A Sunday Telegraph journalist contacted a Muslim who was recorded calling for the Muslim armies to liberate Palestine, to ask him whether he considered his speech a hate crime. His full response was “Jihad is the foreign policy of the Islamic System which is established on the way of Prophethood. It has nothing to do with violence against civilians, as your newspaper often misportrayed it. Opposition to the illegal occupation of Palestine is not antisemitic, as Zionism is a colonialist project which cynically used the Jewish people for its supremacist aims. Many Jews oppose Zionism as it is an ideology of military occupation and oppression.”

In his subsequent article Edward Malnick deliberately omits the parts of the response that call into question the legitimacy of labelling as antisemitism opposition to the Zionist occupation of Palestine. His previous articles for the Daily Telegraph have attempted to incite fear in Britain under the false pretext that antisemitism drives Muslims to oppose the occupation of Palestine and the violence against Palestinians by the Zionist entity there.

The previous week Mr Malnick contacted Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain for a comment on the same video, to which we replied:

“All of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s statements and actions in relation to occupied Palestine should be seen in the context that we are fundamentally opposed to the Zionist ideology and its occupation of Palestine; that we distinguish between Jewish people as a faith and an ethnicity, and the Zionist military occupation that calls itself a ‘Jewish state’ while its origins are in fact colonial and many of the ardent Zionists are not themselves Jewish. In Britain, we use the term Zionist entity as we do not recognise the name that it gives itself. In Arab and Muslim majority countries the party and most other people, including the mainstream media, refer to the occupation of Palestine as the Jewish entity or the Jewish state. No one has ever misunderstood either term to refer to the Jewish people per-se, despite the dishonest claims of the apologists for the military occupation of Palestine.

We are all too aware that insincere people will take selective comments or statements out of their context – or even the statements/placards of those who attend demonstrations – to twist them to fit their own narrative and agenda, despite the real meaning being something entirely different. This is ever more apparent as we see concerns about antisemitism being hijacked by some to silence criticism of the aggressor in this conflict, or the rhetoric of ‘extremism’ invoked attempting to silence calls for an alternative to the colonial system that exists in the Muslim world today.”

Despite having access to the full speeches and responses to his questions he has repeatedly and deliberately ignored the context and printed only the snippet that serves the agenda of apologists for violence against Palestinians. Instead, he quotes from the extremist Community Security Trust organisation which is well known for its attempts to silence criticism of the persecution and murder of Palestinians.

In the same week that the world witnessed the sickening marches in occupied Palestine with open racist language and calls to exterminate Palestinians, such “journalists” cannot find room among their propaganda to report the true context of the apartheid military occupation of Palestine, nor the Islamic voices that oppose it.

We, therefore, invite Mr Malnick to publicly explain his deliberate removal of context from his “journalism” and his repeated attempts to silence opposition to the illegal occupation of Palestine and the violence that the Zionist occupiers there inflict upon the Palestinians. Does he consider this a hate crime? Are not his words of incitement in fact hate speech against the Muslims in Britain?