Protect the American Media–Whether They Deserve It or Not

By Andrew McCarthy
Human Events | Aug. 14, 2007

It is a hard thing to defend the American media. Even when they are right and even when they badly need defending.

In large part, that’s because press hypocrisy is so striking. Journalists demand two sets of rules: one for themselves, one for everyone else.

They claim monopoly over the dark corners where their sources and sometimes deceptive intelligence-gathering practices must be shielded from public scrutiny. Everyone else — even those upholding not the public’s dubious “right to know” but its constitutional right to life — are expected by the selfsame media to operate in the sunshine.

Now, moreover, we find the American media — those post-sovereign, Global-Village-lovin’, We Are the World-hummin’ transnational progressives — insisting that they, uniquely, must be swaddled in the majesty of enlightened American law, protected from such well-known retro-bastions as Europe and Canada which seem not to have heard of American libel law, as laid down in New York Times v. Sullivan. Naturally, the media would have the rest of us cowboy chauvinists hew to the Geneva Conventions even when they don’t apply, knock down life-saving security fences because they offend the World Court, and refrain from defending ourselves until Ban Ki Moon gives us the high-sign. We, it seems, are relegated to the glorious International Community, but when it comes to their day-to-day, the Fourth Estate prefers Love American Style, thank you very much.

Intellectually, it is not difficult to grasp that some of this asymmetry is necessary. The mind can separate the role of the press in a functioning democracy from the smugness with which modern journalists perform it. There can be no self-determination without knowledge. Period. Journalists are our eyes and ears, informing us of what we haven’t the time or resources to learn for ourselves. They obviously need to be cut some slack.

Though it’s right up my alley, I have found it very difficult to get worked into a lather over the latest treachery perfected by our friends the Saudis: The use of the International Community’s benighted libel laws to stifle American First Amendment freedoms.

International law may be a gorgeous mosaic when the media want to slap around some nettlesome conservative daring to suggest that maybe the Supreme Court shouldn’t be using other countries’ precedents to interpret U.S. legal principles. But not when journalists are hoist on their own petard. So now the media suddenly see the wisdom in letting America be America. There’s no need to evolve the First Amendment’s settled American jurisprudence. This is the media, after all. This isn’t some one-horse town seeking justice for a victim viciously murdered. For those rubes, better the Supreme Court study the law of Sierra Leone than apply settled American death penalty precedents. For really important people with really important problems, like journalists facing libel suits, who cares what Great Britain thinks when we’ve got good old press-friendly standards made right here in the U.S. of A.?

There’s a great temptation to go with poetic justice here. But it wouldn’t be justice. For journalism’s worst, it would serve them right. But it wouldn’t serve us. There are plenty of great journalists who play it straight and do extremely important work. We need the best of journalism to be able to do its job: to edify us about salient information that would otherwise remain obscure, if not affirmatively hidden by the powerful — information we need to make intelligence choices in governing ourselves.

One such choice we must make concerns the nature of our relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis claim to be our staunch ally in the war against Islamic terrorism. Nevertheless, many terrorists (including fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers) are Saudis, and, besides oil, the Kingdom’s top export is the anti-Western Wahhabist ideology that is radicalizing young Muslims throughout the world, including in the United States, which is now dotted with madrassas backed by Saudi money.

Toward that end, a few intrepid journalists and researchers, prominently including…Rachel Ehrenfeld, have scrutinized the available public record of Khalid Salim bin Mahfouz. Mahfouz is a highly influential Saudi sheikh who used to own the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia. He was up to his neck in the scandal that engulfed the infamous BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International, known to the Justice Department as the “Bank of Crooks and Criminals, Inc.”) when, in 1992, he was permitted to settle the indictment against him by paying a $225 million settlement: for him, chump change.

