From the Editor

AFSI’s Man of the Year Award

While Time names Vladimir Putin “Person of the year” (as Gary Kasparov points out, Time insists this involves no value judgment but it will be trumpeted in Russia as an endorsement of Putin’s policies), we at AFSI give our Man of the Year award to two courageous men: Daniel Pipes and John Bolton.

No one has elucidated as clearly and consistently the dangers of the misnamed “peace process” as Daniel Pipes or been so courageous in championing Israel in those bastions of anti-Israel conformity, our universities. Of those who have played an important role in the Bush administration, John Bolton stands out for articulating the dangers Islam now poses to the West and Israel. Most recently he has taken on the NIE report on Iran’s nuclear program, pointing out that it purveys policy biases as “intelligence judgments” opening “the way to Iran to achieve its military nuclear ambitions in an essentially unmolested fashion, to the detriment of us all.”

Against Nature

The average American recognizes that Islam, despite President Bush’s repeated pronouncements, is not a religion of peace. But what is increasingly apparent is that Islam today fosters among some of its adherents what most people on this planet would consider unnatural behavior. To strangle your own 16 year old daughter, because she fails to wear a hijab in class at her Applewood Heights school in Canada? To booby trap an infant in order to murder Benazir Bhutto? It was Bhutto’s concern for the infant that saved her own life—she says that she did not take the baby in her arms because she was fearful of harm to the child as it was being handed from person to person to reach her. Of course that did not save the infant or the others blown up nearby. These are only especially egregious examples of behavior by those prepared to violate every canon of “natural law” in the name of Islam.

Free Speech on Trial

Columnist Mark Steyn, along with Maclean’s, Canada’s best-selling magazine, are being hauled before not one but two modern equivalents of the medieval Star Chamber, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Maclean’s “crime” is publishing a chapter from Steyn’s book America Alone. The book documents the demographic collapse of Europe and the rise of its Islamic population, both such obvious facts that chronicling them does not merit the name of “opinion.” Nonetheless five Moslem law school students, sponsored by the Canadian Islamic Congress, demand Maclean’s be punished for spreading “hatred and contempt” for Moslems.

Given how brilliant, funny and quick on his feet Steyn is, he should have no trouble making hash of the complaint (if he is allowed to speak). Of course, this is not to say the human rights commissioners will be swayed—as David Warren notes in the Ottawa Citizen they are a “committee of smug, leftwing, humourless, jargon-blathering adjudicators” empowered to “make up the law as they go along and impose penalties restricted only by their grimly limited imaginations –such as ruinous fines and lifetime ‘cease and desist’ orders, such that, if you ever open your mouth again on a given topic, you stand to go to prison.”

Alas, although the title of Steyn’s book suggests its theme—that the U.S. is the best hope for sustaining Western values—political correctness and dhimmi-wittedness is stifling free speech here as well, most obviously on campus but in other venues as well: for example the New York Post notes that New York City has a human rights panel that seeks to stamp out “anything deemed too politically incorrect.”

Libel Tourism Wins a Round

Speaking of suppressing free speech, the New York State Court of Appeals refused to uphold the First Amendment rights of Rachel Ehrenfeld. As we noted in Outpost (July/August 2007) Saudi billionaire Khaled bin Mahfouz had obtained a default judgment for libel against Ehrenfeld in Britain on the ground that her book Funding Evil referred to his financial backing of organizations with ties to terrorism. Because English libel law is much more friendly to plaintiffs, and Saudis, awash in cash, can easily sue (while their targets lack funds for international suits), “libel tourism” is flourishing, with American authors sued in English courts over books or articles published in America. Ehrenfeld asked the New York Court of Appeals to rule the British judgment against her was unenforceable under the First Amendment. Avoiding the free speech issue, the Court of Appeals has now ruled against her on technical grounds, saying it lacked jurisdiction over Mahfouz. (The British courts were not bothered that they lacked jurisdiction over Ehrenfeld whose book had not been published or distributed in (continued on page 12)
(From The Editor: continued from page 2)
England–a handful of books had reached Britain through purchases on Amazon.)

All is not yet lost. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out that the federal court panel that sent the case to the New York state court in June made clear that it maintained jurisdiction to deal with any issues that remained after the state court ruled. Nonetheless, McCarthy says it is essential that Congress enact a law establishing a federal cause of action for this kind of intimidation so Saudis can’t game the system “by traveling to England to sue Americans but then claim Americans can’t touch them in America. If our courts won’t protect us from this kind of nonsense, our laws must—especially when the deprivation involved is something as fundamental as free speech.”

Munich-style Giveaways

Julia Gorin notes that in Bush’s final year, we’re seeing a repeat performance of Clinton’s last year—with the targets again both Israel and Kosovo.

Gorin writes: “Recall that heading into his final year in office, Bill Clinton launched a war against the Serbs on behalf of Albanians, to be able to say that his administration ‘did something.’ Then, Clinton’s final year—2000—saw a desperate Clinton-Albright attempt to achieve a last minute peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, with Albright announcing, ‘We’re going to have a deal no matter what’…. In poetically parallel timing, what Bill Clinton started in his second-to-last year in office is being completed by Bush in his own second-to-last year in office eight years later: the creation of a jihadist mafia drug-cartel state, otherwise known as an independent Kosovo. As well, in Clinton-Albright-style desperation, Bush and Condoleezza Rice have decided to just ’do something’ in the Middle East via the Annapolis conference this week, further paving the way for Israel’s demise.

“The question emerges: Why are Albanian Muslims entitled to two states, while Jews aren’t entitled even to one.”

Freeing Terrorists

We have often pointed out that Israel’s repeated mass releases of Arab terrorists as “good will” gestures are in fact death sentences on her own citizens. Now we have some numbers. Almagor, the organization representing the victims of Palestinian Arab terrorism, has issued its report: the Israeli government has sentenced to death a minimum of 177 Israelis who have been murdered by released terrorists.