Muslim American comedian sues site for accusing him of Manchester bombing
Dean Obeidallah sued Daily Storm for accusing him of planning the bombing of Ariana Grande concert. Photo: The Guardian
(Web Desk) – Muslim American comedian and radio host Dean Obeidallah has sued the publisher of the Daily Stormer for falsely labeling him as the “mastermind” behind the Ariana Grande’s concert bombing in the UK.
According to the Guardian, Dean Obeidallah said that the neo-Nazi site falsely assembled and embedded messages in a story on June 1 to make it look like it was sent from Obeidallah’s Twitter account. The fabricated messages were meant to trick the readers into believing that the radio host took responsibility for the terrorist attack that killed dozens of people on May 22 in Manchester.
Obeidallah, who is also a columnist at the Daily Beast, said that after the article was published, he received death threats. “It was literally jaw-dropping,” he said. “The death threats were something I’ve never seen before in my life,” Obeidallah stated.
One comment on the post said Obeidallah “just earned himself a spot at the gallows”, according to his federal lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday against the publisher, Andrew Anglin.
The Muslim American comedian’s lawsuit claimed that Anglin defamed him and invaded his privacy causing him “emotional distress”. Obeidallah seeks unspecific compensatory and punitive damages.
The story comes two days after Google and GoDaddy pulled the site’s web address from their search engines, in effect to make it unreachable. Anglin’s publication mocked the 32-year-old woman who was recently killed in a deadly attack at a white nationalist rally in Virgina, which resulted in the removal of their site’s name from search engines.
The legal action claimed that the article’s defamatory statements were intended to spur violence against Obeidallah, citing other alleged examples of Daily Stormer readers who did just that, including Dylann Roof, who read the website’s content before killing the black churchgoers in South Carolina.
The suit emerged at the riotous time for the publisher who is already facing a federal lawsuit by another target of one of its online trolling campaigns. A woman from Montana in April sued Anglin for orchestrating an anti-Semitic trolling campaign against her family.
The representatives of Obeidallah’s suit stated that the Daily Stormer had not responded to their request to remove June 1 article about him.
The Daily Stormer published its post about Obeidallah a day after the Daily Beast published his column entitled, “Will Donald Trump ever say the words ‘white supremacist terrorism’?”
“Their goal was clearly to marginalize my voice,” said Obeidallah, 47, a resident of New York City.
