A good exercise in PR for Northwest anti-terror police

5:54pm Tuesday 9th February 2010

By Asif Mahmud

The recent programme on the BBC entitled ‘Terror on the Doorstep’ may have raised a few eyebrows.

But what really was the intention of programme-makers? And had they by being offered exclusive footage by the terror unit failed to ask the questions that mattered to the wider community?

The programme began by telling us how the Terror unit had learned much from Operation Pathways and the arrests on the M65. In both cases suspects were later released without charge despite the high-profile arrests.

We were then presented with footage that shows a girl and young boy playing with guns, which police believe are real.

"What do you do with the weapon?" asks a man's voice. He answers his own question: "I want to kill the infidels." This is indeed shocking.

There is no doubt the average British citizen watching this would think twice about questioning the work of anti-terror operations ever again.

However, despite the footage being filmed in Pakistan this ‘isolated video’ is used to suggest that British parents in the UK would in some be teaching their kids to hate non-Muslims.

Some might say it is quite possible to find equally shocking footage of almost any crime on the internet. What makes this more shocking is that it suggests Muslims are ‘breeding’ and ‘teaching’ their kids to dislike others from an early age.

Later the programme tells of how the letter ‘m’ should not be used for the word ‘Mujahideen’.

An officer said of another raid: “We found a series of flash cards and documents on how to raise Mujahid children [who will fight for Islam].

”The cards were written in English - and instead of having M for Muhammad they had M for Mujahideen...

”They have the potential to indoctrinate. It just shows the mindset of some people and what we are up against.”

I’m sorry but to suggest that word play helps to make kids think about suicide bombing and killing is ridiculous. The word Jihad has been hijacked by a small group of extremists that does not mean that when and if a child chooses to use it should he or she be labelled as an extremist.

Programme-makers had in this case missed a valuable opportunity to question the North West Terror Unit on the major raids they have conducted. And why these raids were triggered.

Rather what we get is carefully orchestrated thirty minutes. Barring the ‘exclusive’ footage of the children playing with guns it seems programme-makers were struggling to fill the rest of the time.