The charities' magazine Third Sector recently reported on the complaint against the UK-based international charity that supports persecuted servants of Jesus Christ for statements in Slippery Slope:
The booklet claims that DVDs featuring radical preachers are "widely disseminated" in mosques and says that on one such DVD a speaker argues that "if a girl refuses to wear the hijab, she should be hit".
It also claims that radical Muslim preachers say "women are created with deficient intellect".
A commission spokeswoman said: "Concerns have been raised with us regarding the Barnabas Fund after recent media coverage of a booklet produced by the charity.
"We are currently considering the issues raised to determine what, if any, regulatory interest there is for the commission."
If the complainant has been challenging the veracity of the Barnabas Fund's claims, then all the charity has to do is produce the evidence for its reporting of Islamist activity, and that should be the end of it. But if the complainant was asserting that the Barnabas Fund should not have reported the statements of radical Muslim preachers, then that kind of complaint should be summarily dismissed.
The Charity Commission's own website asserts that
whilst the charitable sector is enormous and very diverse, the aims of each and every charity, whatever their size, must be for public benefit. Public benefit is therefore central to the work of all charities.
Telling the truth through the exercise of free speech is a vital part of a charity's responsibility to serve the public benefit. Censuring a charity for disseminating veracious information that certain individuals may have felt presented their religion in a bad light would go unconscionably against the public benefit.
This is by cc - The Christian case for capital punishment - appeared on Christian Today.
Either way, the decision on this complaint will be very revealing indeed.
ReplyDelete" . . . all the charity has to do is produce the evidence for its reporting of Islamist activity . . "
ReplyDeleteExactly so! If the complaint is regarding 'facts', the truth, one way or another will come out.
If it is just a complaint about 'facts being revealed' then we need to know. Even better, we need to know who made the complaint!
Blessings
Terry
"Even better, we need to know who made the complaint!"
ReplyDeleteWell did we ever get to know who complained about Lynette Burrows on the radio a few years ago?
Shame on anyone who hides behind anonymity to get someone arrested. Let them step out of the shadows if they really believe what they claim.
Dan
I must say your report (the first I've heard about this complaint)comes as no surprise. It was not long before someone/some organisation/the State was going to try to attack, and muzzle, the Barnabas Fund (and other similar Christian organisations). Of course, I very much hope the complaint can be swiftly disposed of, as you say ... but will such a thing return? Surely. When I recently went to hear Dr Sookhdeo talk, at a local church, it occurred to me that there could well be a hostile demo outside afterwards (fortunately, there wasn't). I much support Barnabas, and Dr. Soo - but I do fear for them, also.
ReplyDelete“Telling the truth through the exercise of free speech is a vital part of a charity's responsibility to serve the public benefit...”
ReplyDeleteAnd if a charity regarded ‘The Truth’ to be Christianity is untrue and received tax breaks and ‘protected’ status to do so, would you uphold this as the role of a charity?
I have worked for/with Christian organisations that decided not to tie themselves to the limiting regulation of the Charity Commission. Which I think is noble. Why should the taxpayer subsidise (via tax exemption etc.) what is becoming a political voice?
The Church grew when it was persecuted – perhaps it is time to stop whining and wanting special privilege and for Christians to put their money where their mouth is and support these organisations with cold, hard cash, time and effort; instead of the ‘easy’ support of whinging at every opportunity...
Many of our major charities were originally Christian. The very concept of a Charity Commission would be inconceivable had Britain not been a country saturated with Christian values. Indeed, the very word 'charity' is grounded in the Authorised Version of the English Bible (see 1 Corinthians 13).
ReplyDeleteClearly, if a situation ever arose where Christian organisations were forbidden from registering as charities, we would have to live with that. But for that to happen in the United Kingdom would be an extraordinary repudiation of our country's history, language and culture - the very culture in fact that allowed religious toleration to emerge.
It's not hard to check out the accuracy of the 'slippery slope'. All it's 'stories' have citations which can easily be checked up. Ten minutes research on the internet on a random selection of the stories found that they were either quoting unbalanced stories from the press, which a bit of further research would have shown a more complex picture (e.g. the stories about "nurses ordered to stop medical procedures five times a day to turn the beds of Muslim patients towards Mecca") or they partially quote a balanced news story to make it sound much more anti-Muslim (e.g. the story of the London academy with a textbook which described Jews as apes and Christians as pigs"). I only checked a handful of stories, but every one I checked was inaccurate and gave a partial account of events to portray Muslims in a more negative light.
ReplyDeleteIf I was being charitable I'd say it is a result of the lazy 'cut and paste' journalism. Barnabas Fund should be better than that though...
The statement about a message of hate and segregation being disseminated in UK Mosques was referenced to a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary broadcast in January 2007.
ReplyDeleteIt is also worth bearing in mind that Slippery Slope came out before the deterioration in the situation is Tower Hamlets. And that is well-documented.