Britain’s Channel 4 has produced a dramatization of the September 11 atrocities—told through the eyes of the Islamic terrorists who committed them. And it was written by an IRA sympathizer. (Hat tip: TalkinKamel.)

A Channel 4 dramatisation of the September 11 plot through the eyes of the terrorists is likely to be bought by American television.

Peter Dale, the channel’s head of documentary, said the same US broadcasters who originally pulled out of funding the £2 million film The Hamburg Cell because the subject was too sensitive were now “quite keen” to buy it having seen the finished film.

The two-hour drama tells the story of the students-turned-suicide terrorists from their initial meetings in Hamburg through to the moment that they boarded their planes on the day of the attacks.

The film focuses principally on one hijacker, Ziad Jarrah, a Lebanese student who took over the controls of United Airlines Flight 93. The plane crashed in Pennsylvania after what was believed to have been an attempt by passengers to overpower the hijackers.

The drama, which Channel 4 insisted was based on “exhaustive documentary research”, is the first attempt by programme makers to examine the motives of the killers.

It has drawn accusations that it will encourage others to become terrorists. Critics claimed that any attempt to portray the human side of the hijackers would inevitably end up being sympathetic to them.

The project’s potential for controversy was fuelled by the choice of Ronan Bennett, a prominent Irish republican sympathiser, as the drama’s writer. Bennett was convicted in 1975 of killing a policeman near Belfast but was cleared on appeal. He was accused of glorifying the IRA in Rebel Heart, a drama about the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin which he wrote for BBC1.

However, at a preview screening of The Hamburg Cell yesterday, Bennett rejected suggestions it was sympathetic to the terrorists. “Did you find their anti-semitism sympathetic? Did you find their espousal of mass-murder sympathetic?” he said. “The characters are dealt with objectively. People who believe in jihad won’t find encouragement in this.” He added: “What emerges from the film - unpalatable and unsettling though it may be - is that the hijackers were all quite ordinary.”

Indeed, the drama generally portrays the hijackers as blinkered and easily led - perfect targets for the al-Qa’eda members who recruited them in Germany.

Mr Dale said the film had been a difficult project particularly in finding funding. “The whole ambition was to find out what makes these people tick, rather than to be judgmental.”

Because we all know that being judgmental is a terrible, terrible sin.