{"id":772,"date":"2006-08-22T10:35:44","date_gmt":"2006-08-22T09:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2006\/08\/22\/john_ware_interviewed_in_media_guardian"},"modified":"2025-10-10T20:24:55","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T19:24:55","slug":"john_ware_interviewed_in_media_guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2006\/08\/22\/john_ware_interviewed_in_media_guardian","title":{"rendered":"John Ware interviewed in Media Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Ware, the guy behind the anti-MCB documentary last year and a more recent one attacking charity support for Hamas-run schools, was interviewed<\/a> for yesterday's Guardian<\/em> Media supplement (free registration required):<\/p>\n

\nHe says he is one of five journalists – the others are Martin Bright, the political editor of the New Statesman, Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail, the Observer's Nick Cohen and the Times writer-turned-Tory MP, Michael Gove – who have been labelled by the MCB as "being in the vanguard of Islamophobia in this country". "We don't meet up like witches to discuss it," jokes Ware. "We've all come to this view independently that – potentially – politics and Islam is an incendiary mix."
\nHe first attracted the wrath of Muslim groups after his Panorama film last year accused the Muslim Council of Britain of being in "a state of denial" about the scale of Islamic extremism in the UK. The MCB hit back by accusing the BBC of pro-Israel bias and dismissing the programme as "deeply unfair" and "a witch hunt". If Ware, whose citation when he won the James Cameron Prize in 2004 praised his "moral vision and professional integrity", is perturbed by the onslaught he has faced, he certainly does not show it. "This is just rhetoric and quite a lot of it is abusive rhetoric," he says of his detractors. "They are aggressive and too rarely do they engage on the facts. In our programme last year, we manifestly did not accuse the MCB of being extremist. I don't think the MCB are extremist. I know that their leadership is appalled by 7\/7. What we said was that they didn't completely 'get' the origins and the roots of extremism and that some of their own affiliates were kind of nursery slopes for extremism. And for them to suggest that extremism lives in a vacuum and doesn't have some sort of connection with teaching and history is absurd."\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

To me, this sort of demonstrates why Ware himself doesn't "get" why his first documentary (transcript here<\/a>) caused so much offence. First of all, the MCB aren't really leaders; they are not in a position to dish out orders to Muslims or to police what is going on in the organisations which actually fund the MCB. They are, in my opinion, a useful talking head for when there is a crisis, as with the London bombings last year which were the work of a small, unpopular, unrepresentative extremist group (possibly consisting of not much more than the people who did the bombs, possibly of a larger, but still very small, group which glorifies in killing huge numbers of people in spectacular acts of terrorism). The fact that the MCB have links to Jama'at-e-Islami is fairly well-known and has been mentioned in the Muslim press; they have not always had much credibility as they were seen as the Home Office's favourite Muslims.<\/p>\n

The second big objection to his documentary was that it drew connections between "extremism" – in the context of the 7th July bombings – and mere dislike of western culture among Muslims (as in "Mr Kantharia says that within the MCB a distaste for western secular culture still exists"), which last time I checked is quite legal. The programme largely consisted of a witch hunt, attacking Muslims for holding normal Muslim beliefs without actually threatening anyone, and pulled out an individual from Oxford named Taj Hargey, who had been a complete unknown until that programme was aired, to make generalised accusations against ordinary Muslims. That<\/em> is why people objected to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Ware, the guy behind the anti-MCB documentary last year and a more recent one attacking charity support for Hamas-run schools, was interviewed for yesterday's Guardian Media supplement (free registration required): He says he...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-cs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=772"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42310,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions\/42310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}