On 9 October 2012, The Independent published an apology on their website for suggesting, in a previous article, that the party Ghannouchi leads, Ennahdha (An Nahda) has been offered foreign funds. The apology stated: "we wish to make it clear that Mr Ghannouchi and his party have not accepted any donation from a foreign state in breach of Tunisian party funding laws. We apologise to Mr Ghannouchi." On 17 May 2013, the BBC published an apology on their website for previously publishing inaccurate statements about Ghannouchi six months earlier on 21 November 2012. The article had accused Ghannouchi of threatening to order troops on to the streets if the Ennahdha Party did not get the results he expected in the elections in 2011, and suggested he condoned the violent Salafist attack on the United States embassy and the burning of the American School in Tunis in September 2012. Acknowledging that none of these accusations and suggestions were in fact true, the retraction concluded: "The BBC apologises to Mr Ghannouchi for these mistakes and for the distress they caused him." In 2020, the UK High Court ruled in favour of Ghannouchi, in a libel case against Middle East Online and its editor Haitham El Zobaidi. The Middle East Online (MEO) and one of its editors had claimed that Ennahda "supported terrorism", a charge Ghannouchi "vigorously denied". According to Ahmed Yusuf, the article was part of a ""a systematic campaign" against Ghannouchi from media backed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egypt." Ghannouchi's willingness to compromise with secularists in Tunisia and his country's unique success in maintaining a democratic system following the Arab Spring has been credited by at least one observer (Robert Worth) to his background. Unlike many Islamists, Ghannouchi "lived abroad for decades, reading widely in three languages", including Western thinkers Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre. He admired the courage of leftists who protested in the streets against the dictatorship, were arrested and tortured in prison, and became willing to work with them. Watching the initial victory of the Algerian Islamists—while exiled in London—collapse into the slaughter, mayhem and defeat of the civil war, left a deep impact. According to Azzam S. Tamimi, he was influenced by Malik Bennabi and his treatise "Islam and Democracy", which laid "the foundations" for Ghannouchi's "masterpiece" "Al‐Hurriyat al‐'Ammah" ("Public Liberties").