little bit more.

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2/06/2008 11:22:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 

Newsnight gets hoaxed over "al-Qaida in Britain".

The Mujahideen Shura Council's (now the Islamic State of Iraq) logo.

Oh dear. Generally, Newsnight is on the ball when it comes to most things, but it fell far short last night in the bullshit meter stakes.

In typically breathless tones, reporter Richard Watson reported that on the 2nd of January a posting appeared on the jihadist forum alekhlaas.net announcing the creation of "al-Qaida in Britain". The message included threats against both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, urged Muslims to join them, and generally prepare for battle. Sajjan Gohal made a lot of vapid assertions and cast no light on the subject whatsoever, then "ex-spook" Dame Pauline Neville-Jones was invited on to talk about battling an ideology while saying we had to take the message "very seriously".

You can understand why Newsnight got excited. Over the past year especially, and since Zarqawi's group in Iraq professed allegiance to Osama bin Laden (now the self-proclaimed "Islamic State of Iraq"), various terrorist groups the world over have taken on the "al-Qaida" brand. The Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat became al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, while the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group has also more recently joined up, even if the ties were already long established. There was also the announcement of the establishment of al-Qaida in the Levant (Lebanon, Syria, etc), although whether such a group actually exists in any operative state is certainly open to question. Closer to home, and also questionable, a group calling itself "al-Qaida in Europe" has claimed responsibility for the 7/7 attacks, but rather undermined its credibility when it also claimed that it was behind the blackouts in America that were most certainly not their doing.

It's undoubtedly true that if a group calling itself "al-Qaida in Britain" had openly announced its formation and said it was planning attacks that it would be a significant ratcheting up of the audacity, if not the competency or potency of takfirist jihadists within these shores. What it doesn't mean is that the group has necessarily any material links with al-Qaida as it currently exists, if indeed it really does exist any more except as an idea. Previously, all those who weren't publicity whores or hotheads have kept their heads well below the parapet for good reason - even though Omar Bakri Mohammad continues to preach and spread his reactionary crap via Paltalk or somewhere else since he was expelled to the Lebanon - if they don't or didn't have some sort of understanding with MI6, they were rapidly put under surveillance and are now prosecuted in a similar fashion.

The reasons for why it's highly unlikely this was anything other than either a prankster or a fantasist are manifold. For starters, alekhlass is just one of the innumerable number of jihadist forums now proliferating across the web, and until recently was by no means one of the most prominent. Recently, some of the most infamous have been taken down, prompting flight to far more secure, genuinely private sites that don't have any sort of open presence, and to replacements like alekhlass. It'd be unprecedented if that site was chosen out of all the others for such a major announcement. Secondly, if this was a genuine announcement that was taken seriously amongst cyber-jihadists themselves, it would have spread like wildfire across all of them; instead it was deleted almost as soon as it was put up. Indeed, if this had come from al-Qaida themselves it would have distributed to all of them as their As-Sahab releases are. One would have expected that such a major happening would have been accompanied like the Libyan allegiance statement was, with al-Zawahiri probably praising it in a audio or video message. It's possible they could want to get this out with a lower profile, as most are going to doubt that there is any real coherent group at work in this country under the al-Qaida moniker rather a rag-tag bunch in autonomous cells, but it still seems highly doubtful. Thirdly, the major jihadist monitoring organisations such as the SITE Intelligence Group and the NEFA Foundation have nothing on this whatsoever, when you'd expect they'd have been all over it, nor have any of the major blogs obsessed with jihadists.

Most of all though, there's no need for al-Qaida to announce that there's a latest franchise operating in this country. We already know there is; the media reminds of that fact as many times as it possibly can. Why do they need to be so blatant and unsubtle in their methods when they have such flagrant scaremongering garbage in the press courtesy of "security sources"? The Scotsman claimed at the weekend that there was an equivalent of a "white army" of terrorists made up of converts to Islam, with 1,500 mooted as the figure. Why bother announcing your establishment when they're doubtlessly only waiting for the command to slip into our bedrooms at night to slit our throats? To be more serious, it's also never been their style in the west: those such as Mohammad Atta and Siddique Khan are far too dedicated to their cause to wave their dicks around online and put a target right above their heads. Supposedly, prior to the patio gas canister jihad there were postings on forums about "London getting bombed tonight." Perhaps if they'd concentrated more on the bombs than self-aggrandising they might have achieved something other than setting themselves on fire.

