In a way, it's almost comforting to know that terrorists who normally settle disputes with assassinations and suicide bombings resort to the English court system whenever their feelings are hurt. Or, to be more precise, whenever someone accurately represents their views in print.
My friend David T at Harry's Place, a popular social democratic blog in the UK, is being threated with libel litigation by one Mohammad Sawalha, a man the BBC has identified as the mastermind behind "much of Hamas’ political and military strategy." Sawalha is also the president of a front organization for Hamas known as the British Muslim Initiative, and it is in this capacity that he has taken issue with David's post about a speech Sawalha gave at an anti-Israel rally in Trafalgar Square:
The reason that the British Muslim Initiate is upset with us is this. This weekend, Mr Sawalha attended a demonstration against a festival celebrating the re-founding of the State of Israel. He gave a speech, in Arabic, to Al Jazeera. In that speech, he stated that the purpose of his demonstration was to:
“express our resentment at the celebrations by the Jewish community”
He also made another statement, which has been the subject of some dispute. Al Jazeera initially reported the phrase in question as containing the word “??????”. That word translates as “evil” or “baneful”, or some variant thereon. The next word was “????? “, which means “Jew” or “Jewish”. We translated the phrase, as it appeared, as “evil Jew” or “Jewish evil”.
Some time later, the word “?????? ” was removed from the Al Jazeera report. It was replaced with the word “?????? ”, “lobby”.
The British Muslim Initiative then issued a bombastic “press release”, which it pasted in our comments section, claiming that we had:
“deliberately skewed the word ‘Lobby’ to turn it into some other word and make it seem as though it means ‘evil/noxious’”
It went on to describe Mr Sawalha as a promoter of “community relations and cultural dialogue”, and object to him being ”demonised” as a “‘Jew-hater’ and ‘anti-Semitic’.”
[Unfortunately, the Arabic is not being parsed by Armavirumque's blogging software. Check out the HP post to see the words.]
As I've written privately to David, my suspicion is that Sawalha can and will be easily shown up here. Let's assume he saw Harry's Place's original post about his speech -- or the speech's reprinting by Melanie Phillips -- and then put in a call to Al Jazeera to ask them to doctor the transcript. (If this is so, then David and many others have a fair case against the Arabic news network for willfully and tendentiously altering a matter of public record.) The original phrase "evil Jew," once published on Al Jazeera's website, remains forever, "cached" in some way traceable via Google or the WayBack Machine, which archives almost every iteration of every bit of HTML ever to appear on the web.
Sawalha might only be trying to intimidate honest chroniclers of his hate-filled oratory, or he might be like those Saudi billionaires who follow through on their thuggish threats. At any rate, he has chosen a British law firm, Dean and Dean, whose reputation suggests it would be advertising on late-night television on this side of the Atlantic. Take heart, David.
Another follow-up post at HP here. Also, see this blurb by Nick Cohen, who withdrew from this year's Islam Expo, another shambolic piece of Islamist theatre passed off as multiculturalism, which is run by -- you guessed it -- the British Muslim Initiative.
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