Douglas Murray libel trial closes with barrister defending Hijab’s ‘provocative’ online conduct

The barrister representing Mohammed Hijab described his client as “provocative, a bit of a smart-alec, a bit too cocky” but insisted that lawyers for The Spectator and its associate editor Douglas Murray had failed to substantiate serious claims against him.

Mark Henderson, delivering closing remarks at the end of a four-day libel trial at the Royal Courts of Justice, said the defendants had been “unable to find” more than three examples of problematic behaviour “out of thousands of hours of footage posted online [on YouTube]”.

Hijab, a social media influencer with more than a million YouTube subscribers, is suing The Spectator and Murray over a 2022 article that alleged his presence in Leicester and a speech to a crowd of masked men had contributed to intercommunal violence and race riots between Muslims and Hindus in the city.

Henderson dismissed suggestions that Hijab was using the proceedings to “pursue a vendetta” against Murray, who chose not to appear in court during the hearing.

Much of Hijab’s complaint turned on whether his remarks in Leicester, which alluded to the actions of a far right nationalist group called Hindutva, could be taken to mean all British Hindus. He had told the Leicester crowd: “I’m saying this directly to all the so-called Hindutva wannabe gangsters: Don’t ever come out like that again”. He also led calls of “Allahu Akbar”.

Murray — who declined to attend the court hearing — had written that Hijab had “cropped up” in Leicester to “whip up his followers” and that he had told the crowd that “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,” Murray wrote.

Hijab says that the article cost him financially through damage to his reputation, but lawyers for the Spectator and Murray say that as a public figure who has regularly engaged in controversial actions, Hijab’s behaviour is already subject to scrutiny. Any “adverse consequences” to the YouTuber stem from his own behaviour, not the article, lawyers for the magazine and Murray say.

William Bennett KC, on behalf of Murray, told Mr Justice Johnson, sitting at the Royal Courts of Justice, that while Hijab was asking the court to vindicate his reputation, “we say that he has the reputation he deserves: a man who whips up crowds when it has been dangerous to do, a street agitator, who has acted in this manner on a number of occasions”.

Mr Bennett focused on three appearances by Hijab: Leicester, a protest outside the Israeli embassy in London on May 23 2021, and a “provocative” visit to Golders Green on Saturday May 22 2021, in which Hijab sought to engage with Jewish passers-by about Israel’s actions in Gaza. Video clips of the Golders Green event showed Hijab standing next to a van which bore images of dead Palestinian children plus Holocaust images, while a number of people, apparently Jewish, crossed the street away from him in order to avoid answering questions about the Israel/Palestine situation.

Giving evidence on Monday, Hijab denied having anything to do with the van, but acknowledged that going to Golders Green on the Sabbath, which he said he had not thought about at the time, was an error of judgment.

In fact, Mr Bennett said, “the real Mr Hijab is even worse than the person presented in Mr Murray’s article. Not only did he whip up the crowds in Leicester and outside the Israeli embassy, he has himself made wholly unjustified threats of violence against dogs, that he and the crowd led by him would kill them if they as much as came near to them when they attended a protest at the Israeli embassy”.

On behalf of the Spectator, barrister Greg Callus told the court that Hijab’s claim should be dismissed and that “quite the contrary to his case, he has revelled in the attention and self-publicised the very acts which he alleges have so damaged him when reported in the article. Worse, Defendant 1 [the Spectator] submits that the claimant has quite simply fabricated parts of his case, namely the loss of various supposedly lucrative contracts with charities and companies run by his associates”.

Mr Callus attacked Hijab, telling Mr Justice Johnson that “the way he has litigated his case – the almost total failures of disclosure, the confected claim to special damages, the use of these proceedings for the purpose of pursuing a vendetta against Defendant 2 [Douglas Murray] rather than for the reparation of reputational harm – would justify the Court striking-out the claim rather than entering judgment on the Claimant’s behalf”.

He added: “Given his behaviour in evidence before the Court, the claimant is simply not deserving of any substantial remedy, and should never have brought this claim at all”.

Mr Justice Johnson said he would reserve judgment on the case. It is likely to be made public later this year.