Judgment Approved by the court for handing down. Ismaik v Fadaat Media c) is guilty of money laundering on a significant scale (a Chase level 1 allegation); and d) has paid Google to conceal his criminal past and true character in search engine results. 15. He says these are all allegations of fact, but that the italicised text ‘right-wing, extremist’ is an expression of opinion. He says they all have defamatory tendency. 16. Fadaat Media says the natural and ordinary meaning of the words complained of is instead that: a) Mr Ismaik has been used by Zionists who have funded him to promote the extremist right-wing view that the Arab-Israeli conflict will be resolved by ending the Jordanian state and preventing the creation of a Palestinian state. That view is detrimental to the interests of the Claimant’s own country. b) He was, in the past, convicted in respect of petty sums in Jordan. c) There had been grounds to suspect him of guilt in a major money laundering case (a Chase level 2 allegation). d) He has used Google services to hide search results relating to his past, including court rulings and prosecutions, while promoting his good deeds. 17. Fadaat Media accepts these are all factual allegations, apart from the italicised text in meaning (a), which it says amounts to the expression of opinion. It accepts that meanings (b) and (c) are defamatory of Mr Ismaik. But its case is that meanings (a) and (d) are not. Consideration (i) Approach and context 18. The standard approach to determination of meaning is first to read the words complained of without knowing what either party wants to say they mean; to form and note some provisional views; then to read the pleadings and the skeleton arguments, and listen to any oral submissions, before reaching a final view. 19. On my first encounter with this article, I had to deal with several factors making access to its meaning more effortful than it would have been for original readers, and I have kept that in mind throughout this exercise. 20. The first is that I was reading an agreed translation prepared for the purposes of litigation, rather than a piece of journalism in English. Accuracy was no doubt a priority for the parties in agreeing an English version, but what is lost in translation is at least some of the idiom and readability (and all of the layout) of the original piece. It inevitably takes a slower and more laborious read to yield its meaning as a result. 21. The second is that I have no context in English for this article. I was provided with a complete (untranslated) version of the Al-Araby newspaper for the day, and could see where the article appeared in it. I could also form some general impressions of Al-