Judgment Approved by the court for handing down. Ismaik v Fadaat Media ‘Zionist’ PR machine capable of getting articles placed in prestigious magazines (a recognisable anti-‘Zionist’ trope), or that anything real or factual might be being said about the relationship between that machine, the editorial board of Foreign Policy, and Mr Ismaik. The article – and the reasonable reader – is simply not concerned with that level of logic or detail. The piece is operating in a different register. The inference invited here is, in my view, the rather airier one that Mr Ismaik must have been paid for the article, it is pro-‘Zionist’, the ‘Zionists’ have a well-funded PR machine - and the rest can readily be left to the anti-‘Zionist’ imagination. 60. The piece refers to ‘those who control’ Mr Ismaik and ‘those who are funding’ him. In context, an ordinary, reasonable reader would readily understand those to be casual tropes for ‘Zionist’ alignment – as the piece says, ‘the Zionists used him’. I do not agree it would be understood to be a literal, factual allegation relating to identifiable historical financial transactions or a condition of literal subservience. It is an allegation of being tainted with ‘Zionist’ money – a conspiracy theory, or at least ‘something which is or can reasonably be inferred to be a deduction, inference, conclusion, criticism, remark, observation, etc’; that is to say, an expression of opinion. 61. I cannot, however, find any natural and ordinary imputation at all either that Mr Ismaik himself did not genuinely espouse the views expressed in the Foreign Policy article, or that, having been in the article ‘introduced to the world in his capacity as a representative of Jordanians of Palestinian descent’ that was a pretence or deception. What the piece says is that the views expressed in the Foreign Policy article are not representative of Palestinian/Jordanian (mainstream) views, and that the journalist disagrees that they are in the best interests of Palestinians/Jordanians as a whole. That is something different. 62. In my view the ordinary reader would have to be unreasonably ‘avid for scandal’ to extrapolate that not only was Mr Ismaik a proponent of ‘Zionist’ views, he did not even truly believe in them. A reader would clearly understand the journalist’s rhetoric that it was incredible that a Palestinian/Jordanian should espouse these views as being just that; I am not persuaded they would understand that therefore Mr Ismaik did not in fact do so. That would be excessively literal and indeed over-interpreted. On the contrary, the general sense of the piece is that Mr Ismaik is indeed in sympathy with the views in the article (a ‘model for Arab Zionists’ as one version of the article is headed) rather than an agnostic or a believer in something else. The journalist’s meaning would readily be understood objectively to be that ‘Arab Zionist’ should be regarded from the outset as a political oxymoron, not that Mr Ismaik is a deceiver. 63. My conclusions on the nature and meaning of this allegation are these. The natural and ordinary meaning of the words complained of is that: The Foreign Policy article which appears under Mr Ismaik’s name advances political views which are extremist, right-wing ‘Zionist’ views, and contrary to the best political interests of Palestinians and Jordanians. It is incomprehensible that a Jordanian of Palestinian descent should have advanced them. The article has all the hallmarks of a product of the wellfunded international ‘Zionist’ PR machine. So Mr Ismaik can be thought of as an agent of these ‘Zionists’ and as having benefited financially (directly or indirectly) from ‘Zionist’ money.