This isn't to dispute that takfirists aren't operating in this country; just that those that are truly dangerous are the ones that don't draw attention to themselves. Announcing they've arrived would be doing just that. The threat exists, but it continues to be wildly overstated by those whose interest it is in to do so. Sorry Newsnight, you just got hoaxed.

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1/16/2008 09:25:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, December 17, 2007 

Charles Moore enters the Policy Exchange/Newsnight fray.

Firstly, apologies for not updating on Saturday. My phone line had until around 2 hours ago been borked since 2am on Friday night/Saturday morning. Thanks, Tiscali.

Secondly, this will hopefully be the last piece on the Policy Exchange/Newsnight confrontation unless something new comes up. Charles Moore, ex-editor of the Daily Telegraph, and Chairman of Policy Exchange just had to stick his nose in though and therefore deserves to be thoroughly fisked.

Skipping Moore's trite intro about Newsnight:

On a day when the world's central banks were combining to rescue the global banking system, and when Gordon Brown was trying to think of a way of signing away Britain's independence in Lisbon without cameras, there were big things for the programme to lead on.

Instead, it presented a huge, 17-minute package about Policy Exchange.


Seeing as the signing away didn't occur until Friday, there was little point going on about it until Thursday night, surely? Let's not even bother getting into the giving away of our birthrights that the Eurosceptics and tabloids have blustered over when they've preached bullshit and lies about Europe for so long. The 17-minute package was a thorough, intelligent and lucid piece of investigative journalism. It was something that doesn't grace our screens much anymore, and it was far better than a tedious report on the central banks having to bail out the other banks because of their economic ineptitude, unless the report went into how the free market had failed due to the greed of the City on both sides of the Atlantic.

Although Newsnight's portentousness was unjustified, the allegations did look serious. It should be said at once that they need proper investigation. But when you know the background, you come to see how very different this story is from the way Newsnight told it.

And does Charles Moore anywhere in this actual piece refute any of Newsnight's allegations and accusations? Of course he doesn't. This is the start of the obfuscation. The allegations need proper investigation, but in the mean time we're going to attack Newsnight for daring to investigate our potentially shoddy report.

This is what happened.

Over the summer, Policy Exchange produced the most comprehensive report so far on the extent to which extremist literature is available in British mosques and Islamic institutions. It is called The Hijacking of British Islam.

Muslim undercover researchers visited nearly 100 mosques. In 26 of them, they found extremist material - titles such as Women Who Deserve to Go to Hell (for answering their husbands back), virulent insults of Jews and homosexuals, puritanical attacks on moderate Muslims, calls for the complete rejection of Western society etc.

It was a big story, and as I shall make clear, none of Newsnight's claims this week has diminished its dimensions.


In 6 of those there are now, thanks to Newsnight, doubts about whether they did supply the material, meaning that extremist material was found in a fifth of such institutions, not a quarter. That's still unacceptable, but because of those doubts it also brings the entire report into disrepute. To continue to claim that Newsnight "hasn't diminished its dimensions" is to give in to a desire for personal myopia.

The report made the front page of many newspapers, including this one. It was extensively covered everywhere - everywhere except for the entire national output of the BBC.

This was because of Newsnight. Thinking that such a report was a serious public issue that could advance well under the "flagship's" full mast and sail, Policy Exchange had originally offered it to Newsnight exclusively.

Newsnight's people were enthusiastic, but on the late afternoon of the intended broadcast, they suddenly changed their tune.

Policy Exchange had offered them many of the receipts it had collected from mosques as evidence of purchase; now they said that they had shown the receipts to mosques and that there were doubts about the authenticity of one or two of them.

Given that the report was being published that night, the obvious thing for Newsnight to do was to broadcast Policy Exchange's findings at once, allowing the mosques to have their say about the receipts.

There was no need for Newsnight to claim "ownership" of the report. Instead, the editor, Peter Barron, decided to run nothing. His decision meant the Policy Exchange report was not touched by the BBC at all.


I'm sorry, is Moore meant to be getting at something here? Newsnight decides to actually check up on the veracity of PE's report, and when it discovers there are doubts, it decides to investigate more thoroughly, and this is something Newsnight is worthy of criticism over? One of the things modern day journalism suffers from in the 24-hour news climate is the desire to get the story out and for the facts, such as they are, to be established later. We've seen that happen this year with Madeleine McCann and in numerous other cases. They could have broadcast the report and said that the mosques disputed the findings and even the authenticity of the receipts, but would have been left with eggs on their faces and facing criticism if someone else had then done the investigation they decided to do themselves. Newsnight finds itself being damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. Moore is also wrong to say that the BBC didn't touch the report at all; as Osama Saeed has already explained, the Islamic Centre of Edinburgh had its "naming and shaming" in the report heavily covered on the BBC north of the border, and where again the findings have been disputed.

