"Gilligan’s Island" was a sixties sitcom with an eponymous hero who was "bumbling, dim-witted [and] accident-prone". Andrew Gilligan had nothing to do with that programme, but one can’t help thinking about him as he seems to be everywhere at the moment; the London Evening Standard, the Daily Telegraph and, this week, Channel 4’s Dispatches.
Having sprung to prominence as a reporter on the BBC’s flagship Radio 4 Today programme, he exposed the "sexing up" of Tony Blair’s infamous dossier on Iraq’s "weapons of mass destruction". This episode, you may recall, led to the death – by "apparent suicide", according to evidence given at the subsequent Hutton Inquiry – of Dr. David Kelly who was revealed as Gilligan’s source by the BBC. That whole murky episode aside, Gilligan has developed a bit of a career in right-wing publications as an "expert" on Britain’s Muslims.
On the back of his latest Dispatches programme ("Britain’s Islamic Republic"), he claims in today’s Daily Telegraph that one of Britain’s largest Muslim charities, Muslim Aid, "is linked to Islamic terrorists". I have a feeling that Gilligan may well regret the sub-editor’s headline, for in the article which we have to assume he has written he has inserted "allegedly" before "linked" to cover his back against libel action. To support his claim he cites two donations from Muslim Aid. The first was to the Islamic University in Gaza which, says Gilligan, the New York Times described as "one of the prime means for Hamas to convert Palestinians to its Islamist cause"; the second was to a Palestinian charity which the US government has designated as a "sponsor of terrorism". Neither "authorities" are known to be entirely objective in these matters; some readers of the NYT have claimed recently that "Reporting in the US is biased towards Israel. The [New York] Times is no different". And according to one senior CNN journalist US designations of individuals and organisations as "terrorists" is based on nothing more than lists of names provided by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which are then rubber-stamped by Washington. No evidence, no investigation, no due process.
Click here to read the complete commentary by Middle East Monitor, 2nd March 2010