A judge has dismissed a libel claim brought by Youtuber Mohammed Hijab against The Spectator after finding the magazine’s reporting was “substantially true” and he had not suffered serious harm as a result.
The High Court’s Mr Justice Johnson also found that Mohammed Hegab, who posts videos under the name Mohammed Hijab to 1.3 million followers, had “lied on significant issues” while giving evidence at the trial in July.
The reporting centred on tension between British Hindus and British Muslims which took place in Leicester in the summer of 2022. Hegab attended the city and made a speech about Hindu nationalist ideology Hindutva later posted to his Youtube channel, on 18 September that year.
Days later The Spectator’s Douglas Murray wrote of the “downside with diversity” and what had happened in Leicester: “Soon charming people like Mohammed Hijab, who rotates between presenting himself as a reasoned interlocutor and a street agitator, arrived on the scene.
“Hijab made a slight name for himself last year by whipping up a mob on the streets of London. At one anti-Israel protest addressed by Hijab in inflammatory terms, a masked man was filmed chanting ‘We’ll find some Jews. We want their blood’, though Hijab says he had left the protest by that time and later tried to calm things down.
“Of course, the police did nothing much about the crowd itself, for the belief of the British police these days is that as long as a mob can be dispersed at some point, it counts as a great victory for the force.
“This week Hijab cropped up in Leicester to whip up his followers. Among other things he told them that Hindus are ridiculous people, not least because of their belief in reincarnation. Hijab claimed that the Hindus must live in fear because they have been reincarnated as such ‘pathetic, weak cowardly people.’ ‘I’d rather be an animal,’ he went on.”
Hijab sued The Spectator and Murray, claiming damages for losses resulting from three organisations that had disassociated themselves from him following the publication of the article.
Mr Justice Johnson described Hegab as “highly educated” but “combative and constantly argumentative” on the witness stand. He also described the claimant as having displayed “palpable personal animosity” towards Murray.
The judge found: “Specifically, I am satisfied that he lied in respect of the event at Golders Green, the counter-protest at the rally for Israel, the seminar on Hinduism at the Sapience Institute, his repudiation of vigilantism, his evidence as to the involvement of the Hindutva, his evidence about his choice of language in his speech, and his evidence in support of his claim for financial losses,” referring to a series of events in which Hijab had appeared in the run-up to the Leicester speech.
The judge decided that the article conveyed the meaning that: “The claimant is a street agitator who has whipped up a mob on London’s streets, addressed an anti-Israel protest in inflammatory terms, and exacerbated frayed tensions (which had already spilled over into public disorder) between Muslim and Hindu communities in Leicester by whipping up his Muslim followers including by ridiculing Hindus for their belief in re-incarnation and describing Hindus as pathetic, weak and cowardly in comparison to whom he would rather be an animal.”
He said this was a statement of fact which is defamatory of Hegab, but that The Spectator had not caused, and was not likely to cause going forward, serious harm to his reputation.
This was partly because Hegab has “many more” social media followers than The Spectator, a number that had not seen a dramatic drop post-publication according to reliable evidence, while the judge said it seemed Hegab “positively revelled in any form of publicity” and noted that material published by him was “at least as reputationally damaging to him as the article” because he posted video showing himself “directly whipping up a large group of masked men and ridiculing a central tenet of Hinduism”.
“In any event, it is substantially true, and it is not materially inaccurate,” Mr Justice Johnson said, dismissing the claim.
The judge said the description of Hegab as a “street agitator who has whipped up a mob on London’s streets” and as someone who “addressed an anti-Israel protest in inflammatory terms” was an “accurate description” of what he was seen to be doing at a rally for Israel.
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