Guido Fawked - Sadiq Khan Smear Busted

While Zac Goldsmith, the Tories’ candidate for Mayor of London, has kept schtum and pretended he’s running a clean campaign, there has been a continuing undercurrent of highly negative stories aimed at Labour challenger Sadiq Khan, many of which have verged on the Islamophobic, suggesting that Khan is just another Scary Muslim (tm) who is in league with extremists, and even terrorists.

Sadiq Khan

In the vanguard of these attacks has been the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, an outlet that gave the impression in the run-up to last year’s General Election, as my friend Peter Jukes put it, of being a deniable branch of Tory HQ. Today the Fawkes folks are at it again, telling “Inter-Pals: Khan Raised Funds For ‘Global Terrorists’”. So what’s this highly dubious tale about?

“In 2008, while Khan was a government whip, he was a ‘distinguished guest’ at a fundraiser for the pro-Palestine charity Interpal. Just five years earlier, the US government designated Interpal as ‘global terrorists’ who ‘provide support to Hamas and form part of its funding network in Europe’. At the time Sadiq was helping them raise cash, Interpal was under investigation by the UK Charity Commission for its links with terrorism”.

Yeah, right. The US Government has never stumped up any evidence to back up their claim, and the Charity Commission investigation ultimately concluded that Interpal complied fully with the Commission’s requirements. Even the Telegraph had to concede back in 2006 that “Interpal … has twice been the subject of investigations by the Charity Commission … On each occasion it found no evidence of links to terrorism”.

It gets worse: The Great Guido should be extremely careful about suggesting Interpal “provides support to Hamas”, as the Express titles did just that in 2010, precipitating a libel action which involved a £60,000 payout and the charity’s legal costs. As Interpal had retained the services of Messrs Carter Ruck, the latter amount would most assuredly have been well into six figures. And it gets worse still.

Back in 2005, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, having branded Interpal a “terrorist organisation”, settled out of court, retracted the claim, and stated “We would like to make it clear that we should not have described Interpal in this way and we regret the upset and distress our item caused”. And it gets worse yet again.

After the 2003 US designation of Interpal as “global terrorists”, the BBC noted “The Charity Commission, the UK watchdog, froze the charity's accounts and launched an investigation. It later cleared Interpal, saying Washington had not been able to substantiate the claim”. So the Fawkes rabble is basing its latest smear of Sadiq Khan on a claim made by an agency of the Federal Government for which there is no evidence.

Not only that, but were it not for the generous use of quote marks, The Great Guido’s claims could be potentially libellous. Now that would be a case worth seeing.