Islamist hardliners lose another libel action

by Andrew Gilligan
Telegraph Blogs
January 27, 2010

https://www.legal-project.org/629/islamist-hardliners-lose-another-libel-action

Excerpt:

One of the key tactics Islamist hardliners use to suppress reporting of their activities is to hassle those who write about them with libel actions, Press Complaints Commission complaints, and so on. Thankfully, there is growing evidence that this tactic is failing.

Today, in a very significant judgment, a man named Azad Ali lost his High Court libel case against an article in the Mail on Sunday which described how he had been suspended from his job as a Treasury civil servant after writing a highly controversial post on his blog.

As I put it in my own story for my then newspaper, the Evening Standard, Ali praised a spiritual leader of al Qaeda, Abdullah Azzam, denied the Mumbai attacks were "terrorism" and quoted, apparently approvingly, a statement advocating the killing of British troops in Iraq.

He criticised those Muslims who "tell people that Islam is a religion of peace". He described non-Muslims as "sinners" and said Muslims should "hate [non-Muslims'] disbelieving actions".

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