A few years back, Dr. Ehrenfeld, a nationally renowned expert in the field of international terrorism financing, published a book called “Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed — and How to Stop It.” (The book, re-released in an expanded version in 2005, contains a forward by former CIA director R. James Woolsey. Full disclosure: both Rachel and Jim are colleagues of mine on the Committee on the Present Danger.) In it, Ehrenfeld argues that bin Mahfouz was responsible for transferring tens of millions of dollars to accounts controlled by terrorists, including funds routed to both the International Islamic Relief Organization, branches of which have been formally designated as terrorist entities by the United States, and the Muwafaq Foundation, which, the Christian Science Monitor notes, the U.S. Treasury Department has described as “an Al-Qaeda front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen” — such as Yasin al-Qadi, its one-time leader, who was formally designated as a global terrorist in 2001. Alyssa A. Lappen, a senior fellow at Dr. Ehrenfeld’s American Center for Democracy, recounts in a [July, 2005] FrontPage Magazine piece that, in 2003, former Clinton administration counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke told the Senate Banking Committee that Muwafaq “reportedly transferred at least $3 million, on behalf of Khalid bin Mahfouz, to [Osama] bin Laden[.]”

Mahfouz and the Saudis do not want Americans reading such things. Mahfouz, however, didn’t dare take legal action in the United States. In America, the law of libel is controlled by the aforementioned New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court’s 1964 watershed. As libel experts Samuel Abady and Harvey Silverg[l]ate explained last year in the Boston Globe, Sullivan elevates the dissemination of information over concerns about private reputation. In the United States, the burden of proof is on the public figure who claims he has been defamed to show that the journalist was not merely wrong but recklessly and maliciously so. Truth, moreover, is a complete defense.

But Mahfouz is a man of the world and no stranger to its variegated legal systems, which are far less hospitable to journalists. Most prominent is the law of Great Britain, where presumptions run the opposite way. England, which has no First Amendment, puts the burden on the journalist to prove her allegations. Many times, however, journalists (like the American government they take glee in bashing) are not in a position to demonstrate the truth of their assertions to the satisfaction of courtroom proof standards. That doesn’t make what they have said any less true — they simply have witnesses who won’t come forward publicly, usually because doing so would endanger them, embarrass them, or compromise their future effectiveness.

The United Kingdom also has a very low threshold for establishing “jurisdiction,” the power of a court to entertain a lawsuit. Jurisdiction hinges on, among other things, how affected the realm in question is by the controversy. Here, though Ehrenfeld’s book was not published in the U.K., a few copies were purchased there over the Internet — quite possibly by the Saudis themselves in order to manufacture jurisdiction.

That thin reed was enough, the British courts held, to give them jurisdiction over the case. Not surprisingly, Ehrenfeld did not wish to endure the time and expense of litigating a case in a foreign country where she was unlikely to win given the stacked legal deck. When she did not answer the suit, the British court entered a default judgment in Mahfouz’s favor. The tribunal ordered Ehrenfeld to refrain from “publishing, or causing or authorising the further publication” of her assertions about Mahfouz. The legal maneuver has the effect of intimidating Ehrenfeld’s publisher and any other prospective sponsors of her work. The effect is to muzzle the Saudi critics.

This offensive lawfare strategy of “libel tourism,” as Abady and Silverg[l]ate label it, has worked spectacularly well for the Saudis. Lawsuits, of course, are incredibly expensive; Mahfouz, with a bottomless deep pocket, can afford to engage in them until the end of time. Lappen has thus catalogued a growing list of the silenced: publishers who’ve apologized, publicly retracted allegations, and removed references to Mahfouz in various books and articles after either being sued or threatened with legal action.

The most recent episode involves a book called “Alms for Jihad,” written by former relief worker J. Millard Burr and University of California academic Robert O. Collins. Mahfouz and his son threatened the publisher, Cambridge University Press, with a lawsuit. Despite being given mounds of back-up information to support their claim that the Saudis fund charities for the purpose of spreading Wahhabist Islam and radicalizing American and European Muslims, Cambridge has caved. The publisher has agreed to destroy its stock and to press distributors to pull the book from their shelves. (Since this post on August 1 by Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online, the Amazon link to the book has been discontinued.)

Dr. Ehrenfeld decided to fight rather than cave. She filed a suit against Mahfouz in the United States District Court in Manhattan, seeking a declaratory judgment that the sheikh could not prevail on a libel claim under federal and New York state law, and that the British judgment was unenforceable in America.

