Free Republic

GENEVA (Reuters) - Muslim states said on Wednesday that what they call "islamophobia" is sweeping the West and its media and demanded that the United Nations take tougher action against it. Delegates from Islamic countries, including Pakistan and Egypt, told the United Nations Human Rights Council that treatment of Muslims in Western countries amounted to racism and discrimination and must be fought. "People of Arab origin face new forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance and experience discrimination and marginalization," an Egyptian delegate said, according to a U.N. summary. And Pakistan, speaking for the 57-nation Organization...

LIBEL LAWS FORCE US NEWS OUT OF ENGLAND From The Sunday Times thelastcrusade.org By Maurice Chittenden and Steven Swinford American newspapers and magazines may stop selling copies in Britain and block access to their websites because of our draconian libel laws. An article that would be regarded as free speech in America under its constitution’s first amendment becomes actionable in the High Court in London once it is deemed to have been published here, however small the readership. Such is the UK’s reputation as a world centre for “libel tourism” that newspapers are considering whether it is still worth...

A homosexual man is suing a third national Bible publisher for "mental anguish" after he says the company published Bibles with a negative connotation toward homosexuals. Bradley LaShawn Fowler of Canton, Mich., alleges William Tyndale Publishing manipulated Scripture when it published Tyndale’s New Living Translation Holy Bible and the New Life Application Study Bible by using the term "homosexuals" in a New Testament passage, 1 Corinthians 6:9. "One Bible dictates homosexuals will not inherit the Kingdom of God, while the other is completely void on the issue altogether," Fowler wrote in a statement on his blog.

State officials are examining whether public money has been improperly used to pay for Islamic mosques on charter school campuses in Blaine and Inver Grove Heights. Chas Anderson, deputy commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Education, said officials will study Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy's (TiZA) use of state "lease aid'' grants, which were created more than a decade ago to help charter schools rent adequate facilities. "If it is subsidizing a mosque, in our view, that would be a violation of state and federal law,'' Anderson said. The probe is the latest in a series of church-vs.-state conflicts involving TiZA...

SNIPPET: "Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz died in Jeddah last Saturday." SNIPPET: "The serial libel tourist Khalid bin Mahfouz is dead. But the jihad against the West he helped fund, together with pernicious British libel tourism practices, are alive and well. Unfortunately, the U.S. government did nothing to stop his activities on either front when he was alive. Now Congress has the opportunity to reverse Mahfouz’s legacy of libel tourism. New York State, Florida and Illinois have already passed anti- libel tourism laws, and another was just passed unanimously by the California legislature." SNIPPET: "A law to protect Americans free...

A House committee held an important hearing Thursday morning on the issue of "libel tourism." That's the practice of bringing libel suits against American authors in other nations, particularly the United Kingdom, where First Amendment protections do not apply and where the burden of proof is placed on the defendant rather than on the plaintiff. Saudi Arabian businessman Khalid bin Mahfouz has brought several such lawsuits, winning a default judgment against American researcher Rachel Ehrenfeld for her book Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It, and forcing a Cambridge University Press to destroy copies of the...

Note: Video included. January 21, 2009 For hate speech -- after declining to do so last year, which means that Islamic supremacist groups in the Netherlands have kept up the pressure on lawmakers until they got the outcome they wanted. Hate speech, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, and hate speech laws are tools in the hands of the powerful that they can use to silence the powerless and crush dissent. And make no mistake: even though the Muslims in the Netherlands and elsewhere in the West present themselves as embattled victims of racism and "Islamophobia," that...

Criminalizing Criticism of Islam By ELIZABETH SAMSON FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE September 10, 2008 There are strange happenings in the world of international jurisprudence that do not bode well for the future of free speech. In an unprecedented case, a Jordanian court is prosecuting 12 Europeans in an extraterritorial attempt to silence the debate on radical Islam. The prosecutor general in Amman charged the 12 with blasphemy, demeaning Islam and Muslim feelings, and slandering and insulting the prophet Muhammad in violation of the Jordanian Penal Code. The charges are especially unusual because the alleged violations were not committed...

Lawfare: Bleeping with the Enemy - May 14, 2008 ... A healthy understanding of Islamofascism, sharia and jihad is replaced by ignorance or the Islamofascist line of a benign Islam and sharia, ...

U.S. Wary Of Small Boat Terrorism As boating season approaches, the Bush administration wants to enlist America's 80 million recreational boaters to help reduce the chances that a small boat could deliver a nuclear or radiological bomb somewhere along the 95,000 miles of U.S. coastline and inland waterways. According to an April 23 intelligence assessment obtained by The Associated Press, "The use of a small boat as a weapon is likely to remain al Qaeda's weapon of choice in the maritime environment, given its ease in arming and deploying, low cost, and record of success." While the United States...

The Islamist movement has two wings – one violent and one lawful, which can operate apart but often reinforce each other. While the violent arm attempts to silence speech by burning cars when cartoons of Mohammed are published in Denmark, the lawful arm is skillfully maneuvering within Western legal systems, both here and abroad. Islamists with financial means have launched a “legal Jihad,” filing frivolous and malicious lawsuits with the aim of abolishing public discourse critical of Islam and with the goal of establishing principles of Sharia law (strict Islamic law dating back to the 9th Century) as the governing...

New York's highest court has passed up an opportunity to protect American authors from the libel judgments of foreign courts. In a decision handed down yesterday, the Court of Appeals in Albany told a New York-based researcher that she could not use the courts here to challenge a British judgment ordering her to pay 30,000 British pounds — more than $60,000 — for defaming a Saudi billionaire. The case was a test of how New York's courts will respond to concerns that the First Amendment rights of American authors are undermined by libel judgments imposed abroad, especially in Britain. Libel...

It has become popular for those with competing political agendas to allege threats to free speech, whether real or imagined. Yet, there is a very real threat to free speech that has received little attention in the public sphere. It's called libel tourism and it has become a major component in the ideological arm of the war on terrorism. At question is the publication of books and other writings that seek to shed light on the financing of Islamic terrorism. Increasingly, American authors who dare enter this territory are finding themselves at risk of being sued for libel in the...