Mr Barron had already been in trouble for his editorial judgment.

In the summer, the BBC apologised for a Newsnight programme in which a reporter's encounters with Gordon Brown's press officer had been presented in reverse sequence, in order to make Mr Brown's team look intolerant.


Moore, like with Godson, has decide to turn on Peter Barron rather than reporting itself. It's true that Newsnight did apologise for that fortuitous editing, but it was the independent filmmaker's own work. Barron should have checked. Anyway, if we're to adopt the PE defense, the filmmaker can more than claim that despite his editing his report was still accurate, just not altogether the truth.

Mr Barron's judgment of the Policy Exchange report came under attack from colleagues: his flawed methodology - the original decision not to broadcast - had lost the entire corporation an important story.

Ah, failed methodology. Is this the new "flawed prospectus"?

Mr Barron decided to try to prove himself right. In the private sector, there is something called "vanity publishing", where people pay for their own works to be published.

Mr Barron's vanity broadcasting was, of course, at the expense of the licence-fee payer. He put the crew of the flagship on to investigating Policy Exchange's receipts. For six weeks, they turned on the staff of Policy Exchange, who had come to them in good faith in the first place, and treated them like criminals.

And, err, he rather has, hasn't he? Even if Moore's allegations are true, the licence-fee payer and the public interest have been served by Barron's decision to investigate. Apparently being asked some searching questions is now the equivalent of being banged up in police cells and raided at 6am in the morning.

The receipts that Policy Exchange had lent to them were impounded, and copies were distributed to others without permission.

They were subjected to complicated forensic tests. One of these, allegedly the most damning, was completed over a week before Wednesday's broadcast, but withheld from Policy Exchange.

Although there was no screaming news urgency about the item, a courier carrying the test results sat outside the offices of Policy Exchange's lawyers on Wednesday evening with the message that the think-tank could see the results only if it agreed, before seeing them, that it would go on air that night to answer Newsnight's charges.


Outside the lawyers' offices rather than Policy Exchange's? Could this possibly be because PE had already threatened legal action in the most alarming terms? Surely PE were going to appear on Newsnight anyway? Or were they going to, like the government, be unable to find anyone to appear despite a request? Newsnight presumably didn't hand back the originals because they rightly feared that PE wouldn't be gladly giving them back.

On the programme, Jeremy Paxman, who admitted off-air that he had not seen the film before it was broadcast, attacked Policy Exchange's research director, Dean Godson, for refusing to let Newsnight speak to the researchers who had collected the receipts. This was not so: Mr Barron himself had spoken to two of them.

This was dealt with in the previous posts: Barron only says he spoke to one and that was on the day when the original broadcast was meant to be in "an inconclusive conference call".

Poor Paxo, who these days has the air of a once-marvellous old Grand National horse who should no longer be entered for the race, had not been properly briefed.

He accused Policy Exchange itself, which the Newsnight report had not done, of fabricating receipts. Strange the mixture of fierce accusation and casual sloppiness.


Now we're down to the personal insults and more obfuscation. Pray tell, if PE or the researchers employed by PE didn't fabricate the receipts, who did?

Newsnight was very excited about the results of a study of receipts by a forensic document analyst that seemed to suggest forgery.

It did not tell viewers that its expert wrote: "The relatively limited amount of writing available for comparison has prevented me from expressing any definite opinion." She did not study any of the writing in Arabic, though it appeared on two of the three receipts she investigated.


Strange then that she was apparently convinced in Newsnight's actual report. Newsnight was hardly able to ask the researchers to provide some longhand to compare with the receipts, was it?

Of course, any allegations about receipts are, in principle, a serious matter for a think-tank.

Policy Exchange bases its work on evidence, and so its evidence must be sound. The BBC did not give the think-tank the chance to investigate its complicated allegations properly. Policy Exchange will now do so.


Oh, for Christ's sake. Only now are the allegations to be investigated properly. Had PE been suitably rigourous in the first place it would have found the mistakes and discrepancies that Newsnight did before the report had got anywhere near publication. It had six weeks during the BBC's own investigation to do its own digging. Froth and chaff.

