Ware responds

John Ware has issued a response to some of the criticisms levelled against him after last month's Panorama film about Interpal.

His response took in points made by AIM magazine, Pickled Politics, the MCB and myself. The whole thing can be read at AIM, but I've pasted the pertinent points below.

6) Sunny Hundal wrote in Pickled Politics: "We didn't bring anything new to the table."

We did - at least according to Kenneth Dibble, Executive Director of the Charity Commission's legal services: what he himself defined as possible "collateral activities" - e.g. those promoting or glorifying terrorist activity - amongst the Islamic charities in the West Bank and Gaza to which Interpal distributes funds. For example, the video of children at the Al Khalil Al Rahman Young Girls' Society being encouraged by adults to sing songs celebrating their deaths and the deaths of Israelis through suicide bombings. This was the same material Sunny himself later describes as "quite disturbing".

Mr Dibble accepted that this "collateral" conduct was not something the Charity Commission had previously taken a view about. But he also said it was "...an issue that you are raising now and if I may say so is quite a pertinent issue."

7) Sunny quoted approvingly from MAB's Osama Saeed who wrote: "Ware's goading of young boys in an orphanage as to how many of them wanted to be fighters was sick beyond words."

Actually, my question to those boys was: "Who would you like to be. Who is your big hero? It's hard to see how that constitutes "goading."

8) Sunny also seems to have agreed with Osama when he said the Palestinian head teacher Fateheya Qawasmeh had "denied that her school had ever been raided by the Israeli army, but he maintained it had, and that a computer seized from there had pictures of violence on it. For Ware, she was lying, and the Israelis could do no wrong."

This misrepresents what we said. It also raises a disturbing question about Osama's understanding of what exactly "objective" journalism is.

The question I actually put to Mrs Qawasmeh was whether the orphanage adjoining her school had been raided - not the school. She denied this categorically. I then turned to the Israelis for their evidence, as you'd expect. They produced a lengthy IDF report dealing with the raid on 12 August 2004, and a badged and labelled computer, which when connected up provided powerful evidence that it had been used by the orphanage, indeed it contained the names of all the children.

9) Sunny wrote that the programme was "very agenda driven journalism."

Having asked the Israelis for their evidence, and having been persuaded by it, we could of course have come away and said: "These guys are Zionists. You can't trust a single thing Zionists say because they're, well, Zionists."

But surely that would have been "agenda journalism" because it demands that information from one side should never be believed [even if it survives scrutiny] whilst the benefit of the doubt should generally be given to another side.

10) The Muslim Council of Britain seems also to have expected us to discount Israeli sourced documents simply because they came from Israelis. It has referred to our "over reliance on partisan Israeli and American sources" which its says "clearly exposed the flimsy basis" of our "arguments against the British Muslim charity Interpal."

In fact many of the documents on which we relied were not written by the Israelis, but by Interpal and the Palestinian Authority. It was the Israelis who seized the documents when they raided a number of charities in the West Bank.

11) The MCB has gone much further than Sabina and Sunny. The MCB has accused me of being "an agenda-driven pro-Israeli polemicist."

This may be just rhetoric but it does echo the MCB's intemperate remarks prior to the broadcast of our previous Panorama "A Question of Leadership" following which it made a series of wholly inaccurate assertions. Each one of them was investigated by others [independent of me] in the BBC's Programme Complaints Unit.

Not one of the MCB's complaints withstood scrutiny. Readers can find the editor's very detailed response to the MCB on this page.

Having reported at length the MCB's many criticisms, we did ask some major Muslim media outlets to carry the BBC's response to them. Regrettably none did.

Regrettably, too, a number of e mails complaining about "Faith, Hate & Charity" have been abusive - and self evidently orchestrated, much like the last time. Why, I wonder, is it proving so difficult to debate these issues without resorting to rhetoric and name calling?

12) But there have been moments of light relief. The prize must go to Mohammed Sawalha, who now runs the "Muslim Initiative" a splinter group from the Muslim Association of Britain. He spoke of my "BBC mask" having slipped, and hinted that my paymasters were not the BBC but the Israeli foreign intelligence service "Mossad". As Mr Sawalha would have it, I am a "Mossad hireling"!

