Raed Salah has lost his ill conceived attempt to prevent his deportation from the United Kingdom. Despite being the subject of a banning order, you will remember that the hate preacher was accidentally admitted to the United Kingdom.
He has had his fun. It is now time for him to sling his hook.
This is what the court found:
We are satisfied that the appellant has engaged in the unacceptable behaviour of fostering hatred which might lead to intercommunity violence in the UK.
“We are satisfied that the appellant’s words and actions tend to be inflammatory, divisive, insulting and likely to foment tension and radicalism.
I urge you to read the response of The CST to the judgement.
Given that Salah was bound to fail in his challenge, one might ask: why did he bother. As the trial unfolded, the strategy of the Salah team became clear. Their case was, in essence, a pretty disgraceful attempt to portray Raed Salah as a victim of a Jewish conspiracy.
Specifically, the Raed Salah defence campaign spread the defamatory lie that the Community Security Trust, a respected anti-racist organisation, had fed the Home Office “doctored quotes” about Raed Salah. About that allegation, the CST notes:
CST completely rejects this wholly untrue claim, which is not mentioned in today’s ruling. It appears to be something given to journalists writing about the case rather than a meaningful claim relied on in court by Salah.
Indeed, The CST provided original source material, on which the partial newspaper reports about Salah’s conduct were based. Far from doctoring the quotes, The CST provided full context for Salah’s behaviour, in a manner which was potentially helpful to his case.
In advancing this “Jewish conspiracy” defence, Raed Salah’s team relied on two supposedly “expert witnesses”. The first is Professor David Miller. The second is Bob Lambert
David Miller runs a website called “Spinwatch”. Spinwatch has a shameful track record of attacking Muslim liberals and opponents of terrorist movements. Notoriously, David Miller’s site presented the views of the prominent neo-Nazi academic Kevin MacDonald, to explain the political behaviour of Jews.
The second is Bob Lambert, who has recently been exposed as a police spy, who deceived not only the members of Green anarchist group he had infiltrated, but also lied to his girlfriend, to whom he pretended to be an environmental activist on the run. Quite apart from Lambert’s personal and political dishonesty: his faux-academic European Muslim Research Centre (“EMRC”) at Exeter University is funded by two Muslim Brotherhood front organisations: Islam Expo and the Cordoba Foundation.
The directors of IslamExpo include fugitive Hamas commander and Istanbul declaration signatory Mohammed Sawalha. The Cordoba Foundation is run by the Muslim Brotherhood activist, Anas Altikriti, who has called the murder of coalition troops in Iraq “legitimate“. The EMRC Board includes Bashir Nafi, who a decade ago was a senior operative of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group, indicted in the United States.
As the CST was not a party to this litigation, it did not have the opportunity to rebut the spin of the Salah team:
Salah’s defence called two witnesses, Professor David Miller of the Spinwatch campaign group and former police officer Bob Lambert, both of whom contested CST’s expertise in this area. The judgement notes their claim that CST “failed to distinguish between anti-Semitism and criticism of the actions of the Israeli State and therefore gives an unbalanced perspective”, but that both Miller and Lambert accepted it was not “improper for the Secretary of State to seek the views of the CST in this matter”. Needless to say, CST totally rejects the claims of Miller and Lambert that we fail to distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of Israel. OurAntisemitic Incident Reports and Antisemitic Discourse Reports (both available here) lay out this distinction in great detail. However, we were not afforded an opportunity to defend CST’s position during the hearing and no witnesses were called by the Home Secretary’s lawyers to counter their claims. Consequently, CST’s rejection of Miller and Lambert’s ‘expertise’ was not heard in court and is not in the ruling.
Quite apart from the pathetic attempt to attack The CST, Salah’s substantive case was all over the place. He hopped from one lie to another. I’d imagine that his legal team was tearing their hair out by the end of the case:
When these allegations were first aired, Salah denied having written the poem; denied making the blood libel comment; denied facing any charges in Israel; and denied any links to Hamas. Only after CST provided evidence to the contrary, did Salah admit to having written the poem and making the blood libel comment, and argued instead that CST’s interpretation of those texts was wrong. He also admitted his conviction for funding organisations linked to Hamas, but claimed this was for “charitable and humanitarian purposes.”
I’d like just to focus on one aspect of Raed Salah’s inconsistent and shifting defence, in this post. You’ll remember that one of the many pieces of evidence uncovered to illustrate the nature of Raed Salah’s racism was a poem that he had written, in which he says:
“You are the germs of all times. The Creator had deemed you to be monkeys and losers.”
One newspaper report had inserted the word “[The Jews]” in square brackets into its translation of the poem. Initially, Raed Salah accepted that this poem was antisemitic and denied authorship of it:
The British press had circulated accusations of an anti-Semitic “poem” they attributed to Salah. But under instruction from Salah, Husain emphasized he absolutely denies writing the poem and “finds it offensive” because of its anti-Semitic content.
Unfortunately, evidence then emerged that established that the poem was indeed published, under Raed Salah’s name. The defence then shifted to a different lie: that the poem was about “all oppression” and not really Jews at all.
Lying is a strategy employed without the slightest shame, not simply by Raed Salah, but by his supporters. Have a read of MEMO’s press release, desperately trying to spin their hero’s utter failure, by misrepresenting the content of the judgement. I’ve read the judgement, and the attempt to present the court’s recital of legal arguments as findings in Salah’s favour is both pathetic and dishonest.
Now, here’s a question for you.
If a person denies clear evidence of racism, defends a racist, and attacks a leading anti-racist institution, is it fair to conclude that they are in fact a racist?
I ask, because Raed Salah attracted a large number of supporters and admirers, who rushed to his defence, during the course of his self-imposed stay in the United Kingdom.
One by one, we plan to examine the role of each of these institutions and individuals in the Raed Salah saga.
