So was the BBC right to scrap plans to screen a fictional terrorist attack by Muslim suicide bombers in Casualty?
As the Observer reported on Sunday, "internal clashes" over whether the highly sensitive subject matter would cause offence prompted the corporation's editorial guidelines department to order that the episode be changed so that the Muslim characters were replaced by animal rights extremists.
Update: Wednesday August 22, 11am: the BBC has asked for a comment to be added, stating that the Islamist suicide bombers storyline was not axed because of intervention by the corporation's editorial policy unit (scroll down for the full statement).
The wishes of drama staff were apparently overruled because of concerns that the story would perpetuate stereotypes of young Muslims in Britain.
And in even worse news for the BBC, according to the Observer, Channel 4 is taking the risk-taking lead with its detailed examination of Muslim extremism in the drama Britz, details of which were first unveiled by MediaGuardian.co.uk last November.
And here we have certainly been inundated with some furious correspondence after we posted the Observer story on our site.
"I find it outrageous that the BBC sees fit, yet again, to smear the Animal Rights movement with a storyline concerning the bombing of a bus by Animal Rights extremists, something that has never occurred and never would be perpetrated by animal activists," writes Sue Baumgardt from Hove in Sussex.
"Animal activists are clearly seen as a 'soft' target for the BBC who, despite their remit to portray both sides of the argument, regularly only present a one sided view. They know very well that animal activists won't strike back in the way they feared that Muslim extremists would, which is why they changed the characters." The BBC, she says, are "propagandists and cowards".
And she wasn't the only one to make this argument.
M Williams from Sutton says it's "time for the BBC to have its public money taken from it" because it it "no longer represents mainstream Britain but anyone who is anti-British and it is fervently pro-Muslim, anti-Jewish and anti-American".
Former Tory party chairman Lord Tebbit would probably agree with these sentiments if his comments to the Observer are anything to go by: "People were perfectly free during the violence in Northern Ireland to produce dramas about terrorism for which presumably they might have been accused of stereotyping IRA terrorists or even suggesting that all Catholics were terrorists.
"What is the difference here? I fail to see why sauce for the goose shouldn't be sauce for the gander. The BBC exists in a world of New Labour political correctness."
And so on.
Has the BBC been right and fair or has it boobed again?
And what about other dramas like Spooks which deal with the secret services and terrorist threats to Britain and yet have had to be careful about "showing the Muslim terrorist of the week" as one staffer told me the other day, even though it needs to be relevant at a time when the threat from terrorists with a radical Muslim agenda is a major concern of millions of people in the UK?
I remember the first ever episode of Spooks dealt with an attack by anti-abortion campaigners - hardly a serious and present threat, perhaps, in the minds of people using public transport in the UK or those going to nightclubs. But many other episodes of Spooks have been about Islamic extremism, and this has caused some concern, not just in the Muslim community but from people acting in it as well.
Over to you.
Update: Wednesday August 22, 11am:
However, the BBC has denied the storyline was ever banned and has sent letters asking for a correction to the Observer and the Daily Telegraph, which followed up the story.
A BBC spokeswoman said: "There was a programme idea that was discussed about the issue. Editorial policy gave the programme-makers guidelines and they agreed amendments to the storyline. But the storyline was then dropped. The BBC's editorial policy department did not ban the story. They are there to give advice when required. They do not over-rule or order.
"This is a storyline that was once discussed. It didn't make it through the process but it was not blocked so it's totally untrue to say it was banned. The BBC has depicted Islamic terrorists in a number of programmes for example in Spooks and The State Within."