Mahfouz, being no fool, had not sought to execute on his British judgment in the New York — where Ehrenfeld lives and works, and where her book was published. His purpose, transparently, was intimidation — the judgment he won in Britain, about $110,000, was never the point. Had he had tried to collect on it, he would have been deemed to be doing business in New York — which would subject him to suit in the United States, where jurisdiction is not as easily established as in Britain.

The federal district court upheld Mahfouz’s claim that he was insufficiently present in New York to be sued here, notwithstanding that Mahfouz once maintained apartments in New York City; was formerly connected to entities that did business there; currently operates a website that can be accessed there; caused communications to be sent there several times to warn Ehrenfeld about the suit and inform her of its progress; sued a New York resident in a foreign country, requiring her to take several steps in New York directly because of the suit; and, Ehrenfeld contends with great force, implemented a scheme, in New York, to chill her research and writing.

Fortunately, in a crucial development on June 8, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit changed course. Finding the question whether Mahfouz is subject to suit in New York to be a close one, it employed an unusual procedure which permits a federal court to certify questions of state law to the State’s highest court: Asking the New York State Court of Appeals to weigh in on whether Mahfouz qualifies for suit under New York’s “long-arm” jurisdiction law.

Of equal significance, the federal appeals panel addressed a preliminary issue the lower court had declined to reach, ruling that Ehrenfeld’s claim is “ripe.” This means the appellate court recognized that she is already suffering concrete damage. Thus, if the state court determines that Mahfouz is personally subject to being sued, he will not be able to get the case thrown out through the sly stratagem of refraining from trying to collect on the judgment he “won” in the U.K.

Why is all this so significant? If Ehrenfeld’s suit survives, she would be able to complicate Mahfouz’s life immensely. Civil actions provide for liberal discovery by the parties. Mahfouz would be faced with a Hobson’s choice: Answer the suit and open his finances up to scrutiny; or default, which would (a) result in a judgment against him undermining his ability to operate in the United States, and (b) demonstrate to the world that, given the opportunity, he would not even try to refute the terror-financing claims made against him.

It is crucially important to our development of a sound national counterterrorism policy that good-faith journalists are not silenced by Saudi intimidation. American courts ought to crack down on Mahfouz’s pettifoggery and make him feel the consequences of his litigiousness. Congress ought to consider responsive legislation — perhaps a federal cause of action against those who use foreign courts as part of a scheme to chill free expression. Moreover, the current administration or the next one, regardless of party, should be diplomatically pressing the Saudis to desist from, and the Brits to bar libel tourism directed at, American journalists.

Whether or not the American media deserve such protections, the American people surely do.

Mr. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, directs the Center for Law & Counterterrorism at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

The Fly in the bin Mahfouz Ointment

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine | Aug. 6, 2007

U.K. libel laws and courts have been among Saudi Arabia’s most successful tools to veil its Islamic proselytization and terrorist funding. The Saudi operator is billionaire Khalid Bin Mahfouz, who has sued or threatened to sue some 36 U.S. and U.K. publishers and authors and was given default judgments in all of them.

But there is a new fly in bin Mahfouz’ Saudi ointment—an U.S. legal precedent established by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on June 8, 2007. In 2003, U.S. investigative reporter and director of the American Center for Democracy, Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, published Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed–and How to Stop It.

Among other things, Funding Evil reported bin Mahfouz’ well-documented terror funding. As always after such reports, bin Mahfouz sued Ehrenfeld for libel in Britain. In the High Court, bin Mahfouz’ attorneys informed Justice David Eady that former CIA director R. James Woolsey had written the foreword for Funding Evil. “Say no more,” declared Eady. “I award you a judgment by default, and if you want, an injunction, too.”

Justice Eady then ordered Ehrenfeld to apologize, retract, pay bin Mahfouz $225,913.37 in damages and destroy copies of her book.

A fearless U.S. citizen, published in the U.S., Ehrenfeld ignored the British default judgment. Rather than respond to false claims of libel, never tried on their merits, Ehrenfeld applied to the Southern District Court of New York to rule the U.K. court judgment unenforceable in the U.S.

