The BBC Trust has rejected complaints against a TV drama that showed a fanatical British Christian beheading a moderate Muslim.
The offending episode of “Bonekickers” was aired in July last year and sparked fresh claims of anti-Christian bias at the BBC.
The BBC Trust, a group of “independent trustees acting in the public interest”, rejected suggestions that the drama associated fanatical Christianity with evangelicalism and gave an offensive portrayal of evangelical Christians.
Daily Telegraph writer, Damian Thompson, said: “We are deep into the realms of BBC bias and ignorance here.
“Only a BBC drama series would, to quote the complainant, ‘transfer the practice of terrorist beheadings from Islamist radicals to a fantasised group of fundamentalist Christians’.”
When the show was broadcast a TV reviewer for the Observer said: “it wasn’t the absurdity of the storyline that buried Bonekickers so much as the BBC’s paint-by-numbers version of political correctness.”
He added: “A Martian watching TV drama of late would probably conclude that the country is crawling with homicidal Islamophobes”.
The BBC Trust’s decision to support the drama comes in the same week as the BBC caved in to pressure and apologised to the Muslim Council of Britain over accusations that the group supports attacks on British troops.
The accusation came in an edition of the Beeb’s topical debate show, Question Time. A £30,000 payout and an apology have been offered by the BBC, despite the fact that the Government has expressed similar sentiments about the same group.
In October last year Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, said Islam should be treated more sensitively than Christianity because it is less integrated into our society.
In 2006 executives at the BBC admitted that they would consider broadcasting a scene where the Bible was thrown away but they would never do the same with the Koran.
In the same year the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, said that Christians took “more knocks” in BBC programmes than other faiths.
Dr Sentamu said: “They can do to us what they dare not do to the Muslims. We are fair game because they can get away with it.”