AL is this the article you're referring to [padding added by AL to move the url off the main page...at Harry's Place ]

The truth is not a defense (or defence, for you tea-slurpers) against libel in the UK, and people like Galloway are past masters at bullying their critics with lawsuits.

But Hari seemed to be a leftist of a different stripe, as this American Thinker post from a couple of years ago shows.

Is Johann Hari a different person?

#2: The truth is not a defense (or defence, for you tea-slurpers) against libel in the UK

Unless I am very much mistaken, you are wrong there.

Mr. Winston;

No, it's the link in the main post. As noted, it's not at the HP site anymore, it was taken down.

AL;

It looks like it has been purged from Google as well.

It looks like it has been purged from Google as well.

No it is still there. I have blogged about it today and have saved the page just in case. It don't see why Mr Hari finds it defamatory to be called a tabloid journalist anyway...

Re: #5 from Francis: thanks for the information, Francis.

Is it defamatory to call someone a lawsuit-happy bully who's shown that they'd rather suppress the truth than admit an error?

Thanks Francis, AFAICT this is the offending passage:

I make clear in the introduction that my parents were ex-communists who remained conventional members of the late-twentieth-century left. They didn’t “raise me” to see Orwell as “a moral archetype.” Indeed, I’m not sure that they ever read Orwell themselves. If they had, they would have hated his argument about totalitarianism because, as I say again in the introduction, they did not see a moral equivalence between communism and Nazism. For my part, it’s true that I did start Homage to Catalonia a few years ago, but to my shame I never finished it. I would no more ask “What would Orwell do?” than I would “What would Jesus do?”

Hari makes up these stories about my mother and father solely so he can declare that I am an “ostentatious claimant of George Orwell’s mantle.” This would indeed be a preposterously self-aggrandizing claim to make if I had ever made it. But I haven’t, in print or in private.

Having misrepresented my parents, he goes on to misrepresent my book.

Hopefully, despite Breyer and Ginbsurg’s fondness for foreign law, the SCOTUS will never look to Britain for “interpreting” the scope of the protections in the First Amendment.