On June 8, 2007, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals justices unanimously found that Ehrenfeld’s case merits hearing in an U.S. federal court–and that the case has implications for all U.S. authors and publishers, whose First Amendment rights are threatened by foreign libel rulings. Continue reading “The Fly in the bin Mahfouz Ointment”


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

Moderate and Radical Muslims: The Confused PBS View

by Alyssa A. Lappen
American Thinker | May 7, 2007

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) doesn’t want Americans to learn of radical Islam’s war against moderate Muslims, such as Danish Member of Parliament Naser Khader, who are trying to reform and transport to the 21st century a faith born (and for a great many, stuck) in the 7th century.

“If [MP Khader] becomes the Minister of Foreigners or Integration, why don’t we send out two guys to blow up him and his ministry,” Danish Imam Ahmed Akkari said while being secretly taped by France 2 journalist Mohamed Sifaoui in March 2006. Once exposed, the 29-year-old Akkari denied his threat, but later claimed on tape, “It was a joke. I was joking.” But Khader speaks Arabic, and it was no joke.

Ahmad Abu Laban, one of Akkari’s radical compatriots, knowingly stated on tape that the West gives his radical co-religionists “a margin of freedom” in which to lobby politically to impose Islamic law on Western and Danish society, and “we use it.”

Both of these radicals were taken out of commission in 2007—Akkari in an auto accident and Abu Laban died of cancer.

But a veritable army of radicals follow in their steps, as becomes clear after viewing a new 52-minute documentary, Islam versus Islamism: Voices from the Muslim Center, screened privately in New York City on May 2 and for U.S. legislators in Washington D.C. on April 25 by producers Martin Burke, Alex Alexiev and Frank Gaffney.

The radicals and their Persian Gulf backers now dominate 80% of U.S. mosques and Muslim organizations, according to Sufi leader Hisham Kabbani, whom mainstream Muslim groups blackballed for testifying to the U.S. State Department in January 1999. Continue reading “Moderate and Radical Muslims: The Confused PBS View”


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

Show Me the Money and I’ll Show You the Agenda

By Andrew Cochran
Terrorfinanceblog | April 10, 2007

I’m trying to determine why senior U.S. government officials or Congressmen continue to entrust their precious time to those with an extremist or Islamist agenda when they’re searching for “moderate Muslims” with whom to hold a dialogue. It still happens all too often, even years after the 9-11 attacks (I have another example about which to post soon). And I have to conclude that too many government officials around the world and experts are still trusting what they hear from a foreign leader or long-standing Islamist, instead of watching what they actually do. My golden rule, probably due to my experience as a CPA and consultant, is simple: see how the Islamists and their supporters (or their opponents, for that matter) spend their money, and stop trusting what they say.

Analyses of the Muslim Brotherhood illustrate this point perfectly. Douglas Farah took issue with the Foreign Affairs article by the Nixon Center’s Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke, “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood,” starting a mini-debate here and on the Nixon Center site (see Doug’s last post on it). But look at the angle each party takes in their analysis: Leiken and Brooke barely mention how MB leaders spend their money; it’s all about “expressions of confidence that it would honor democratic processes.” Yes, there is some discussion of “a painstaking educational program,” but nothing about the directions for the “big money.” To the contrary, Doug’s method is to follow the money. Everything he writes on MB, from his recent piece on Sudan to his 2006 analysis of the MB’s international financial network, focuses on the cash flow. Lorenzo Vidino explores the financial angle in his April 6 post, “The Muslim Brotherhood in Holland,” discussing how the MB has worked in Europe since World War II. Other articles in the debate break down along this fault line – see Alyssa Lappen’s response to Nick Fielding, in which she cited MB’s financial support for terrorism, while Fielding discounted or ignored such instances.

I recently mentioned to a senior Congressional staffer that “if you show me the money, I’ll show you 80% of the agenda.” He corrected me – “it’s 90%.” And he’s certainly right in the CT world, in the U.S. and abroad. Find out where a group gets it money and where it spends it, and you’ll know the group’s agenda.


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Propaganda Offensive

By Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
American Thinker | April 2, 2007

The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is heightening its U.S. propaganda offensive in advance of the 2008 presidential elections, taking advantage of the political uncertainty and opposition to the current Administration’s defense policies against radical Muslim terrorist organizations and states.

