interpal and the panorama documentary
I was very shocked after watching the BBC Panorama programme Faith, hate and charity last Sunday. This purported to be an investigation into the London-based international NGO Interpal, which gives funds to charities on the West Bank. Having been involved with Interpal through work for several years trying to contest their designation by the US as a terrorist organisation, I was obviously quite nervous about what the programme would say.
Panorama claimed that the programme would reveal that the charities Interpal funds “are linked to Hamas and help build support for the movement by spreading its Islamist ideology”. In fact, it didn’t reveal very much at all but engaged in an hour of one-sided Islamophobic mud slinging.
Robert Ware, the journalist who made the programme, is clearly a hysterical believer in the clash of civilisations. He has no sympathy for Muslims whatsoever, be they moderate or fundamentalist, living in peace or living under occupation – to him, they all seem to be enemies in a new cold war between “the West” and Islam.
His investigative journalism relies on a trail of guilt by association which holds that if individuals associated with the charities that Interpal funds in the Occupied Territories are also associated with “political” activities, such as involvement with Hamas or armed struggle against the Israeli occupation, therefore those charities are involved in political activities and therefore so is Interpal. It is a breathtakingly weak case, and Robert Ware gives it substance through lots of cloak and dagger “reconstructions” and highly selective quotations designed to paint Islam as a medieval, bloody, indeed evil, faith.
Nothing is put in context at all. Even the basic fact that the Palestinians are living under a brutal occupation is completely omitted from the picture. There’s a scene in which Ware questions a classroom of Palestinian school children, asking them “Who would you like to be? Who's your big hero?”
A boy replies: “Like a mujahid.”
”A fighter! Fighting for what?”
“We will continue to resist the Israelis until we get them out.”
John Ware presents this as an example of children being brought up to believe in a destructive ideology. To me it sounds like what any child would think, living under a humiliating and frequently lethal occupation. If I lived in Palestine I think, I hope, I would fight for freedom.
In another scene he asks a child in a playground, “what does the Koran mean to you?” and he replies, “I learn from it everything ... it's the way of my life”. Ware’s treats this assertion with suspicion and the implication is that being a devout Muslim is in itself problematic.
He also shows a video of children singing in an out of school girl’s club: “We all sacrifice ourselves for our country. We answer your call and make of our skulls a ladder to your glory.”
Fair enough, that’s pretty racy stuff, young girls singing about martyrdom. But it is hardly unique to Islam. One person who commented on the BBC website quoted a song she used to sing at a state school in England:
Stand up, stand up for Jesus, each soldier to his post, Close up the broken column, and shout through all the host: Make good the loss so heavy, in those that still remain, And prove to all around you that death itself is gain.
It is so easy to see how biased John Ware is. Just take one of his assertions and consider how it would sound if we were talking about Christianity, Judaism or white people. He is completely unreasonable in expecting all Muslims to live up to an impossibly high standard of ethical behaviour, to be peaceful at all times and to refrain from mixing religion and politics in any way, despite the fact that faith plays a massive role in US and Israeli politics.
Interpal was never going to get a fair hearing out of this programme. Even when John Ware talks about its offices, he has to say that Interpal “operates from an anonymous building in Cricklewood”, implying that they are some kind of underground secret agency. I too have visited Interpal’s offices and there is another way of looking at their building. They are cutting costs by working from a fairly basic building in a cheap part of North London, so that as much of the money they raise as possible goes to humanitarian relief in Palestine. I’m sure that if they were in a swanky building somewhere round Westminster, with their name embossed on the windows, then John Ware would also think of something bad to say.
So, all in all, a rather poisonous documentary. Let’s hope Panorama will commission something more balanced next time it wades into the complex discussions Muslims and non-Muslims are having about the nature of Islam.
You can read Interpal’s own statement on the Panorama documentary here.
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