Claimant’s further submissions
243.
Mr Bennett submitted that it is important to bear in mind that the Claimant was
delivering the DEVIANT GROUPS SPEECH (2010) on ‘home ground’, i.e. to an
LIC audience who would have been familiar with the Claimant and his views and
general behaviour and that (in Mr Bennett’s words) he was ‘a man of peace’. The
home audience would, no doubt, have been paying careful attention to what their
Chief Imam was saying and have been receptive to his message. Those who were
regular attendees would, no doubt, have been particularly familiar with his work,
views and also sermons. However, Mr Bennett’s bald assertion that the Claimant was
known to Muslim audience to be ‘a man of peace’ is no more than assertion and not
particularly helpful. The Claimant’s upstanding reputation in the community would
have made his messages seem all the more credible and attractive. The core issue
remains what did he mean by the things that he said to his in-house Muslim audience.
244.
Mr Bennett also submitted that it was important to remember that the speech was
being heard live by the audience and to be careful not to subject the speech to an
overtextural analysis. As stated above, I have borne this well in mind, in relation to
this and other live speeches by the Claimant, that meaning is to a large extent a matter
of impression (c.f. Eady J in Bond v. BBC, supra).
General observations
245.
I have read the whole of the Claimant’s 42-page DEVIANT GROUPS SPEECH
(2009) in one go as Mr Bennett suggested. In my view, the main messages in the
Claimant’s speech are clear. The Claimant’s broad message is that armed jihad, i.e.
“fighting the enemies of Islam”, is a general religious duty for all Muslims aimed at
achieving “the promotion of the religion of Islam and the making the religion of
Allah, the supreme, and the suppression of the Disbelievers and the Hypocrites and
destroying the disbelievers and hypocrites...". The Claimant’s particular message,
using and endorsing the words of Sheikh Abdul bin Baz, is that the Palestinian
conflict is as an “Islamic affair” and Muslims should show “solidarity” by
“...fighting the Jews an Islamic Jihad until the Territory (Israel-Palestine) goes back
to its proper people…”.
246.
In my view, the DEVIANT GROUPS (2009) is expressly and implicitly all about
encouraging the audience to engage in aggressive, physical jihad in Palestine on
behalf of Islam. It is a far cry from the notion of mere ‘proportionate self-defence’,
which is nowhere mentioned. There are no words in the speech limiting or
ameliorating the effect of the above passages. Indeed, the Claimant is scornful of
those who are “weak” (see the sixth section).
247.
The Claimants’ conflating of the meaning of jihad or jihad fiy sabilillah (striving in
the path of God) with armed combat (qital) and his failure to articulate the Qur'anic
conditions and regulations for qital, signals a vision of Islam which would be regarded
as violent, extreme, partial and misleading to a young British Muslim audience. Given
the sensitivities of the subject, a responsible speaker and teacher of Islam when
discussing qital must be explicit about the conditions for declaring and prosecuting it.
At no stage does the Claimant mention any of the limiting conditions in relation to
qital. At no stage does the Claimant suggest that any of the means used by Muslim
groups in Afghanistan, Chechyna, or Palestine, which included suicide bombings,
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