Board of Deputies retracts but doesn't lose

Here's a strange thing. According to the Rolled up Trousers blog of Osama Saeed, the Board of Deputies is claiming that no one won the recent libel case that had the Board apologising and coughing up an undisclosed sum for accusing Interpal of terrorist activities.

The BoD are defiant however, claiming Interpal have not scored a victory. The Board's Director, Jon Benjamin has had this to say:

"The case was not tried and tested in court. Despite the way the story has been spun by Interpal, the settlement was not a victory for either side."

Hang on. The BoD called Interpal "a terrorist organisation". Interpal begin libel proceedings against BoD. BoD say they shouldn't have called Interpal "a terrorist organisation". Sounds like a victory to me.

And me.

Here's the statement of that the Board of Deputies now has on the home page of its website.

The Board of Deputies and the UK-registered charity Interpal announce that they have reached an out-of-court settlement of libel proceedings relating to an item published by the Board on this website in September 2003. In the item, we referred to “terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Interpal”. 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.