By the Fahrenheit211 courts correspondent

A man who mocked an Islamic group for what he believed was the organisation’s alleged dishonesty in a series of emails connected to a joke job application, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of ‘racial and religious harassment’.

Tim Burton of Birmingham, who is a member of the patriotic political party Liberty GB, denied harassing Fiyaz Mughal of the anti-Islamophobia group Tell Mama. Mr Burton is alleged to have harassed Mr Mughal by submitting a joke job application for a post at Fiyaz Mughal’s organisation, and following up the spruious application with a series of emails to Fiyaz Mughal. The emails, the prosecution said, caused Mughal distress and to feel ‘intimidated’ The trial, expected to last three days, started yesterday at Southwark Crown Crown in London.

Mr Benjamin Temple, prosecuting, said that Mr Burton had sent a number of emails to Mughal stating that Mr Burton was ‘sorry that he’d missed the deadline for the job application’ but added that he, Mr Burton, said that he was ‘anyway too honest to work for Tell Mama’. The prosecutor alleged that Mr Burton has accused Tell Mama of being an ‘Augean Stables’ that needed cleaning out.

In evidence given to the court by video link, the chief prosecution witness, Fiyaz Mughal, said that he had opened emails sent to the Tell Mama business email account and that they had distressed him. One of the emails he said appeared ‘psychologically designed to give him a bad day’. Fiyaz Mughal also alleged that one of Mr Burton’s emails linked to a New English Review article about a previous case that Mughal had brought against Burton at Birmingham Magistrates Couht in 2014, which Mughal lost. Fiyaz Mughal also alleges that another communication he received on the second anniversary of Mr Burton’s accquittal by a District Judge ‘attacked his identity’ which Mughal described as that of a ‘non practising’ Muslim. The communication in question contained the text ‘celebrating the second anniversary of the Birmingham trial with some booze and a bacon sandwich’.

Fiyaz Mughal also alleges that Mr Burton has religiously harrased him by referring to him as a ‘mendaious taqiyya artist’. Mughal then went on to express his opinion that the truth about the Islamic concept of ‘taqiyya’ is a Shia one designed so that those in the Shia Islamic minority are given permission to lie in order to save their lives. Mughal said that this view had been endorsed by major Islamic scholars and that other opinions on this issue were merely the views of whom Mughal referred to as the ‘far right’.

Mughal appeared at one point to become quite agitated and went into somewhat of a diatribe about what called ‘the far right’. He accused a number of internet radio stations such as PEGIDA radio and online publicaitons such as ‘Restore Australia’and this one, Fahrenheit211, of being ‘far right nodes’. He accused Mike Holt of Restore Austalia of wanting a return to the old ‘White Australia’ policy. Mughal took particluar exception when Mr Burton allegedly sent Mughal an email in April with an attachment of an article from Fahreheit211, in which Mughal was referred to as a ‘poltroon’.

During Fiyaz Mughal’s evidence he angrily accused Mr Burton of holding ‘fruitcake views’ and of telling lies about the subject of Taqiyya. He also accused Fahrehheit 211 of ‘prolifically’ criticising his organisations and stated that nearly all his opponents and critics were part of an international ‘far right network’. He also denied consorting with Islamists and said that ‘I wouldn’t want to be in the same room as Islamists’.

Fiyaz Mughal will continue to give evidence today.

The trial continues.