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Arab comment controversy
The BBC cancelled the Kilroy show in 2004 after an article entitled 'We owe Arabs nothing' by Kilroy-Silk[9] was published in the Sunday Express. The article had originally been published in April 2003 by the same paper and 'republished in error' according to Kilroy-Silk.[citation needed] On its first publication the article did not attract the same furore from the national press or provoke any known disciplinary action from the BBC. One passage reads:
? We're told that the Arabs loathe us. Really? For liberating the Iraqis? For subsidising the lifestyles of people in Egypt and Jordan, to name but two, for giving them vast amounts of aid? For providing them with science, medicine, technology and all the other benefits of the West? They should go down on their knees and thank God for the munificence of the United States. What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000 civilians on September 11 and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate the murders? That we admire them for the cold-blooded killings in Mombasa, Yemen and elsewhere? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors?' ?
The article was strongly condemned by the Muslim Council of Britain and the Commission for Racial Equality, whose head, Trevor Phillips, said that the affair could have a "hugely unhelpful" effect. Faisal Bodi, a columnist for The Guardian, called for Kilroy-Silk to be prosecuted for incitement to racial hatred. He said that Kilroy-Silk had written statements critical of Muslims in 1989, during the Salman Rushdie affair and in a 1995 article in the Daily Express.[10] By contrast Ibrahim Nawar, the head of Arab Press Freedom Watch came out in support of Kilroy-Silk in a Daily Telegraph article, calling him "an advocate of freedom of expression" and saying that he agreed with much of what Kilroy-Silk had said about Arab regimes. [11]
There was speculation that the controversy could affect Sunday Express owner Richard Desmond's attempt to acquire the Daily Telegraph, which was later dropped for unrelated reasons.[citation needed]
Labour MP Andrew Dismore asked why the BBC had disciplined Kilroy-Silk but had not moved against Tom Paulin after he had made allegedly anti-semitic remarks. The BBC's defenders pointed out that Paulin appeared on BBC programmes only as a pundit and commentator, and was not employed as a presenter of a programme in his own right. Subsequent to losing his permanent position, Kilroy-Silk appeared on BBC programmes in the same capacity as Paulin, as an individual commentator no longer representative of the BBC.
According to the Daily Express, 50,000 people responded in a telephone poll supporting Kilroy-Silk's reinstatement.
On 4 December 2004 a man threw a bucket of farmyard manure over Kilroy before he was due to make an appearance on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions?. David McGrath, from Wilmslow, Cheshire, was later convicted of the attack. He was given a conditional discharge, and ordered to pay £200 costs to Kilroy-Silk.
A spokeswoman for Kilroy-Silk told The Observer, "He is not a racist at all - he employs a black driver," she told The Observer, a quote which is sometimes incorrectly attributed to Kilroy-Silk himself.[12]
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