The British Muslim Initiative is the sister organisation of the terrorist group, Hamas. Its President is Mohammad Sawalha: a man who the BBC identified as the mastermind of “much of Hamas’ political and military strategy”, and as responsible for directing “funds, both for Hamas’ armed wing, and for spreading its missionary dawah”. Its senior members include Azzam Tamimi, the Hamas Special Envoy who once expressed a desire to commit a suicide bombing.
Yesterday evening, we received a letter from Anas Altikriti of the British Muslim Initiative, threatening legal action against us.
It is a great relief to be the subject of mere legal threats. In Gaza, where Hamas is in power, they prefer to settle disputes with political opponents by murdering them.
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’.”
I do not know Mr Sawalha. However, if he is a senior Hamas activist, and a supporter of that organisation, I cannot imagine he has anything positive to contribute to “community relations”. Moreover, it is very unlikely that any British court would regard it as defamatory to describe a Hamas activist as a racist. Hamas is a proudly racist, and genocidal terrorist organisation.
A little later, an Al Jazeera reporter called Medyan Dairieh appeared in the thread, insisting that Mr Sawalha had spoken of the “Jewish Lobby”. He explained that the original report contained a spelling mistake. However, instead of apologising to Harry’s Place and to the British Muslim Initiative for his hopelessness as a journalist, he accused us of having “no common sense” for thinking that a Hamas activist would use the phrase “Evil Jew”.
I can form no conclusion on what precisely Mr Sawalha said at Sunday’s demonstration. The meaning of the words “????” and “????? ” have been extensively discussed in the comments of the thread below. Initially, defenders of Mr Sawalha claimed that in Arabic, “Jew” meant “Zionist”. When that argument fell apart, there was some debate as to whether the word “????? ” means “Jew” or “Jewish”. The defenders of Mr Sawalha insisted that the word could not be used to mean “Jew”. However, the leading dictionaries suggest that it can be used in this manner. There was also some disagreement as to how likely it was that a careless journalist would have mistyped the word “evil, “????” when intending to type the word “?????? ”, “lobby”.
It is possible that Mr Sawalha railled against the “evil Jewish Lobby”, rather than the “evil Jew”. What I find astonishing, is that the British Muslim Initiative thinks that it is somehow better to be caught out inveighing against - not the policies of the Israeli Government, not the “Israel Lobby”, not even against the “Zionists” - but against the “Jewish community” and the “Jewish Lobby”. It is clear from their letter that they see no problem with saying any of that. How bold of them.
