Website sued : Neo-nazi site attemps to link Muslim comedian with bombing
A Muslim comedian and nationwide radio talk show host sued the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer for libel Wednesday, saying it had falsely accused him of masterminding a deadly bombing in England and concocted a series of Twitter postings that seemed to show him boasting of the attack.
“If you believe the lie and the fabricated tweets, I am a terrorist,” Dean Obeidallah told reporters after lawyers from Muslim Advocates of Oakland filed the suit in federal court in Ohio, the last known residence of the Daily Stormer’s publisher, Andrew Anglin.
The Daily Stormer is the nation’s leading white-supremacist website. It was founded in 2013 by Anglin, an unabashed admirer of Adolf Hitler — in a 2016 posting, he said, “I ask myself this in all things: WWHD (What Would Hitler Do?)” He took his publication’s name from Der Stürmer, a magazine in Nazi Germany.
Anglin has also celebrated the election of President Trump as “our glorious leader.” His website lost its chief online hosts, GoDaddy and Google, this week after Anglin derided Heather Heyer, the woman who was fatally struck by a car during a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday, as “fat” and of “no value” to society because she had no children.
He did not respond to an email requesting comment on the suit.
Obeidallah, who lives in New York, hosts a daily political talk show on SiriusXM radio. On June 1, Anglin published an article describing him as the mastermind of the May 22 Manchester bombing and as a “confessed terrorist” who was wanted by Interpol and other international agencies.
The bombing, at an arena where singer Ariana Grande had just given a concert, killed 23 people plus Salman Abedi, identified by police as the bomber — and injured 250. Islamic State radicals claimed the bombing had been carried out for their cause, but police said they have found no evidence of a terrorist conspiracy and have not charged anyone with complicity.
But Anglin’s article contained Twitter postings that appeared to show Obeidallah implicating himself. One said he was now safe in Syria and “able to confirm that I personally planned the Manchester bombing, by the grace of Allah.” Another said Abedi’s “reward is paradise eternal.” Others said he was appearing on CNN to discuss his role in the bombing, and that “22 is a pretty good score” but with the help of Allah, “more will die in hospital.”
Each of the purported tweets, Obeidallah said in a conference call with reporters, was manufactured by the Daily Stormer from the format of his Twitter page — using his name, Twitter handle and the number of retweets to give an air of authenticity to phony messages. For example, he said, his actual CNN-related post concerned his plan to discuss a white-supremacist terror bombing in Portland, Ore.
He also said neither Interpol nor any other police agency was after him, and he did not flee to Syria or anywhere else.
The suit said the Daily Stormer article also included a link to Obeidallah’s Twitter account and a suggestion that readers might “want to go confront” him. He said he has received death threats, including one displayed in the suit that showed a man pointing a handgun with an invitation to “look down this barrel.”
“There is very strong evidence that they knew, or should have known, that the article was false,” said Johnathan Smith, a lawyer with Muslim Advocates. He said Obeidallah’s lawyers wrote to Anglin on June 15, asking him to retract the article and remove it from his website, but received no reply.