I have no desire to open up another can of worms by challenging Aamer Naeem’s arguments about his charity’s finances, but there were a number of things which he said in his article yesterday which do require a brief response.
1. I stand by my original article. It was accurate in every claim that it made and included a lot of commentary which put forward Penny Appeal’s case. It is in the public interest to report on the accounts of Muslim charities which handle large amounts of the public’s money and to ask searching questions of them. 5Pillars did exactly that and some will accept Penny Appeal’s explanation and some won’t – that’s the nature of being in the public eye and dealing with the scrutiny it brings. I’ll let readers decide if it was misleading or sensationalist, but I personally I don’t accept that it was.
2. I made a promise to Aamer Naeem, CEO of Penny Appeal, to publish his response in full on my own website and I have fulfilled that. I did so despite the fact that the article contains strident criticism of 5Pillars, myself and Dilly Hussain. I am unaware of any other media outlet who would have done that. We did it because we are committed to transparency and accountability and don’t believe we are above criticism or reproach.
3. I did not intentionally omit mention of Penny Appeal’s 2015 accounts in my article; in fact, I did briefly mention them. However, I did not go into detail because I was under the impression (perhaps wrongly) that the accounts were not yet public and should only be reported once lodged with the Charity Commission. Secondly, I had offered Penny Appeal a right of reply so figured they could expand on them if they wished to do so. I omitted a lot of the detail that Aamer Naeem told me on the phone for similar reasons. Please don’t forget, I was writing an 800 word news article, not a PHD thesis.
4. I did not record the phone call with Aamer Naeem although I sometimes do record phone calls (with people’s permission) for reasons of accuracy. Dilly Hussain thought I did this as a matter of regular practise but the fact is I don’t.
5. 5Pillars firmly believes in holding Muslim institutions which handle large amounts of public money to account. Quranic verses on suspicion and backbiting have been blatantly misused on social media in an attempt to shut down questions. We will not “cover for our brothers” when it comes to matters of public finances.
6. I submitted the enquiry to Penny Appeal about their accounts at around 12pm on Thursday, giving them five hours to respond not 25 minutes. I would have delayed publication had they asked me to.
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7. Aamer Naeem did not try to bribe me into not writing the article by offering me a foreign trip. I mentioned to Dilly Hussain in a jokey, throwaway kind of way that Aamer had offered to show me Penny Appeal’s work in The Gambia and Dilly obviously misconstrued this. This is completely my fault as I gave him that impression.
8. Aamer questionned 5Pillars accounts at the end of his piece and the fact that we also ask for public donations. We will, of course, publish our accounts as we must and people will have the right to judge us on them. All I would say is that we receive relatively tiny amounts of public money which we clearly advertise will be used on “technical, marketing and journalism” issues, and when we do publish our accounts I guarantee that all of it would have actually been spent on those issues, not 27%! And no public money will be held in reserve for future projects either!
9. Finally, I sincerely hope that some good can come out of this. Public confidence in Muslim charities is low in certain quarters and I do believe that charities should become far more transparent about how they explain themselves to the public. They aggressively solicit our donations, after all, and make big promises so we have a right to know where our money is going. Their supporters, who use emotional and religious arguments in an attempt to shut down criticism, do those charities no favours whatsoever.
On the other hand, perhaps laymen do have a very basic understanding of how charities work and what their accounts really show, and perhaps they are too quick to judge and condemn.
From 5Pillars’ perspective, none of this was personal; we published the story because we believed it was in the public interest and we assume the responsibility for that.