But the real oddity of all this is that the actual contents of the report have been validated.

Extremist literature was available in the mosques, and in some cases still is. The mosques could not dissociate themselves from the literature and, in most cases, did not even try to: they jumped on the receipts instead.


Well, a few of them did, and justifiably so one would imagine when in one case it seems to have been fabricated with the office round the corner being wrongly identified as a mosque. The Newsnight investigation found two of the books mentioned in the report in two of the mosques; hardly validating it when its complete findings have been put into doubt due to the apparent making up of the receipts.

One mosque insisted that the next-door bookshop selling extreme stuff had nothing to do with it, yet the extremist books in question which the shop sells are by a former Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia (author of a famous essay in which he literally asserted that the Earth is flat) who was a founding sponsor of the mosque!

And one would expect, with the writer being a former Grand Mufti of Saudi that his books would be reasonably widespread.

I don't blame Newsnight for reporting questions about receipts, though I deplore their methods. I do blame them for trying to kill the much, much bigger story about the hate that is being preached in our country.

Moore than seems to deplore the methods of investigative journalism. Not surprising seeing that the stitching up of Galloway from the "documents" in Iraq took place under his watch. If the BBC was trying to kill the "bigger story", it's done a poor job of it, considering how it's contributed to that story itself considerably over the last year.

Policy Exchange researches all sorts of public policy - police reform, school choice, housing, as well as on Islamist extremism. Next week comes its big report on improving philanthropy. I find it repellent that the might of the BBC is deployed to threaten and bully a charity in this way.

Most of which is complete bollocks. The latest publication on prison reform recommends selling off some of the prison estate that is dilapidated, pocketing the money and then spending it on building new prisons. Nowhere is it explained just where the prisoners currently occupying the prisons to be sold off would be housed in the meantime. To claim that the BBC is "threatening and bullying" Policy Exchange is absurd: PE, with its legal threats before the BBC investigation had even been shown, was the one which was bullying while the BBC was daring to look behind the facade. Policy Exchange seems to have two obsessions: the police and Islam. Since July 2006, when it published Martin Bright's series of articles on the relationship between the government and "Islamist reactionaries" abroad in a pamphlet, it's published three other studies on Islam, including the one now under suspicion. Seeing as it was co-founded by the ghastly Michael Gove, a noted devotee to neo-conservatism who had his tome "Celsius 7/7" described by William Dalrymple as "a confused epic of simplistic incomprehension, riddled with more factual errors and misconceptions than any other text I have come across in two decades of reviewing books on this subject", it's not much of a surprise.

More important, however, is the fate of Muslims in this country.

It is not often realised that the British citizens most persecuted by Islamist extremism are Muslims themselves.

The researchers that Policy Exchange used to find the extreme literature were all Muslims - no one else could pass unnoticed in a potentially hostile environment.

Because their safety was and is threatened, the think-tank protects their anonymity. On air, Newsnight revealed where some of them were.

Yesterday an Islamist website repeated this and called for supporters to help hunt them down. The BBC has unintentionally exposed them to the risk of harm.


Oh yes, they're currently in Mauritania, a country the size of Egypt. Seeing as no one knows who or where they are, those Islamists might just have a considerable task on their hands in tracking them down. Moore would of course know about the pitfalls of offending some Muslims: he wrote a reasonably infamous article prior to the religious hatred law going through which opened with "Was the prophet Mohammed a paedophile?" He continued:

To me, it seems anachronistic to describe Mohammed as a child-molester. The marriage rules of his age and society were much more tribal and dynastic than our own, and women were treated more as property and less as autonomous beings. Aisha was the daughter of Mohammed's right-hand man, and eventual successor (caliph), Abu Bakr. No doubt he and his family were very proud of the match. I raise the question, though, because it seems to me that people are perfectly entitled - rude and mistaken though they may be - to say that Mohammed was a paedophile, but if David Blunkett gets his way, they may not be able to.

Some pointed out that not every source agrees that one of Mohammad's wives was 9 when he married her; others pointed out that she was also described as 19. Calling Mohammad a paedophile is a common insult when mocking Islam, but Moore, a notable believer, would be outraged if Jesus was described in similar terms, as he goes on to relate when describing Paul Abbott's attitudes towards Christmas. After all, there is no account of what he spent his time doing between his teenage years and when he was baptised, aged 30: he could have conceivably spent it banging every goat in sight, although it's unlikely. Thing is, I agree with Moore over his wider point; I just wouldn't have decided to be needlessly inflammatory to make it. To digress, Policy Exchange could have refused to tell Newsnight where they were at all; provided with the information, what did they expect Newsnight to do with it?

