It’s time for Muslim agitators to stop suing and start debating

Not long after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich last summer, I wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph criticising the concentration on the alleged backlash against Muslims. In particular, I attacked an organisation called Tell Mamma, run by Fiyaz Mughal, for appearing to suggest that the unpleasant EDL was as monstrous as al-Qa’eda. Later in the piece, I wrote that, when you publish on such matters, you are all too often ‘subject to “lawfare” — a blizzard of solicitors’ letters claiming damages for usually imagined libels’. So it proved. Along came a solicitor’s letter from the firm of Farooq Bajwa, saying that I had described Mr Mughal as an extremist. Last week, I attended a court hearing. Was the complainant right about the ‘natural and ordinary meaning’ of my words? This week the judge, Mr Justice Tugendhat, determined that he was wrong, so we won. Mr Mughal, who is, indeed, not an extremist but seems to be a fool, has now lost two legal cases (including mine) and a PCC case on related matters.