Judgment Approved by the court for handing down. Ismaik v Fadaat Media the political stance of that article. He marks that by ascribing its provenance to ‘Zionists’, and by offering a ‘Zionist’ explanation of why it bears the name of Mr Ismaik, a Jordanian of Palestinian heritage. 45. The article is described as espousing the ‘Zionist project’: an end-point to the ArabIsrael conflict which involves validation of Israeli ‘occupation and settlement’ in the West Bank and Gaza, which ‘denies Palestinians their historical rights and rejects international resolutions’, and which means ‘the Jordanian state disintegrating and being headed by a king with no more than a symbolic role playing the part of a mayor of a village under occupation’. In short, it is described as an article ‘that promotes the extremist right-wing Zionist view that the Arab-Israel conflict will be resolved by ending the Jordanian State and preventing the creation of a Palestinian state’. 46. The reader understands the Foreign Policy article solely through the lens of the journalist’s own views. Five of the seven paragraphs of the online version of the piece are preoccupied with condemning the article’s politics. It also describes a strong reaction against it by Palestinian and Jordanian public opinion; so much so that Mr Ismaik had been ‘compelled’ to publish an explanation of the article ‘which amounted to an apology’. 47. The disparagement of the article draws in Mr Ismaik. It uses a number of recognisable rhetorical devices to do so. First, it posits that, since the views in the article are so obviously contrary to the best interests of Palestinians and Jordanians, it was extraordinary that any Jordanian or Palestinian should have allowed themselves to be associated with them, so an external explanation must be sought for that. The proffered explanation is that the article should not really be understood as the product of Mr Ismaik’s own independent thinking and journalism: it must be the work of ‘Zionists’, and the product of a well-resourced PR-machine run by states supporting those ‘Zionists’. So Mr Ismaik had ‘relayed’ that product by lending his name to it. The ‘Zionists’ had ‘used him’. He is referred to as the ‘author’ of the article in inverted commas. 48. Then the rhetoric posits that Mr Ismaik can be understood to have benefited from ‘Zionist’ money in lending his name to the article. It infers the ‘Zionists’ had operated in this way to seek some broader legitimacy, or appeal, for the political views expressed in the article by associating it with Mr Ismaik as a Jordanian of Palestinian descent. And finally, it declares that it was to the further discredit of the article, and Mr Ismaik, that the ‘Zionists’ had found no-one better than him – a ‘nobody’, an ‘ignoramus’, and one with a blemished record – to serve that purpose. 49. So on my first complete read-through of the article, the provisional meaning I thought the ordinary reasonable reader would take from all this about Mr Ismaik was along the following lines. The piece was an angry political and ideological critique of the content of the Foreign Policy article, expressed in rhetoric inflected against ‘Zionists’. The journalist felt so passionately that its outlook was contrary to the political interests of Palestinians and Jordanians that he underlined the point with rhetoric to the effect that it was hard to believe any Jordanian/Palestinian could have written it, and readers should instead see in it the direct hand of ‘Zionists’. None of this was to the credit of the true culprits – well-resourced and devious ‘Zionists’ – or Mr Ismaik. (b) Reconsideration: the claimed meanings