What these brave Muslims undeniably found was evidence of widespread, obnoxious material that is a risk to decent Muslims and to British social order.

Really? The written word in the form of impenetrable, archaic religious texts and books by reactionary gobshites is now so dangerous as to threaten the mores of "decent Muslims" and risk British social order itself? If so, then reports which are based upon fabricated evidence must also conceivably threaten, in that horrible new phrase, "community cohesion".

The BBC chose, in effect, to side with their extreme opponents and to cover up the report, because of an obsession about a few pieces of paper.

The few pieces of paper which just happened to underlie the entire report. Congratulations Charles Moore, your attempt at "moving the debate on" has succeeded admirably.

Update: Brilliant wider look at the entire report by Abdurahman Jafar on CiF.

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12/17/2007 07:00:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, December 14, 2007 

Policy Exchange vs Newsnight: Ding ding, round two!

Policy Exchange have issued a second press release on the Newsnight investigation into their report:

Policy Exchange regards the allegations made in BBC Newsnight’s programme of 12th December as libellous and perverse. We stand by our report The Hijacking of British Islam. Policy Exchange investigated nearly 100 mosques and other Islamic institutions of which 26 were found to harbour extremist literature. Of these, Newsnight alleges discrepancies in respect of the receipts obtained for the literature in 6 cases. In 5 of those 6 cases, irrespective of the allegations about receipts, a clear connection to extremism has been identified. In the sixth case, the mosque has publicly admitted it has a problem with rogue traders operating on its premises.

OK then, let's have a closer look at both the Newsnight allegations (video) and the description of the mosques in question in the Policy Exchange report (PDF).

The first mosque featured in Newsnight's investigation was the London Cultural Heritage Centre. The only link to extremism which the Policy Exchange report mentions (page 31) is that Ramzi Mohamed, one of the failed 21/7 bombers, was alleged by the Evening Standard and Sunday Times to have worshipped at the mosque, something the mosque itself denied. The report also doesn't mention that the books featured in the report were allegedly purchased from a stall in the mosque during a book fair, which is certainly different than them being provided by the mosque itself. Secondly, the date on the invoice allegedly provided by the seller is on a Friday during Ramadan, when there most certainly wasn't according to the mosque's spokesman even enough room for such a fair to have taken place. PE retorts that the mosque has had by its own admission problems with rogue sellers but again that hardly warrants the report "naming and shaming" the mosque as selling/providing extremist literature. If the LCHC was suitably inclined it could probably consult lawyers about its own possibilities for action over the inaccurate allegations.

The second mosque featured by Newsnight was the North London Central Mosque, or, aka, Abu Hamza's former haunt, usually known as the Finsbury Park Mosque. Policy Exchange explains in its report that it was taken over in 2005 by the Muslim Association of Britain, with five members of MAB made the trustees of the institution. One of these men is Azzam Tamimi, who is noted for his relationship with Hamas, and has in the past made inflammatory remarks about martyrdom. The mosque is also sympathetic towards the Islamist philosopher Mawdudi, who formed the Jamaat-e-Islami Islamic political party. Despite this, the mosque itself has denied supplying the books featured in the PE report, on page 77.

The third and potentially most serious allegations against Policy Exchange concern the "Euston Mosque". Policy Exchange's report claims that the mosque is headquarters of the United Kingdom Islamic Mission, an organisation linked by Martin Bright in the New Statesman to the aforementioned Jamaat-e-Islami party, something which JEI collaborates on its website. The UKIM was also featured in the Undercover Mosque programme.

All of which would be well and good, but for one small detail. The actual Euston Mosque, as the Newsnight investigation found, is around the corner at 204a North Gower Street, rather than 202 as PE states. The mosque and UKIM have no relationship with each other, and the receipt provided for the books is completely different to the ones which the mosque issues. Policy Exchange claims that the UKIM must have a prayer room that is used and subsequently known as the Euston Mosque, but the outside of the building certainly doesn't make any claims for what seems like the headquarters of UKIM to be anything other than an office. UKIM also completely denies issuing the books featured in the report on page 68 and giving the receipt supplied to Newsnight by PE. The Euston Mosque would it seem on this evidence to have a good case for suing Policy Exchange for libel.