Incredibly, “Hear Out the Muslim Brotherhood,” an op-ed in the Boston Globe on Sunday March 25, portrayed the outlawed Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a reforming tool to promote democracy and stability there and throughout the Middle East, and praised the MB for “surviving” decades of oppression by previous Egyptian regimes.

However, a referendum on March 26, 2007 in Egypt banned “the creation of political parties based on religion.” The MB, the biggest opposition group boycotted the vote and later criticized the results because of low voter turnout.

The MB, which is illegal in Egypt, Libya and Syria, operates in at least 70 countries. It is busy preparing the ground to establish Islamic global dominance, successfully using Western democracy to legally inject itself into the political process, while using the free media to portray the Brothers as reformers and protesting any attempt to limit their subversive activities. Indeed, even the Wall Street Journal agrees that in Egypt the MB “has become something of a default opposition.” Criticizing Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak for the latest crackdown on the MB, the Journal declared, “Not even a modern-day Pharaoh can forbid people from gathering in mosques.” Continue reading “The Muslim Brotherhood’s Propaganda Offensive”


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

What Ails Mainstream Journalism

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 22, 2007

Why do otherwise thorough reporters lose their professional skepticism when covering the Middle East and Islam? This peculiar journalistic phenomenon has puzzled me since I began covering the Middle East and Islam, in lieu of the investigative financial reporting work I had done for most of my career. Indeed, it largely motivated my personal professional shift.

An informal conversation with a part-time journalism professor recently gave me important clues. Our professional dialogue was private; therefore, it would be a gross violation of trust to identify this person in any way, excepting to note that the professor lived and reported from the Middle East for a time and now teaches how to cover current-day religious affairs and relations at a major university.

The professor’s classes often cover reporting on the Islamic community in the U.S. today. Therefore, I was keenly interested to determine the professor’s familiarity with sacred and historical texts that motivate modern Islamic activity and dogma.

In financial reporting, it goes without saying that one cannot write a major investigative piece on a corporation, industry or economic issue without first reading a great deal. For public companies, this requires extensive review of all Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings—recent annual reports (10-Ks, or F-20s for foreign firms), quarterlies (10-Qs), and changes to business strategy (8-K) or ownership (13-D). A good sleuth also consults the filings of major competitors and customers, in addition to interviewing as many of them as possible.

Only after laying this groundwork will the thorough reporter contact executives at the subject corporation.

A similar procedure—research first, interviews later—applies to private companies. Before 1995, Fidelity Investor chairman Edward C. Johnson III (Ned Johnson) rarely if ever spoke to reporters. Therefore before requesting an interview, I read everything available on the giant money management firm—and talked to more than 140 industry analysts, consultants, competitors, former and then-current Fidelity employees, and so on. The resulting September 1995 Institutional Investor cover story was subsequently emulated by Fortune, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

Likewise, for a May 1989 Forbes report on the world’s largest private textile firm, Milliken & Co., which had never previously been profiled, before asking the secretive magnate Roger Milliken for an interview, I spent six weeks filling more than 12 notebooks with every shred of data I could gather from every available source. The late Senator Strom Thurmond, then 86, for example, sent me to Florida U.S. Representatives Sam Gibbons, who, in turn, described Milliken as “a protectionist hog, H-O-G.” And former President Richard M. Nixon replied to an interview request in writing.

Of course, not all my financial stories required so many advance interviews, but a large number did. This point is not boastful. Indeed, without intensive advance work, interviewing hard-to-get, controversial, evasive or famous sources would be wasted opportunities or completely fruitless.

Such exhaustive reportage has often helped to expose corporate, Wall Street or other financial corruption. Similarly, investigative journalists have similarly raked corrupt politicians over the coals.

But when it comes to interviewing Muslim community or religious leaders, mainstream reporters are little inclined to submit them to tough or probing questions. Frequently, the U.S. media present leaders of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Muslim American Society (MAS), Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), or Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as civil rights “activists,” “soft-spoken,” “regular guys” to be taken at face value, “moderate,” “really respected,” and so on. Continue reading “What Ails Mainstream Journalism”


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.