Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Follow-Up: Alms for Jihad

To this and this.

From this source (emphases mine):

Here’s a story with huge implications for freedom of speech (all negative), and it’s apparently gone almost entirely unreported in the mainstream press. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), under threat of a law suit, Cambridge University Press has just agreed to pulp all unsold copies of the 2006 book, Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World. According to the Chronicle, this is the fourth such book on terrorism funding to be pursued by a libel action. The Chronicle quotes Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center for Democracy, whose own book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed–and How to Stop It is one of the four books.

In an interview on Monday, Ms. Ehrenfeld characterized as "despicable" Cambridge's decision to settle this week, a move the press has defended as necessary and just. Ms. Ehrenfeld, who is a friend of Mr. Burr's [one of the authors of Alms for Jihad], said that, as she understands it, press officials "caved immediately."

"They didn't even consider the evidence that the authors had given them," she said. "They received a threatening letter, and they immediately caved in and said, Do whatever it takes. Pay them whatever they want. Ban the book, destroy the book, we don't want this lawsuit."


Go HERE for internal links.

So, was there an actual law suit or the THREAT of one? If the latter, then legal discovery and consideration of the evidence in the book were not involved.

2 comments:

Epaminondas said...

My understanding is that there was a DEFAULT judgment, i.e. they did not resist by legal defense in a court hearing, or they, by not showing up, defaulted the claim.

And no doubt, there are some, many, a majority of professors there who feel George Bush creating fascism in the USA ...it's breathtakingly reprehensible for a university of size, wealth and prestige

Dag said...

One reasonable solution is to locate a copy of the books in question and then scan them onto the Internet.

If it's possible to create sympathy for a book like The Satanic Verses then it should be possible to create some as well for the four books in question above.

To make this a reasonable proposition, I suggest one lock the entry and require a payment per view. If it's worth paying for then it must be valuable. Make it exclusive and dangerous, and then it will attract the kind of attention this problem deserves.