The fourth featured mosque is the Tauheed Mosque and Islamic Centre in Leyton in London. The Newsnight report describes it as a "Salafi" mosque, and according to PE it was founded with a donation by Abdul ‘Aziz ‘Abdullah bin Baz, whose writings are featured in the PE report as extremist literature, and has maintained close links with Saudi Arabia ever since. The address given by PE is again wrong, as it actually corresponds to the Islamic bookshop next door. The mosque and the bookshop deny any connection with each other, and the spokesman for the mosque in the report says that they have considered legal action as a result. Policy Exchange says that their researcher was taken from the mosque into the bookshop and told that the books they purchased and used in the report were sanctioned by the mosque.

It again doesn't end there. Newsnight itself noticed similarities between the handwriting on the receipt for the books with the handwriting on the receipt from the London Cultural Heritage Centre. Karen Barr, the expert enlisted by the programme to look into the authenticity of the invoices said that in her opinion there was strong evidence that they were written by the same person.

The final mosques featured, the Al-Muntada in Parsons Green in London (page 59), and the Muslim Education Centre in High Wycombe (page 145) don't appear to have denied as such that the books featured in the report didn't come from them, with Newsnight's reporter finding one of the books on the shelves in the MEC shop. What is denied is that the receipt from the MEC is genuine; the spokesman for the MEC mosque showed the completely different invoices they use in Newsnight's report. Karen Barr performed the "Esta/Esther(sp)" test on the two invoices, and found that one was resting on top of the other when it had been written. This could of course be entirely innocent: the researcher might have took invoices out of his pocket looking for money when he was purchasing the books and the seller ended up writing the invoice on top of it, for instance. It could also be more sinister, suggesting that the invoices were fabricated at the same time at a later date.

There is then some persuasive evidence then that at least some of the invoices for the purchases were fabricated at a later date. Policy Exchange has however not gone with the explanation that the books were purchased and the invoices made up later after the researchers didn't get such prima facie evidence at the time, which, however devious, would at least be somewhat acceptable. Instead, it's not directly rebutted the claim that the invoices were fabricated, instead pointing out that the mosques have been linked in their report to extremism. Being linked with extremism and providing extremist literature is hardly the same thing, and in the "Euston Mosque" case at least their evidence is directly misleading and false. The mosques in question are always likely to, in an echo of Mandy Rice-Davies, say that as in deny it, but PE itself has provided no real explanation for the discrepancies between the receipts.

The statement goes on to continue to attack Newsnight:

At all times, Policy Exchange acted in good faith, voluntarily providing to Newsnight’s team a number of the receipts obtained in the course of our research. Newsnight commissioned a forensic investigation of around 20 receipts; in 6 cases concerns have been raised. Prior to 12th December, having been made aware of some of Newsnight’s allegations, Policy Exchange conducted its own investigation into the research methodology and found no evidence to back up Newsnight’s claims. Only on 12th December, in spite of repeated requests, did Newsnight return the receipts to us. Furthermore, they only supplied us with the reports of their forensic expert two hours before broadcast. At that stage, a new allegation was raised in respect of one of the mosques and we have not had time to investigate this allegation.

Policy Exchange's real complaint seems to have been that Newsnight even bothered to look into the authenticity of the receipts instead of just blindly reporting what the report itself stated like everyone else did. PE's statement that it conducted an investigation into the report's methodology is also misleading: Newsnight has never questioned the actual methodology, what it has questioned is the veracity of the evidence to back up its findings. It all seems to be a bit of sour grapes: why didn't PE make carbon copies of the receipts, and in any case, hadn't it already checked them as Dean Godson claimed they had? How come Newsnight saw through the discrepancies and PE didn't? As for the time given to respond, Godson mentioned the leaks about the Newsnight investigation in his confrontation with Paxman; they well knew something was coming and had plenty of time to organise a convincing defense. They simply haven't done so. The time given to respond is also broadly in line with that which newspapers give to those they're investigating: many of the PE "experts" are former hacks, including Godson himself and PE's director, Anthony Browne.

This is just one example of a catalogue of bad faith on the part of Newsnight’s editor, Peter Barron. Contrary to what was alleged by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight’s programme (having admitted he had not seen Newsnight’s own film before transmission) Policy Exchange has facilitated interviews between our Muslim researchers and the Newsnight team, including one with the programme’s editor. Mr Barron must explain why he chose to make a 17-minute lead package about receipts, not about the abundant evidence of the availability of extremist literature within a minority of Islamic places of worship in the UK.

