Terror victims are BBC licence-payers, too

Over the weekend, the BBC was forced to remove a highly offensive message about Jesus from its website.

All websites run the risk of being defaced by extremists, but why had this message been allowed to remain there for a week, despite complaints? Anti-Muslim comments vanish instantly. Meanwhile, it emerged yesterday that the BBC has refused to allow Casualty to carry a storyline featuring a terrorist attack by a Muslim suicide bomber . The editorial guidelines department decreed that, instead, the terrorists should be animal rights extremists.
The BBC's coverage of Islamic affairs has been unsatisfactory for many years.

In its international and domestic news reporting, the corporation has consistently come across as naïve and partial, rather than sensitive and unbiased. Its reporting of Israel and Palestine, in particular, tends to underplay the hate-filled Islamist ideology that inspires Hamas and other factions , while never giving Israel the benefit of the doubt. (Disgracefully, the BBC is still refusing to publish the Balen Report, which it commissioned to investigate allegations of anti-Israel bias .)

In its coverage of British Muslims, the BBC has been inspired by two laudable aims: to treat their beliefs respectfully; and to avoid stereotyping ordinary Muslims as terrorist supporters. In the process, however, it has done two rather different things.

First, it has presented Islam on its own terms, as if only Muslims had the authority to describe their religion.

Mohammed remains an intensely controversial figure. Yet the BBC shies away from proper historical investigation of "the Prophet", as it insists on calling him.

Second, the BBC has only scratched the surface of one of the biggest news stories of the decade: the penetration of Muslim youth by Islamic supremacist groups.

Indeed, the corporation has even helped this to happen.

Again and again, it has wheeled on Islamic "moderates" who belong to hard-line sects that real moderate Muslims are desperate to stop their children joining.

It has been left to Channel 4 to conduct undercover investigations in radical mosques and to commission a 2007 GFK/NOP opinion poll revealing that almost a quarter of British Muslims believe that the Government helped stage the London bombings of July 7, 2005.

We live in a world in which, although the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, the vast majority of terrorists are Muslim.

Younger BBC programme-makers are aware of this awkward fact; the problem lies with an older generation of executives stuck in a PC timewarp. Casualty is fiction, but that is no excuse for constructing a politically acceptable parallel universe.

To ban a storyline featuring Islamic terrorists not only misrepresents reality; it is also an insult to licence-payers whose family, friends or colleagues were blown to pieces on July 7 - and not by animal rights activists.