All's Fair in Law and War?

The next time someone begins to rant and rave about how Finkelstein or Walt & Mearsheimer have been "silenced" by the Israel Lobby, think about Mark Steyn and the many others mentioned in the following article who are really on the front lines defending Free Speech. Here is an excerpt:

The Islamist movement has two wings -- one violent and one lawful -- which operate apart but often reinforce each other. While the violent arm attempts to silence speech by burning cars when cartoons of Mohammed are published, the lawful arm is maneuvering within Western legal systems. Islamists with financial means have launched a legal jihad, manipulating democratic court systems to suppress freedom of expression, abolish public discourse critical of Islam, and establish principles of Sharia law.

The practice, called "lawfare," is often predatory, filed without a serious expectation of winning and undertaken as a means to intimidate and bankrupt defendants. Forum shopping, whereby plaintiffs bring actions in jurisdictions most likely to rule in their favor, has enabled a wave of "libel tourism" that has resulted in foreign judgments against European and now American authors mandating the destruction of American-authored literary material.

Like the commercial airliners that were turned into bombs on 9/11, these legal Jihadis are trying to turn our court system on its head and to use our own laws against us.

A MAJOR PLAYER on this front is Khalid bin Mahfouz, a wealthy Egyptian who
resides in Saudi Arabia. Mahfouz has sued or threatened to sue more than 30 publishers and authors in British courts, including several Americans, whose written works have linked him to terrorist entities. A notable libel tourist, Mahfouz has taken advantage of the UK's plaintiff-friendly libel laws to restrict the dissemination of written material that draws attention to Saudi-funded terrorism.

Of course Saudi Arabia - home to a majority of the 9/11 bombers - has officially been at the forefront of spreading the lie that the Mossad was behind the attacks. Unfortunately, it appears that the Saudi courts are not as open to libel cases. by foreigners. Apparently this is just one more example of the one-way street that the West is expected to traverse in order not to hurt Muslim sensibilities.

Faced with the prospect of protracted and expensive litigation, and regardless of the merit of the works, most authors and publishers targeted have issued apologies and retractions, while some have paid fines and "contributions" to Mahfouz's charities. When Mahfouz threatened Cambridge Press with a lawsuit for publishing Alms for Jihad by American authors Robert Collins and J. Millard Burr, the publisher immediately capitulated, offered a public apology to Mahfouz, pulped the unsold copies of the book, and took it out of print.

Shortly after the publication of Funding Evil in the United States, Mahfouz sued its author, anti-terrorism analyst and director of the American Center for Democracy, Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, for alleging financial ties between wealthy Saudis, including Mahfouz, and terrorist entities such as al Qaeda. The allegations against Ehrenfeld were heard by the UK court despite the fact that neither Mahfouz nor Ehrenfeld resides in England and merely because approximately 23 copies of Funding Evil were sold online to UK buyers via Amazon.com. Unwilling to travel to England or acknowledge the authority of English libel laws over herself and her work, Ehrenfeld lost on default and was ordered to pay heavy fines, apologize, and destroy her books -- all of which she has refused to do. Instead, Ehrenfeld counter-sued Mahfouz in a New York State court seeking to have the foreign judgment declared unenforceable in the United States.

Ironically, Ehrenfeld lost her case against Mahfouz, because the New York court ruled it lacked jurisdiction over the Saudi resident who, the court said, did not have
sufficient connections to the state.

The article goes on to cite many other examples of lawsuits aimed at silencing critics. Oddly, neither Finkelstein - who just returned from meetings in Lebanon with Hizbullah, nor Walt & Mearsheimer - who have made a fortune out of being "silenced", have been dragged through courts.