Dear Qanta,
Our names are Andrew O’Keefe and Monique Wright, and we were the hosts who interviewed you on Weekend Sunrise. We were also partially behind the decision to invite you on to our show, having read about and admired your work for some time. It is with great sadness, and some surprise, that we now read your article “A Muslim’s Ambush: How I was stitched up by Australian breakfast TV“.
We both recall very fondly that you took the time, on the day, to remark upon the very pleasing content and conduct of the interview in question. As you said in the interview itself, it was “refreshing”. And indeed, anyone who watches the interview could only conclude that we were very sympathetic to your points about Islamism, very interested in exploring the profound ethical and humanitarian collaboration between doctors of different backgrounds at Hadassah, and very open to your discussion of Israel as a liberal pluralistic nation.
Your suggestions that you were somehow set up as a stooge, that you were in any way “ambushed” or exploited, or that our producer Iman had anything other than your best interests at heart in constructing the segment, are completely false. We have known and worked with Iman for some time now, and she is a woman of the highest integrity and the most inquiring disposition. We also know that our segment producer Roy was never asked by the intermediary at the Israeli Embassy (through whom the interview was organized) to provide you with any questions prior to the day of the interview. Though, given that you were in Australia to promote Project Rozana for Hadassah, and given your very public stance on Islamism, it was more than reasonable to expect that the interview would centre on those topics, which is precisely what it did. What’s more, it did so in a way that was extremely sympathetic to you and the Project and which gave great exposure for your work and your views. (Please also note that the “Maddy” to whom you referred in your article was not a producer, as you state, but our guest-greeter. She has no involvement in the construction of the segments.)
Your objection to the segment appears largely to be centred around the overlay footage of the Gaza conflict which accompanied some of your responses. Some of the footage we used showed children in Palestinian hospitals without referencing the conflict at all. Other parts of the footage was, perhaps, too bluntly illustrative of tensions between Muslim and Jewish populations in Israel and Palestine, on which so much of the Islamist hostility you discussed is based. And admittedly, we did use some footage that was inappropriate to what you were discussing at the exact moment it was played, but was very illustrative of what had been discussed prior to its display i.e. the grave injuries, both psychological and physical, sustained by children as a result of ongoing conflicts between Israel and Palestine. This was merely an issue of timing and was in no way intended to cast you as “tool serving the malignant media construct of a two-dimensional anti-Semitic caricature of Zionism”. There was nothing “deliberate” or “opportunistic” about it. As a “veteran media commentator” you must know that, from time to time, especially when the hosts veer off script to follow a particular train of thought of the guest, the wrong vision goes up at the wrong time. For that, I apologise. Sometimes these things happen on morning television.
But taken as a whole, we cannot see how any reasonable person could argue that we exploited you in any way. Indeed, the comments from our viewers afterwards demonstrated that your position was taken for exactly what it is. To suggest that we came with any agenda, either designed to promote Hamas or to debase you, is insulting in the extreme. It also shows an absence of inquiry into our long record of promoting reasoned discussion, even when the tone of that discussion cuts across the prevailing orthodoxies. I encourage all readers of your article to watch the segment and judge for themselves.
Finally, we are perplexed that a person of your high ethical standards would see fit to publish this article without first raising your concerns with our production. To impugn our show and our staff publicly and in such a hostile and defamatory fashion based solely on your own preconceptions about supposed media bias is plainly unethical.
We have here apologized for our minor mistake. You should seriously consider apologizing for your baseless and libelous comments against our staff.
Having said that, we continue to admire your work very much, and we wish you every success with Project Rozana in future. For our part, we will continue to promote a nuanced view of Israel and the Israel-Palestine conflict, as well as to de-couple Islam from Islamism in all our reportage, as we have always sought to do.
Yours,
Andrew O’Keefe & Monique Wright
Weekend Sunrise
Seven Network, Australia
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