Ayoon Wa Azan ( The Accusation Must Be Airtight ).

Byline: Jihad El-Khazen

I want to take the reader back to the year 2004, when Mr. Khalid bin Mahfouz, the former executive manager of the Saudi National Commercial Bank (NCB), filed a lawsuit against an American writer who had accused him of funding Al-Qaeda prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Mr. Bin Mahfouz won the case against Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of the book "Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It", and although the book was not offered for sale in any British bookstore, it was sold over the internet and was available through other means of distribution.

A British court ruled in favour of the wealthy plaintiff in the summer of 2007, causing a storm of controversy over "Libel Tourism" that has yet to settle. This culminated with the U.S House of Representatives passing the bill introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen, in a seemingly unanimous vote. According to Cohen, the aim of this bill is to prevent the abuse of defamation laws in England and other countries, which do not provide as wide a protection of the freedom of speech as that provided by the First Amendment to the United States constitution.

The First Amendment is one of 27 amendments to the United States Bill of Rights. It prohibits federal legislators from making laws that respect an establishment of religion or that prohibit the free exercise of religion, laws that infringe the freedom of speech, infringe the freedom of the press, limit the right to peaceably assemble, or limit the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances...

This is all eloquently expressed, but the First Amendment does not tolerate lies, particularly if the results are devastating to the slandered party. In this respect, Ehrenfeld's book claimed that Mr. Bin Mahfouz deposited tens of millions of dollars in London and New York directly into terrorist accounts and transferred some 74 million dollars to Islamic charities, one of which was managed by a man designated by the U.S. authorities as a terrorist. If this were true, this would

have meant life imprisonment for Mr. Bin Mahfouz.

Why did the author then, choose not to defend herself in the British court? Obviously, it was because she realized that she cannot win the case. She needed to prove that her defamatory allegations were substantially true, since both God's and Man's laws state that the onus of proof is on the accuser.

I pause here to say that in addition to all wars, big and small, known to the Arabs in recent years, there is an even more vicious war taking place and which has received little attention. This is the war of Israel and its lobbyists as well as the Likudniks in the United States, against the "Financing of Terrorism". I would support this expression one hundred percent if it was directed at the terrorism of Al Qaeda alone, but it happens to also include Hezbollah and the Palestinian resistance factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. These are national liberation movements struggling against Israeli terrorism, which has been supported by all successive U.S. administrations. We hope that the current administration, however, will stop supporting Israeli terrorism.

Ehrenfeld's book was neither a solitary nor a fleeting effort, as there are many Likudniks who regularly write and enter and leave the American administration with the only goal of combating the national liberation movements fighting against Israel. They usually place Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and the resistance factions in one basket, when what they should do is place Al Qaeda and Israel in the basket of terrorism, and Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the basket of legitimate resistance.

Thus it came to pass that these events unfolded until we reached the year 2009. After Steve Cohen's Bill in the House of Representatives, Senators Peter King, Arlen Specter and Joseph Lieberman followed suit in the Senate, forming a congressional committee to single out "ridiculous lawsuits" permitted in London and that foreign individuals are using as a scheme to intimidate authors and publishers.

It is not a coincidence that the U.S. campaign against laws drafted by the mother of all parliaments in London is being led by known Likudniks, such as Specter and Lieberman, who represent Israel in the U.S. Congress more than they represent their own country, and try to protect Israel's interests at the expense of every other interest.

When Mr. Bin Mahfouz won the case against Ehrenfeld, I wrote a column about this. An exchange of emails ensued between me and Mr. Samuel Abady, who is a constitutional rights lawyer and a US law professor. In one of his emails he mentioned that he is a Jew of Middle Eastern extraction, and that his paternal grandfather was born in Beirut.

We were mostly not in agreement, since he considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization, and I consider Israel a terrorist state, but he was kind and polite in our exchanges, and I benefited from his knowledge of the law, his ability to compare issues, and his many examples of cases involving the freedom of speech and its protection.

He recommended that I read an article he had written along with Harvey Silverglate published in the Boston Globe on 7/11/2006.

The article concludes with this quote by the late Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis: "Freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth"

Truth is the keyword in the above statement; if a man is going to be accused of practicing or supporting terrorism, this accusation must be airtight as it will ruin the accused if proven.

2009 Media Communications Group

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