It’s been pointed out to me that the ‘apology’ for calling the East London Mosque ‘radical’ was in fact a right of reply. That’s correct – the Express did not apologise for that, but included the ELM’s position that it would not now host Anwar al-Awlaki. I’ve changed the post title but kept the URL so any links will still work.
From the Express:
In an article published on this website on 27 December 2009 until 15 January 2010, entitled “Jet bomb ordered by 9/11 spiritual leader”, we incorrectly described the charity Interpal as “Hamas-supporting”.
As such the article would have wrongly been understood to mean that Interpal and its trustees provided support for Hamas notwithstanding that Hamas is deemed a terrorist organisation and thereby were aiding terrorism.
We accept that this is wrong and neither Interpal nor its Trustees support Hamas.
We wish to apologise to Interpal and its Trustees and are happy to set the record straight.
Apart from the fact it took six months for this apology to appear after the article was taken down, what’s interesting is that the Express has already apologised and paid out damages at least once for the same article.
In March it published an apology for calling the East London Mosque ‘radical’ a right of reply from the East London Mosque, while in April it apologised and agreed to pay ‘substantial damages’ (PDF) to four trustees of the Ummah Welfare Trust, which it had claimed ‘accepted donations in order to advance terrorism and had connections to organisations with links to Hamas’.
The first line of the original article can be found in Google, along with links to the Express’s original story. Yet clicking on those links brings you this:
Not a hint that there was ever anything wrong.
A copy of the original article can be found here.
