Funding EvilIs the U.K. beginning to become a key player in global law enforcement due to their E.U. sympathetic repressive justice system? Will Muslim-friendly law in the U.K. be able to reach citizens of other countries, like yours, for example?
Dr Rachel Ehrenfeld, the author of the book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed -- and How to Stop It, is going to court tomorrow, November 15th. She is fighting in a New York court for protection against a cash-greased Saudi bully for her constitutional right to freedom of speech in her own country, the U.S., over a book that she wrote and published in the U.S.
There has been a campaign of legal intimidation carried out against her, dealt with in detail in our previous post here. In her book she exposes the Saudis including one Khalid Salim a bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire. By doing this, she's taking on a behemoth who has successfully silenced many a critic through a process known as 'libel tourism'.
Wikipedia has a fairly decent description of it here:
Libel tourism refers to the practice of intimidating writers or commentators and their publishers by filing libel suits against them in countries with plaintiff-friendly libel laws, notably the United Kingdom. Noteworthy cases have been of wealthy Saudis suing or threatening to sue American publishers of American writers in British courts [1].
United States law favors freedom of speech. The United States Supreme Court ruled in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan that public figures who sue media defendants must demonstrate that defamatory statements were "made with actual malice." Outside of the United States, truth is not a defense against allegations of defamation.
As an example, Saudi Billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz has sued or threatened suit in the UK 33 times against those who linked him to terrorism. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have settled with him, and he has a Web site boasting of his victories According to a Boston Globe editorial, "Bin Mahfouz and fellow libel tourists have made the English libel bar rich, leading The Times to declare the United Kingdom the 'libel capital of the Western world.' ... This trend has produced a succession of rulings, settlements, and damage awards against English and American media defendants costing millions of pounds"[2]. Though the phenomenon is most closely identified with Saudis, it is not limited to them. A Russian businessman successfully sued Forbes magazine, not in its home country the United States, but in London's High Court. And in 2002, George W. Bush advisor Richard Perle threatened to sue investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in London, because of a series of critical articles Hersh had written about him. [3]
So basically the laws in the United Kingdom are tilted in favor of the plaintiff (Mahfouz) rather than the defendant (Dr Ehrenfeld). A bully like Mahfouz under U.K. law can basically do as he pleases by punishing anyone who exposes him.
How is it, that a woman who wrote and published a book in the United States can be accountable outside the U.S.? He has already defeated her in the U.K. courts. And now she owes $221,000.00. She is appealing to the U.S. to protect her first amendment rights to freedom of speech by declaring the ruling unenforceable in the United States.
Consider this. This is a push to take the citizen out of the protections of their own nation and to try them in an internationally reaching court. In the past an international judiciary only applied to despots who had violated human rights, but now it is being broadened. A global judiciary undermines national sovereignty. Previous posts on European courts overreaching their boundaries can be found here and here.
Libel tourism must be resisted or we are one more step down the road of global dominance and repression by bodies that we DID NOT ELECT into power.
Via Stop Islamic Conquest (where you can find details on helping Dr Ehrenfeld).
[Originally published on The Freedom Fighter's Journal ]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment