Judgment Approved by the court for handing down. Ismaik v Fadaat Media Araby. But I had few clues as to the immediate context in which an original reader would have encountered this article. Context and orientation are important for understanding the meaning a piece of journalism conveys. So before reading the article from beginning to end, I stood back to see what general context I could get for what kind of writing it might be. 22. I inferred from the material I had that Al-Araby is a serious, broadsheet-style daily news, current affairs and politics publication (the parties confirmed that inference in broad terms at trial). Within a paper like that, there are different sub-genres of journalism. The article in the print version was bylined to a named journalist and appeared on an ‘opinions’ page. In the online version it was bylined as the journalist’s ‘column’ under the heading ‘Perspectives’. So I was prepared by this to read an opinion or comment piece of individual journalism, on a serious topic, rather than a news or entertainment item, or editorial. With that in mind, my initial orientation to the article (with a view to capturing an ordinary newspaper reader’s interested but not studious approach) was as follows. 23. First, as to subject-matter, it was a piece of political journalism concerned in general with the Arab-Israeli conflict, and in particular with an article published in Foreign Policy, ‘a prestigious English-language magazine’, giving some views about that conflict and the way forward. This article had appeared under Mr Ismaik’s name. 24. Second, as to tone, it was plain the journalist’s perspective was strongly partisan: proPalestinian and anti-‘Zionist’, a term used throughout, and with clear pejorative intent. It struck me as a piece of anti-‘Zionist’ polemic. The journalist branded the Foreign Policy article an expression of ‘extreme’ ‘Zionist’ views (with some sense of tautology about that). And it was ‘the Zionists’ who must be held responsible for it. 25. That was my initial impression of the genre of the piece. I then read it once, all through, for ‘meaning’ (at a pace allowing for the need to overcome the barrier of translation), from the perspective of an ordinary, reasonable reader of a broadsheet opinion piece by a journalist whose voice and general world view would be instantly recognisable from the outset. I noted my provisional views. 26. I noticed the first two paragraphs were taken up with setting the scene by introducing Mr Ismaik in abrasive terms, before the piece launched into a critique of the Foreign Policy article, summarising and condemning the geo-political views the journalist said it espoused. There is no link to the original article, and no concern to give a contextualised or balanced view of it; it is used as an example of ‘Zionist’ thinking, to be condemned as such. 27. The piece’s interest in Mr Ismaik had struck me as principally a framing device for its political polemic. But this litigation of course focuses on what it says about him. I had formed and noted some preliminary views about that in my first complete read through. I now deal with the piece’s meaning about Mr Ismaik, in the order in which material appears. The ordinary, reasonable newspaper reader, looking at it once over, would absorb information about Mr Ismaik incrementally from the structure within which it is presented. (ii) The ‘conviction’ allegation