I must be an odd sort of "Mossad hireling" - having pursued in 1989 and 1994 one of Britain's biggest benefactors to Zion - Dame Shirley Porter - for political corruption. Because of my evidence, the then Westminster District Auditor began a lengthy inquiry that ended with Dame Shirley being ordered to pay a £41 million surcharge from her own pocket.

There was no hidden agenda behind this programme. The motivation for all of us involved in making it was straightforwardly the fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict presents the severest test to political Islam's claims to be a faith-based ideology of peace and tolerance.

13) Osama Saeed has also said that the songs sung at the al Khalil al Rahman Girls' Society - which Interpal helped fund - were invented before Hamas.

Actually I doubt that, especially the suicide belt song: "Fasten your bomb belt oh would-be martyr and fill the square with blood so that we get back our homeland." But that's hardly the point, surely? It's the content: "We all sacrifice ourselves for our country. We answer your call and make of our skulls a ladder to your glory, a ladder."

Like many of our critics, a one hour debate on the Islam channel about the programme last week failed to make any mention of the evidence we showed of incitement, the heart of our programme. Several of the contributors also misconstrued the programme's meaning. Sir Iqbal Sacranie told Islam channel that we had alleged Interpal was a "front for a terrorist organisation."

We didn't. Rather we showed that some of Interpal's money had gone to charities like the al Khalil al Rahman Young Girls' Society and that over the years this had helped build Hamas into the popular movement it is today. Nowhere did we suggest Interpal funds weren't going to help pay for their education, or to provide other humanitarian assistance.

What we invited viewers to consider was whether such charities were suitable organisations for British charitable funds to go to, given that violence directed at civilians has been a cornerstone of Hamas's ideology.

The important point, surely, is that these young girls were learning that death - not life - is a goal, and to believe in the illusion of total victory, namely the elimination of Israel. The Israeli occupation may well be the fat on the fire of violent fundamentalism. But isn't it also true that those girls were being given the oxygen to help keep this conflict going for another 60 years?

UPDATE: My response to this can be read here

Comments

[Shavez]

Ware is clearly on the run

[naveen]

Ware made his case and proved it beyond any reasonable doubts.

The questions put by the MCB were idiotic. What is the point of a Moslem Council for Britain? It is manifestly a fifth column trying to create subversion. It is time John Ware turned his attention to that as well and got the MCB banned.

[joe90]

A fifth column is usually one that doesn't bring attention to itself naveen -
- what is the point of you, perhaps you should be banned?

We do have anti-racist lehgislation in Britian and the authorities take a very dim views of racists.

[Abu Abdur Rahman]

joe90: "what is the point of you ['naveen']"

Providing us with entertainment. :-)

This blog would not be the same without the in-house deranged loony, aka Osama's personal troll aka "naveen"; surely we all agree that it is instructive to read the demented ramblings of a BNP member with a single-digit IQ...

[naveen]

Racism is a term with no objective meaning and was invented as an ideological weapon by the left. Its repeated inappropriate use is wearing it out. It loses impact. Britain is not a Moslem country and never will be and so there is good justification to ban an organisation which deems itself a "Moslem Council". The tide is turning against Moslems and the tolerance of the people has worn thin.

[Osama]

Abu Abdur Rahman, you make him sound quite cute - my own wee pet troll :)

[Shavez]

Bringing, it back to topic, one of the points he has made is that all the orphans he saw were not as a result of the Israeli occupation.

However, we do know that there are a high number of orphans for an Arab Muslim society. In their culture, wider families, brothers of the father, take in kids who have lost their parents. In Palestine, what we see is single parents now who simply cannot cope economically.

Ware's attitudes to the Palestinians can be seen just in his by-product reactions. He's inhuman.

[naveen is a tube]

Abu Abdur Rahman I think you're being a bit generous over his IQ!

With Naveen, the term 'broken record' comes to mind, one that seriously needs to be tossed away!

[George Carty]

Racism is a term with no objective meaning and was invented as an ideological weapon by the left.