Why then did Richard Watson deny that any had been made available to him? Barron has already stated that he had a conversation with one during a conference call, which was in his words "inconclusive". When else were the researchers provided to Newsnight? It's quite obvious why, as Paxman stated to Godson that Barron chose to make a "17-minute lead package about the receipts" instead of a film on the report; because the receipts' lack of authenticity undermines the entire report's conclusions and asks questions about the ethics of the researchers themselves.

Policy Exchange gave the receipts to Newsnight merely to emphasise the thoroughness of our methodology. The receipts are not, however, mentioned in the report and the substance of the report is unaffected by Newsnight’s allegations about a small minority of the receipts. The report is about extremist literature and all the literature obtained in the course of our research is in Policy Exchange’s possession. As a respected evidence-based thinktank, Policy Exchange takes the integrity and authority of our research very seriously. Accordingly, we shall investigate any outstanding allegations very carefully. It is a pity that Newsnight did not approach this matter with the professionalism one would expect from the BBC.

That the receipts are not mentioned is neither here nor there. Without their existence there would be no report because there would be no evidence to back up the books had ever been supplied by whom PE have said they were. The substance of the report may not be affected, but the report in its entirety has been brought into repute because of Newsnight's allegations. Anyone would expect PE to be defending their report, but their threats of legal action when they don't seem to have properly checked the receipts in the first place suggests that it's PE's professionalism which is in question, not the BBC's, which went through that tiresome journalistic process of checking the evidence.

Policy Exchange is in legal consultations about action in this matter.

And so too might be the mosques slandered in the report on the basis of apparently fabricated sources.

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12/14/2007 10:58:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, December 13, 2007 

Policy Exchange rumbled by Newsnight.

Last night's Newsnight was one of those increasingly rare TV events that are genuinely unmissable - except that hardly anyone other than the usual obsessives would have been watching or even known about it. (You can watch the report by Richard Watson here and the confrontation between Jeremy Paxman and Policy Exchange's Dean Godson here.)

The story began with Newsnight and the right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange doing a deal that would have seen the programme have exclusive access to their latest report - the hijacking of British Islam (PDF), an alleged expose which claimed that out of 100 mosques visited across the country, in a quarter literature judged to be extremist was found - and ended with Policy Exchange threatening legal action while not really rebutting the central allegations made by Newsnight against the source of 5 of those books.

Instead of simply repeating what the Policy Exchange report had found and debating it, Newsnight requested the receipts from PE to check that everything was in order, perhaps considering the fallout from the then unresolved police complaints over Channel 4's Undercover Mosque. According to Peter Barron, Newsnight's editor, who was ferociously denounced by PE's Dean Godson, everything was set to go ahead as scheduled until the reporter Richard Watson raised his concerns over discrepancies he'd found in one of the invoices. Further investigation found another 4 irregularities with the receipts; one had the wrong address, one was from a mosque which didn't have a bookshop, one had the date on it from a day during Ramadan on a Friday when there most certainly wouldn't have been a book fair at the mosque in question, although it admitted it had a problem with rogue sellers; then there was the evidence from a forensic specialist, who found that one of the invoices had been written on top of the other, while the handwriting on two was in her opinion the same person's.

Faced with this evidence, Godson, instead of holding his hands up and admitting that his researchers might have well have purchased the books but then later embellished the receipts, or even attempting to come up with any real explanation, decided to take on Jeremy Paxman at his own game, out shouting, out gesticulating and out foaming at the mouth with indignation. It almost paid off, with Paxman at times looking distinctly uncomfortable at being assailed when that's his job, and especially when Godson claimed that they had in fact provided the researchers to talk to Barron despite Paxman's denial. (Barron contends that he only ever talked to one of them as he had claimed in an inconclusive conference phone conversation on the day the original report was meant to be broadcast.) His attacks on Barron if anything let him down the most, when the editor had no one way of defending himself. Then when questioned about why the researchers themselves hadn't been provided and were apparently all away on a jolly holiday in, err, Mauritania, he said the name "Salman Rushdie", as though what they had done were the equivalent of insulting the prophet Muhammad as Rushdie was accused of doing, and most perplexingly, claimed that even if the receipts were inaccurate it didn't affect the report.

