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BBC Responds to Criticism of Panorama Documentary

[AIM Magazine-UK] John Ware - We said Hamas was "regarded by Western governments as terrorists." That's been the factual position since Hamas - both political and military wings - was proscribed as a terrorist organization by the European Union in September 2003. The program showed that some of Interpal's money had gone to charities like the al-Khalil al-Rahman Girls' Society and that over the years this had helped build Hamas. The contribution that charitable funds have made to the growth and popularity of the Hamas movement is something Hamas leaders themselves have consistently acknowledged. 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), while the benefit of the doubt should generally be given to another side. The Muslim Council of Britain seems also to have expected us to discount Israeli-sourced documents simply because they came from Israelis. 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. What we invited viewers to consider was whether such charities were suitable organizations for British charitable funds to go to, given that violence directed at civilians has been a cornerstone of Hamas' 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. Those girls were being given the oxygen to help keep this conflict going for another 60 years.
2006-08-11 01:00:00
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