True that "Racism", like "fascism" is well-used as a leftist epithet, but racism does have an objective meaning, namely the belief that humans of one genetic heritage (based on geographic location) are biologically superior to those of other genetic heritages.

Contrary to what some lazy anti-Islamophobes may argue, Islamophobia is not racism. However both Islamophobia and racism are potentially early steps along a road to genocide, which is why they are regarded as evil.

[naveen]

scientific investigations have proved that different races have different genetic attributes and that different races have been able to produce different types of societies and civilisations.West Africans have fast muscle twitching due to faster neurotransmission and faster firing neurospindles and this produces better and faster athletes. This is mot matched by their IQ which over 70 studies have shown to have a mean of just 70.

The Ashkenazi Jews have a mean IQ of 117 which is manifested by their ownership of 40% of the Nobel prizes awarded to the USA.
The average white IQ is 100 and the average South Asian and Arab just 85. This is why whites and Jews have created the advanced and technologically developed countries which other races have not been able to do. Africa and the Middle East will never be like Europe and Africans, Asians and Arabs will destroy the West if allowed to remain in the West.

To make these points is race realist and provides the explanations as to why multiculturalism cannot work.

[Osama]

So why was it not always thus? Does IQ among civilisations go up and down over the centuries?

[Muj]

Ware says: There was no hidden agenda behind this programme. The motivation for all of us involved in making it was straightforwardly the fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict presents the severest test to political Islam's claims to be a faith-based ideology of peace and tolerance.

This is surely in itself a hidden agenda. He didn't mention it in the documentary itself.

[thabet]

Nazi Naveen: I hope your doctor isn't Asian!

[naveen is a tube]

I think naveen has the build of a white man and the IQ of a West African then!

Oh and just to point out, environmental factors play a huge role and there are great variations within the races itself. South Indians are known to be very bright and have made great advances in physics and maths. The boy with the highest IQ in the world is Indian. His name is Akrit btw!

Maybe Naveen can take a trip to downtown Maryhill or Drumchapel and I'm sure he'd find lots of intelligent, articulate locals there...

[NAVEEN]

IQ does not vary with environment and if you had any scientific knowledge or understanding you would know that and IQ has not fluctauted. The indigenous natives of Americas and Australia and New Zealand have not varied their IQs and neither has any other race as IQ can be modified only by genetic engineering and not by social engineering.

The mean IQ of India is 85 which is why it is THird World and will always be so. A few bright Indians cannot raise the standard of the country and the rest of the population and that is why they leave.

The Scots have produced one of the world's highest IQs and rates of scientific invention. At less than 0.5% of the world's population , they have over 20% of the scientific nobel prizes. Compare that with India.

The Scots also invented the modern world and enlightenment ...... ever heard of that?

There is a difference between the Scots and Irish who have similar sized populations and diasporas. The Irish don't have the same level of achievement and most of the people in Maryhill and Drumchapel are Irish Catholics which are a different race from the Scots.

As for yourselves i notice that you are not able to construct a logical argument and have resorted to name calling which is of course what people do when their minds are empty and they have nothing to say.

[naveen is a tube]

Aww did I hurt your feelings naveen, its stating a fact you tube. Environmental factors are known to cause changes in the IQ, especially the diet, do some more research sonny jim. Indians are known to have a higher IQ than Pakistanis, if you have ever been to India you will see the huge number of people who have degrees in business, engineering and science. A lot of them work in call centres! There's a huge number of medical text books written by Indians. 2 of which are Kumar and Clark's Clinical Medicine (very widely used book) and Moore and Persaud's Before We are born (another widely used book). India has the second fastest growing economy and the likes of America are recruiting a lot of Indians (and Pakistanis) in the IT field.

The person with the highest IQ in the world is an Indian boy, channel 5 did a documentary about him recently.

As for not constructing a logical argument I proved you wrong about Germany being a homogeneous country (I wonder how long it will be before you bring that topic up again...) and really a lot of the time your arguments make me laugh because you wouldn't have the guts to say have the stuff you do in the outside world.

[joe90]

Maryhill and the Drum are different race all right!

