Andrew C. McCarthy responds:
Leave it to a lawyer. Rachel Ehrenfeld did not attempt to market her book in England. She repeated allegations already publicly asserted by current and former U.S. officials about Sheikh bin Mahfouz, his Muwafaq charity (described by the Treasury as “an al Qaeda front”), and his chosen assistant (formally designated a global terrorist under U.S. law). She took pains to warn that bin Mahfouz denies having funded terrorists. So what’s Barrister Blackburn’s suggestion? Why, she should hire a lawyer, of course.
That is, she should bankrupt herself litigating in a foreign country against a Saudi banking magnate with limitless resources, who has already demonstrated a willingness to expend hundreds of millions of dollars in his New York fraud litigation, and who has scoured the globe to find an extraordinarily friendly ear in a British judge who, The Washington Times reports, has a reputation for favoring censorship over free speech (“Battling Censorship,” July 20, 2007). Indeed, Alyssa Lappen, a fellow in Ehrenfeld’s Center for Democracy, reports that, upon being informed by bin Mahfouz’s counsel that the former CIA director R. James Woolsey had written the foreword to Ehrenfeld’s book, Judge David Eady exclaimed, “Say no more. I award you a judgment by default, and if you want, an injunction, too.” Who wouldn’t trip over himself at the opportunity to pay lawyers a fortune for the privilege of litigating in, to borrow Mr. Blackburn’s phrase, so “scrupulously fair” a forum?
Ehrenfeld did hire counsel, who