“Freedom from harm” is all very well, “freedom from being offended” is extremely dangerous – a way of extending the already harmful phenomenon of “libel chill” and making it freely available to every noisy lobby group. If Sir Iqbal Sacranie and co get their way on “religious hatred”, every BBC Five Live discussion on Islam will be followed by a call from an aggrieved listener and a visit from the Fulham police. And, for every Lynette Burrows, insisting she’ll continue to exercise her right to free speech, there’ll be a hundred more who keep their heads down and opt for a quiet life.
Hollywood stars are forever complaining about the “crushing of dissent” in Bush’s America, by which they mean Tim Robbins having a photo-op at the Baseball Hall of Fame cancelled because he’s become an anti-war bore. But, thanks to the First Amendment, he can say anything he likes without the forces of the state coming round to grill him. It’s in Britain and Europe where dissent is being crushed. Following the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, film directors and museum curators and all the other “brave” “transgressive” artists usually so eager to “challenge” society are voting for self-censorship: “I don’t want a knife in my chest,” explained Albert Ter Heerdt, announcing his decision to “postpone” a sequel to his hit multicultural comedy Shouf Shouf Habibi!
But who needs to knife him when across Europe the authorities are so eager to criminalise him? No society with an eye to long-term survival should make opinion a subversive activity. Here’s a thought: we should be able to discuss homosexuality, Islam and pretty much everything else in the same carefree way Guardian columnists damn Bush’s America as “neo-fascist”.
LIBEL TOURISM
Alms and the man
HOW WILL WE lose the war against “radical Islam”?
Well, it won’t be in a tank battle. Or in the Sunni Triangle or the caves of Tora Bora. It won’t be because terrorists fly three jets into the Oval Office, Buckingham Palace and the Basilica of St Peter’s on the same Tuesday morning.
The war will be lost incrementally because we are unable to reverse the ongoing radicalization of Muslim populations in South Asia, Indonesia, the Balkans, Western Europe and, yes, North America. And who’s behind that radicalization? Who funds the mosques and Islamic centers that in the last 30 years have set up shop on just about every Main Street around the planet?
For the answer, let us turn to a fascinating book called Alms For Jihad: Charity And Terrorism In The Islamic World by J Millard Burr, a former USAID relief coordinator, and the scholar Robert O Collins. Can’t find it in your local Barnes & Noble? Never mind, let’s go to Amazon. Everything’s available there. And sure enough, you’ll come through to the Alms For Jihad page and find a smattering of approving reviews from respectably torpid publications: “The most comprehensive look at the web of Islamic charities that have financed conflicts all around the world,” according to Canada’s Globe And Mail, which is like The New York Times but without the jokes.
Unfortunately, if you then try to buy Alms For Jihad, you discover that the book is “Currently unavailable. We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.” Hang on, it was only published last year. At Amazon, items are either shipped within 24 hours or, if a little more specialized, within four-to-six weeks, but not many books from 2006 are entirely unavailable with no re-stock in sight.
Well, let us cross the ocean thousands of miles from the Amazon warehouse to the High Court in London. Last week, the Cambridge University Press agreed to recall all unsold copies of Alms For Jihad and pulp them. In addition, it has asked hundreds of libraries around the world to remove the volume from their shelves. This highly unusual action was accompanied by a letter from the publishers to Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, in care of his English lawyers, explaining their reasons:
Throughout the Book there are serious and defamatory allegations about yourself and your family, alleging support for terrorism through your businesses, family and charities, and directly.
As a result of what we now know, we accept and acknowledge that all of those allegations about you and your family, businesses and charities are entirely and manifestly false.
Who is Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz? Well, he’s a very wealthy and influential Saudi. Big deal, you say. Is there any other kind? True, but even by the standards of very wealthy and influential Saudis, this guy is plugged in: He was the personal banker to the Saudi royal family and head of the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, until he sold it to the Saudi government. He has a swanky pad in London and an Irish passport and multiple US business connections, including to Thomas Kean, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission. I’m not saying the 9/11 Commission is a Saudi shell operation, merely making the banal observation that, whenever you come across a bigshot Saudi, it’s considerably less than six degrees of separation between him and the most respectable pillars of the American establishment.
As to whether allegations about support for terrorism by the Sheikh and his “family, businesses and charities” are “entirely and manifestly false”, the Cambridge University Press is going way further than the US or most foreign governments would. Of his bank’s funding of terrorism, Sheikh Mahfouz’s lawyer has said: “Like upper management at any other major banking institution, Khalid Bin Mahfouz was not, of course, aware of every wire transfer moving through the bank. Had he known of any transfers that were going to fund al-Qaida or terrorism, he would not have permitted them.” Sounds reasonable enough. Except that in this instance the Mahfouz bank was wiring money to the principal Mahfouz charity, the Muwafaq (or “Blessed Relief’”) Foundation, which in turn transferred them to Osama bin Laden.
In October 2001, the Department of the Treasury named Muwafaq as “an al-Qaeda front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen” and its chairman as a “specially designated global terrorist”. As the Treasury concluded, “Saudi businessmen have been transferring millions of dollars to bin Laden through Blessed Relief.” Indeed, this “charity” seems to have no other purpose than to fund jihad. It seeds Islamism wherever it operates. In Chechnya, it helped transform a reasonably conventional nationalist struggle into an outpost of the jihad. In the Balkans, it played a key role in replacing a traditionally moderate Islam with a form of Mitteleuropean Wahhabism. Pick a Muwafaq branch office almost anywhere on the planet and you get an interesting glimpse of the typical Saudi charity worker. The former head of its mission in Zagreb, Croatia, for example, is a guy called Ayadi Chafiq bin Muhammad. Well, he’s called that most of the time. But he has at least four aliases and residences in at least three nations (Germany, Austria and Belgium). He was named as a bin Laden financier by the US government, and disappeared from the United Kingdom shortly after 9/11.
So why would the Cambridge University Press, one of the most respected publishers on the planet, absolve Khalid bin Mahfouz, his family, his businesses and his charities to a degree that neither (to pluck at random) the US, French, Albanian, Swiss and Pakistani governments would be prepared to do?
Because English libel law overwhelmingly favors the plaintiff. And, like many other bigshot Saudis, Sheikh Mahfouz has become very adept at using foreign courts to silence American authors – in effect, using distant jurisdictions to nullify the First Amendment. He may be a wronged man, but his use of what the British call “libel chill” is designed not to vindicate his good name but to shut down the discussion. Which is why Cambridge University Press made no serious attempt to mount a defense. He’s one of the richest men on the planet, and they’re an academic publisher with very small profit margins. But, even if you’ve got a bestseller, your pockets are unlikely to be deep enough: House Of Saud, House Of Bush did boffo biz with the anti-Bush crowd in America, but there’s no British edition – because Sheikh Mahfouz had indicated he was prepared to spend what it takes to challenge it in court and Random House decided it wasn’t worth it.