That's about the only thing naveen has ever said that has anything to do with reality

[naveen is a tube]

Yup, the ned race! Incidentally Govan is just like those places, and to say people from Govan are Irish is ludicrous. The level of mental stimulation you get has been proven to have an effect on your IQ. Furthermore, Africans living in America have a higher IQ than in Africa, and Ashkenazi Jews have a lower IQ in Israel than in America. Further proof that environment plays a role in IQ. I feel Naveen just copies and pastes off white supremacist websites.

Osama if you have this guy's IP address, why not just block him?

[naveen]

It is typical of fools to start getting abusive when they cannot formulate an argument.

Read the Scar Wienberg trial and its conclusions about environmental differences. The environment cannot change IQ by more than 3-5 points. Black American IQs are higher than Africans because they have acquired some white genes and as I said genetic engineering is the answer.

Indians are hired in America because they are cheap labour and not for any other reason, same as in the NHS. People from Govan are Irish catholic immigrants and not genetically Scots. Scots are like Jews, blood and not land is what counts. Why don't you clear off and go to England where they will give you as many mosques as you want and you can perhaps fulfill your dream of becoming a suicide bomber, which seems to be the ambition of a large % of pakistanis. You are not wanted in this country and you will never be part of society here and so why do you want to stay?

[naveen is a tube]

Lol looks like your being pushed over the edge. The Indians today won't work for cheaper than the local population. The NHS don't pay Asians less in this country either today. Naveen the majority of the population don't share your views and would rather people like you left the country, then at least there would be more harmony.

[naveen is a tube]

Incidentally you might also want to see this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Govan

[joe90]

Remind us all again, O wise naveen, where are the 'Scots' from originally?

Indians are hired for cheap labour by Americans are they - which kind, Red or sub-continent Indains?

And where are these 'Indians' hired - anywhere in the globalised trans-national corporate world in particular?

And I always thought Americans hired other Americans because they were so cheap and easily available, unlike the First Nation American Indians (if that is who you mean),who comprise less than 0.5% of the US population, so you can see thelr wages going up given the big demand for them (according to you), thus they wouldn't be cheap, but on the contrary, would be very expensive compared to their more easily available non-First Nation American sisters and brothers in the job market

- and sub-continent Indains are so far away it would cost a disproportionate amount to import them into the US, rather than just hiring locally available Amercan labour from the local job-pool market!

[mmr vaccine]

Naveens "facts" are just completely untrue. Environment and education, as well as nutrition DOES have a part to play in determining IQ.

Furthermore, his historical citations are completely ignorant. How does one explain the fact that Arabs dominated the world of science and technology for nearly 1000 years? How does he explain the fact that India and China contributed much to the worlds knowledge and were civilized thousands of years before his white ancestors emerged from their caves?

Did their IQ's change?

I would put it to these white racist ignoramuses that civilisation and advancement are cyclical in nature. Just as naveens ancestors were savage cave dwellers while Indians, Arabs and Chinese dominated the world, these same people and others will reclaim this mantle of dominance once western nations decline. This has been going on for thousands of years, and no amount of racist hyperbole by some trashy members of the BNP will change that.

[joe90]

Well IQs don't tell you much about a person anyway - its practically meaningless in the real world, much like naveen - I am sure no-one would miss naveen if they were suddenly to deprive us of their company.

Humanity has lots of other attributes and IQ is the typical one that small minds like naveen's focus on, since it's the only one the western mass-media blabber on about all the time, so therefore the brainwashed non-entities like naveen will as well.

[NAVEEN]

SORRY BUT READ THE FACTS and if you have any education,you might understand.Environment and nutrition have a very SMALL effect on IQ. If their effect was large,the Royal Family would be geniuses and they are not.Read the relevant facts as you are obviously ignorant.

Arabs dominating science, well that is like a few gangsters breaking into the Britsih library,killing the librarians and saying they wrote the books.This "dominance" is a bit overexagerated and it is interesting to note that they could not find the oil beneath their feet!! what happened to the science???

India and China never dominated the world and had no influence on Europe.In fact at the height of their powers they never reached the level of development of Europe.
If you believe India has a great future then you ought to go back there. Funy isn't it how all these so called brilliant Indians cannot lift their country out of the Third World and they have to come like beggars to the WEst.