Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Not A Fanatic.

Inayet Bunglawala complains in the Guardian about being slandered by the Daily Express. He has won a libel case against them and it is clear that the Express did not report his words accurately so that is fair enough. However the subtitle makes a more general complaint that he was unfairly portrayed as a 'fanatic'. This isn't libellous, this is a statement of the obvious, as his wiki page says:
In January 1993 Bunglawala wrote a letter to Private Eye, a satirical magazine, in which he called the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman "courageous." After Abdel-Rahman's arrest on charges of masterminding the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in July that year, Mr Bunglawala guessed that it was only because of his "calling on Muslims to fulfill their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere". Five months before the September 11, 2001 attacks, Bunglawala also circulated writings of Osama bin Laden, whom he called a "freedom fighter", to hundreds of Muslims in Britain.[7]
Whilst his praise for Bin Laden was before the World Trade Center attack it was after Al Qaeda had carried out many other attacks including the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which left hundreds of people dead. This doesn't seem like the sort of stuff that a moderate would say.

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