Ismail Patel, chair of Friends of Al Aqsa, has played down his alleged links to proscribed terror group Hamas insisting: “What do you call a link — am I linked to the Jewish Chronicle just because I am talking to you?”

The JC interviewed Mr Patel at the Palestine Expo event which he organised, and which the UK government had threatened to ban over his expression of support for Hamas.

He said his backing for the group revolved around one speech he had delivered in Trafalgar Square at a demonstration in 2009 against the Gaza war at the time.

“To paraphrase my speech, I argued Hamas was defending the people of Gaza and without them Israel would have destroyed them. You will not find me talking about Hamas either before or after that speech.”

Mr Patel, who founded the Leicester-based FOA in 1997, accepted that Hamas had been guilty of “terrible stuff” throughout its history.

He said: “I’m not justifying the means they have used throughout their history — some of the stuff is terrible. It doesn’t even help their cause. But you cannot occupy a people, the resistance of people is a right of defence.

“For me the Palestinians do not know how to handle their occupation.But that’s another story.”

Mr Patel, who is also a spokesperson for the British Muslim Initiative group, said he “could not see now how a Palestinian could ask a Jewish person to leave Israel.”

He added: “I think that would be a crime. I feel Jews require a national home because of the crimes they have suffered.”

Mr Patel, 55, insisted attempts to have the Palestine Expo cancelled undermined “the whole democratic means of being able to engage and debate, discuss and disagree.”

He said attempts to shut down events like his played into the hands of “lunatic” Islamist groups like Al Muhajiroun which in turn help to fuel Islamophobia.