Let's hear it for Channel 4

Chanel 4 have won their case against West Midlands Police, who accused makers of a documentary of faking footage when they uncovered Muslim preachers calling for jihad, praising the Taliban for the murder of British soldiers and calling for gays to be killed by being thrown off cliffs, among other things.

The doccie was called Undercover Mosque, and West Midlands Police – in whose area one of the mosques was situated – reported the programme makers to Ofcom, the watchdog, for what they claimed, in a fit of political correctness, was heavy editing. Ofcom rejected the complaints last year. Police had begun investigating the issues raised in the programme but decided that C4 itself was wrong and could have been stirring up racial hatred (that conflation of racial and religious again – they all do it).

A story in the Daily Mail says, "Documentary excerpts from preachers and teachers included 'Allah created the woman deficient' and 'by the age of ten, it becomes an obligation on us to force her to wear hijab and if she doesn't wear hijab, we hit her'."

The story continues,

The programme, Undercover Mosque, broadcast in January, featured TV footage of an Islamic preacher praising the death of a British soldier.

At a meeting in a Birmingham mosque, the cleric said: "There was an individual killed in Afghanistan recently.

"Do you know what was written in a newspaper? Hero of Islam! The hero of Islam is the one who separated his head from his shoulders!"

Abu Usamah, a preacher at the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, was secretly filmed saying: "If I were to call homosexuals perverted, dirty, filthy, dogs who should be murdered, that is my freedom of speech, isn't it?"

Although Ofcom had concluded that the West Midlands Police were talking crap, the force left the offending press release, headed "Broadcast out of context", on its website, so C4 decided to take legal action.

The upshot is that the force has to pay £100,000 to C4 (half of which it will give to the Rory Peck Trust, a charity that helps correspondents killed while on assignments) and issue an apology through the High Court, which it, along with the Crown Prosecution Service, will do tomorrow.

You can see some of what was said in the documentary and the disgusting people who said it by clicking on the video below, and you can find more video on the same YouTube page. See also this leader article in today's Daily Telegraph.