Policy Exchange is still saying the exactly the same thing today, forced to issue a statement which again offers no real explanation for the doubts raised over the receipts:

The receipts are not, however, mentioned in the report and the report’s findings do not rely upon their existence.

That they are not mentioned in the report is neither here nor there, nor does it matter that the findings do not rely on their existence: their existence undermines the conclusions because it brings those conclusions into major doubt. If we can't trust the researchers to have properly sourced the material upon which the report is based, then the entire thing is worthless, something which even the notably sceptical Harry's Place has described as gilding the lily.

Even before the Newsnight report, Osama Saeed and a blogger called Dr Marranci had called into question some parts of it and its methodology. Osama questioned just where the material alleged to have originated from Edinburgh Central Mosque had actually came from, as they denied that it was anything they had ever stocked, while the mosque itself has a reputation for its moderation. A couple of weeks later the exact extremist literature featured in the report was apparently dumped in the doorway. The questions from Dr Marranci were met by Denis MacEoin, the report's main author, with little more than contempt. This sentence was the most revealing:

The point is that telling Muslims to hate all non-Muslims, to avoid contact with them as far as possible, tobelieve (sic) Jews are the cause of all the world’s degradation, and so on and on — this is deeply offensive to the host society

In other words, MacEoin considers that at the moment Muslims are just guests in "our" society, and not citizens just as much as we are. I don't wish to turn this into an ad hominem attack on MacEoin or Policy Exchange as a whole, but MacEoin is notable for his pro-Israeli views, also writing this passage previously:

I don’t like to speak in terms of historic moments or symbolic conflicts, but I’m afraid that, as this struggle intensifies, I am bound to do so.

Civilization itself is at stake. The values of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and the open society are as much or more at risk today than in the decades when we confronted, first German fascism and then Soviet communism.


He's also not immune from irrational belief himself, as he recently wrote on CiF defending homeopathy, accusing Ben Goldacre of being ignorant and unscientific, without deeming to mention that his wife, is err, a homeopath.

As for Policy Exchange's accusations that Newsnight's behaviour shows an "agenda" at work, nothing could be more laughable. Newsnight had already given top-billing to a similar report on the extremist Islamist literature available in Tower Hamlets' libraries by a rival thinktank, the Centre of Social Cohesion, and has throughout the year run a series of reports on Hizb-ut-Tahrir, also by the reporter Richard Watson, not to mention the numerous times it's featured Ed Husain, and a couple of other defectors from HuT. As Osama Saeed also mentions, Newsnight Scotland featured the accusations the report made against the Edinburgh mosque, not showing the same scrutiny as the below the border version did. The programme itself could doubtless come up with other examples of its focus on Islam in Britain.

MacEoin is certainly right in one thing - we should and must condemn those mosques that did have such extremist literature for sale on their shelves. They can't use the defence that shops and libraries stock the same stuff, or that evangelical Christian groups have some rather unpleasant ideas which they express through pamphlets too; if such material as "women who deserve to go to hell" is on sale inside mosques, it's quite clearly unacceptable, even on debate within the faith grounds. We should however also though denounce thinktanks or media organisations which broadcast or release such information without properly checking, as Policy Exchange apparently didn't, that everything was in order. Their report and reputation has been tarnished by the Newsnight accusations, and resorting to legal action when it appears that unlike Channel 4, they've been found bang to rights, will only make matters even worse for them.

Related posts:
Osama Saeed - Newsnight rips apart mosque extremism report
Ministry of Truth - Can I get a receipt for that?
Sticks and Carrots - Predetermined Outcomes Part 2

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12/13/2007 10:23:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, May 11, 2007 

Michael Howard vs Alastair Campbell.

Like most sensible people, you probably weren't watching Newsnight at around ten to midnight last night. Unfortunately, I was. Fortunately, Chicken Yoghurt has uploaded the following exchange between Alastair Campbell and Michael Howard, which has to be one of the best confrontations on the programme in a long time. You can see the deep, visceral loathing flashing in Campbell's eyes at the indignity of Howard daring to suggest that he, the power behind the throne, is almost personally responsible for helping to destroy public confidence in politicians. Not only is he doing just that, but he's got the nerve to say it directly to his face. Campbell's repeated quick blinking makes you wonder whether he's trying to make himself believe that it isn't actually happening.

If only someone other than a failed Tory politician had had the guts to do it.

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5/11/2007 10:30:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, March 30, 2007 

Guido and his sock-puppets.

NSFW:

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3/30/2007 08:26:00 PM | | | links to this post

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