Over at Atlas Shrugs, Pamela Geller directs us to an article which she describes as a “thoughtful and stunning indictment of the latest tribulation in our legal battle against the de facto sharia ban on Robert Spencer and me in the UK”. The article, entitled “The end of free speech in Britain”, reveals the welcome news that last week a British court rejected Geller and Spencer’s appeal against the home secretary’s decision last June to ban them from entering the UK.

The name of the author, Abhijit Pandya – described by Geller as “one of our British solicitors” – may be familiar. That’s because Pandya has established his own reputation for frothing-at-the-mouth Islamophobia. Back in 2011, when he stood as the UK Independence Party candidate in the Leicester South parliamentary by-election, Pandya wrote a blog post in which he described Islam as “morally flawed and degenerate” and declared his agreement with Geert Wilders’ view of the faith as a “retarded ideology”. He added: “Islamic culture inherently rejects the Western way of life, more specifically the Protestant work ethic that has successfully built the economies of the West.”

The local paper, the Leicester Mercury, published an editorial condemning Pandya’s blog post as “a wildly inflammatory rant which boiled down to a crass and nasty characterisation of Muslims as lazy, intolerant spongers who are a threat to the British way of life. It was not part of a reasoned debate about multiculturalism, but a series of sweeping, unsubstantiated generalisations which demonise the Muslim community.”

So, clearly, Pandya was an entirely appropriate individual to act as Geller and Spencer’s legal representative in the UK.