Right-wing Think-tank Busted for Dodgy "Islamic Extremism" Report

There's a bit of a scandal going down in the UK after questions were raised about a report on homegrown Islamic extremism by the British think-tank Policy Exchange. The report made waves when it was first released. The video to your right is a heated moment between Dean Godsend, Policy Exchange's Director of Research, and Jeremy Paxman, presenter of the BBC program Newsnight, which first broke the story.

Here's what people are saying ...

A Question of Receipts

By Brian Whitaker

Comment is Free

Last night's shouting match between Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman and Dean Godson of the Policy Exchange thinktank may have been fascinating television but I'm not sure it was very illuminating.

Back in October, Policy Exchange issued a much-publicised report on extremist literature sold at mosques and other Islamic institutions in Britain.

On visits to almost 100 of these places across the country, the thinktank's researchers found extremist material available - either openly or "under the table" - in around 25. Some of this material was certainly alarming, as I wrote at the time. More reassuringly, though, Policy Exchange has also pointed out that three-quarters of the places it surveyed were "nothing other than perfectly reputable centres of Muslim worship and learning".

Shortly before the report was published, Newsnight and Policy Exchange agreed a deal giving the BBC programme exclusive access to the findings. Newsnight's editor, Peter Barron, takes up the story on his blog:

Policy Exchange had given us the receipts to corroborate their claim that a quarter of the 100 mosques their researchers had visited were selling hate literature.

On the planned day of broadcast our reporter Richard Watson came to me and said he had a problem. He had put the claim and shown a receipt to one of the mosques mentioned in the report - The Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre in London. They had immediately denied selling the book and said the receipt was not theirs.

We decided to look at the rest of the receipts and quickly identified five of the 25 which looked suspicious. They appeared to have been created on a home computer, rather than printed professionally as you would expect. The printed names and addresses of some of the mosques contained simple errors and two of the receipts purportedly from different mosques appeared to have been written by the same hand.

I spoke to Policy Exchange to try to clear up these discrepancies but in the end I decided not to run the report.

If substantiated, Newsnight's allegations will knock some of the shine off Policy Exchange, a thinktank closely associated with the Conservative party, which boasts that it is "committed to an evidence-based approach to policy development."

Poisonous and Dangerous

By Seumas Milne

Comment is Free

Throughout this year, a steady stream of hostile and sensationalised stories about the Muslim community in both press and television - often based on research by apparently reliable think tanks - has helped feed anti-Muslim prejudice to the point where Britons were found this summer by a Harris opinion poll to be more suspicious of Muslims than Americans or citizens of any other major west European country.

It might be assumed from this that the other 20 receipts were found to be authentic and that Policy Exchange's basic case was solid. It has now become clear that is not the case. Newsnight insiders make clear that they didn't have the time or resources to check the other receipts - and in at least one of those that they didn't look into, supposedly issued by Edinburgh central mosque, the mosque authorities have said that leaflets claimed to have been found there calling for the killing of the apostates were in fact dumped in the mosque grounds after the report was published.[...]