An Islamic influencer with 1.28 million YouTube subscribers is suing The Spectator and its associate editor, Douglas Murray, for defamation after an article accused him of aggravating racial tensions during the 2022 Leicester riots.
Controversial anti-Israel campaigner Mohammed Hijab maintains that the allegation is false and claims that it caused him “to suffer, damage to his reputation, distress, humiliation, embarrassment, hurt and injury to his feelings”.
Hijab’s lawyers allege that he lost income as a result of the article – including a £3,500-a-month advertising deal with the One Ummah Charity and £30,000 payment for a Ramadan fundraising campaign.
Lawyers for Murray and The Spectator, led by Mark Lewis of Patron Law, have hit back against Hijab’s claims.
They argue that as a public figure who regularly engages in contentious debates, Hijab’s reputation is already subject to scrutiny. Any “adverse consequences” to the YouTuber stem from his own behaviour, not the article, they state.
Murray’s article includes a reference to Hijab's trip to Leicester during the 2022 unrest, in which Hindu buildings were attacked and dozens of arrests made as tensions with the city’s Muslim community exploded. Speaking to a large crowd of mostly masked men, Hijab delivered an apparent warning, saying: “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”.
Hijab travelled to Leicester during the unrest and posted on Instagram a photograph of himself leading a group of masked men along a street, with the caption: “Muslim patrol in Leicester”.
In his column, Murray – who recently received an award from President Isaac Herzog for being a “friend to the Jewish people” – accused Hijab of “cropping up in Leicester to whip up his followers.
“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’s lawyers argue that Murray’s comments were incorrect, and he was referring specifically to Hindutva, an “extremist Hindu supremacist ideology”, not all Hindus.
However, Murray’s lawyers claim the remarks were broader in scope, mocking reincarnation as a “central tenet of Hinduism” and using the word “they” to group together all Leicester Hindus.
His defence added: “Few if any [Leicester protesters] were Hindutva nationalists: in this context, ‘Hindutva’ was a slur upon those British Hindus who participated as Hindus". The defence alleges that Hijab’s comments were “bigoted and Hinduphobic”.
Murray’s lawyers also highlighted Hijab’s controversial past, including a 2021 protest in Golders Green. He stood with a billboard that stated, “Did we not learn from the Holocaust?” above images of the Shoah interspersed with photographs from the Israel-Gaza conflict and asked Jewish passers-by their views on Israel.
The incident, which the Community Security Trust (CST) described as “a disgusting and seemingly deliberate act of incitement”, took place on Shabbat.
Hijab said that his intentions during the protest had been “to find people who were pro-Zionist with whom to debate the issues”.
Murray’s lawyers also referenced a demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy the same year where, minutes after Hijab addressed the crowd about the “terrorist apartheid state of Israel” and declared “We love death”, a masked man called for “Jewish blood”. Hijab claimed he left the protest before the comments were made.
Since October 7, Hijab has appeared on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored and has posted a stream of anti-Israel messages to his millions of followers. On X, he boasted: “Being labelled anti-semitic by a Zionist is a badge of honour” and “More Jews need to condemn the genocide in Palestine. Too many Jews support it [sic].”
British author and conservative political commentator Douglas Murray (Photo by GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT/AFP via Getty Images)
Hijab alleges that Murray published his claims about his comments in Leicester either knowing that they were false or not caring if they were accurate. In his reply to the defence, the influencer questioned why, if Murray was correct, and Hijab used the term Hindutva to make a “religiously-bigoted attack” on Hindus, it not reported at the time.
Mark Lewis, famous for his role in bringing down News of the World, said: “It would not be appropriate for us to comment at this stage, other than to emphasise that Douglas Murray is defending this claim.” The case continues.
