I neglected to post this on the 20th, when this news broke. This will undoubtedly encourage more libel tourism of this sort.

Publisher's Weekly: The New York Court of Appeals has denied a bid by author Rachel Ehrenfeld to have a U.S. court declare a libel judgment issued against her in the U.K. unenforceable in America. Ehrenfeld filed her suit after Saudi businessman Khalid Salim Bin Mahfouz sued her in the U.K., charging that her 2003 book, Funding Evil, libeled him by asserting that Mahfouz has provided monetary support for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. In December 2004, a U.K. court ruled for Mahfouz even though the book, published in the U.S. by Bonus Books, was never released in the U.K. In addition to monetary damages, the U.K. court ruled that the book could not be published in the U.K. and that Ehrenfeld owed Mahfouz an apology.

In an effort to blunt the impact of the ruling, Ehrenfeld filed suit in 2005 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York asking the court to issue a declaratory judgment that the U.K. libel ruling was uneforceable in the U.S. The court dismissed her claim on the grounds that it did not have jurisdiction to issue such an injunction. Ehrenfeld appealed, claiming that by “purposefully projected himself into the state to further a ‘foreign litigation scheme’ designed to chill [Ehrenfeld’s] speech” he was doing business in New York and thus fell under the state’s “long-arm” statute.

In today’s ruling, the New York Appeals Court found that Mahfouz’s actions did not fall under the long-arm statute and agreed with Mahfouz that the U.S. courts do not have jurisdiction to declare the U.K. verdict uneforceable in the U.S. In its decision, the court noted that it was not ruling on the propriety of English libel law, but only on the question of whether Mahfouz’s action “establish a proper basis for jurisdiction” for Ehrenfeld’s suit to go forward.

Judy Platt, staff director for the AAP’s Freedom to Read committee, said the AAP was “deeply disappointed” by the ruling. The AAP, along with several other organizations and companies, had filed a friend of the court brief in support of Ehrenfeld. The Mahfouz case, Platt noted, is a primary explain of libel tourism in which people who feel they have been libeled in books published in the U.S. file suit in other countries with weak libel laws. Despite the U.K. ruling, Ehrenfeld has not paid any damages. Bonus publisher Jeff Stern said the company stands behind Ehrenfeld and her book, which remains in print in the U.S.

MEMRI Blog: It was announced today that the Turkish food giant Ulker purchased the world-known luxury chocolate Godiva from Campbell Soup Co. for 850 million dollars, against competition by Nestle, Mars and Starbucks. Godiva that is considered to be the first among boutique chocolate brands was started by Joseph Drabs in Belgium in 1926 and was sold in 1972 to Campbell Soup Group. This is the first time a Turkish company has acquired a global brand that is sold in boutiques in over 80 countries.

PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been Ulker’s distributor in Istanbul for many years, since before he became Istanbul’s mayor. He cut his business ties with Ulker and transferred his interests to his son Burak Erdogan when he became prime minister in 2003.

Ulker that is considered by some to be an Islamic enterprise, began by baking cookies 62 years ago, and now is worth 7 billion dollars. The group has about 40 companies that manufacture hundreds of food items, including famous coffee brands and the popular Cola Turka that was launched in 2003. Ulker manufactures in seven countries, including Khazakistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Romania. A biscuit factory will open in Egypt in 2008 that will export to African markets.

Already a regional giant, Ulker is going global with the recent purchase of Godiva.

The Qur'an does not say: Leave the Infidels a state of their own, as long as it is hopelessly tiny and they are essentially indefensible. It does not say: Go ahead, make a permanent peace with Infidels that will last forever. It does not say: You need not spread Islam everywhere until it everywhere dominates and Muslims rule everywhere.

It says: You have a duty as a Muslim to spread Islam, to remove all barriers to the spread of Islam, whether they are barriers set up by armies of the Infidels, or barriers that their institutions, political and legal, may pose to the spread of Islam. It says: you, the Believers, are in a state of permanent war with the Infidels, and the only acceptable outcome is for you, the Believers, to win so that Islam dominates the entire globe, and all the lands come under the sway of Islam. It says, or rather Muhammad himself says: War is deception. It says, or rather Muhammad himself offers the example in his own treaty with the Meccans in 628 A.D. (the treaty of Al-Hudaibiyyah) which was to last about ten years, and which he violated, on a pretext, after 18 months, when he felt that his side had become sufficiently strong to defeat the Meccans, that you can sign a "hudna" to last a maximum period of ten years (which can, under certain conditions, if the Muslims are still to weak to attack, be renewed), but must never consider that you have made a permanent peace with the Unbelievers, the Infidels. That is not possible.

And this has been written about so often, by Muslims and by non-Muslim scholars alike (those who were not apologists, but real scholars -- those who worked, as Western Orientalists, roughly in the century between 1860 and 1960, before the Great Inhibition set in, and MESA Nostrans took over and obtained a near monopoly on, the teaching and research on Islam in the Western world -- a monopoly that has only recently been revealed, discussed, mocked, analyzed, and is now too blatant to avoid coming undone, and its participants held up for public inspection, ridicule, disgust, and fury).

But still those who presume to instruct and protect us, in the governments of the West, and that includes those in the Bush Administration, think they can continue to make policies in Iraq, in Afghanistan, towards Saudi Arabia and its malign role and use of the Money Weapon without understanding Islam. And of course Europe does nothing about  the demographic conquest that Muslims keep talking about, but Western leaders keep ignoring even if those they presume to guide are becoming more aware, and consequently more anxious. Of course those policies designed to "solve" (an absurd word, an absurd idea) the "Israel-Palestine" or "Arab-Israeli" "problem" will fail because the problem is simply that Jihad is being waged and will always be waged on Israel by the Arab Muslims, for they cannot accept, never ever, the permanence of an Infidel nation-state, and they are divided, when they are divided, not on ultimate goals but on tactics and timing. The Fast Jihadists of Hamas are the uncompromising true Believers who don't want to extemporize or delay; the Slow Jihadists of Fatah realize that they must proceed in stages, and furthermore, their corrupt leaders, former henchmen of Arafat, want to get that Infidel aid flowing fast, so they themselves can again pocket a good deal of it, just as they, but especially Arafat himself, did in the good old days. And the Americans and Europeans, innocent of Islam, willfully so, are only too eager to oblige. Rice and the rest are champing at the bit.

From  the snippet of "A Christmas Carol" posted below :

Bob Cratchit:  "I am behind my times, sir."

Scrooge: "You are indeed."

And so is NER. 

NER is behind the times, and ahead of them.

Help us.

Contributions are tax-deductible.

at Dicken's World in Rochester.

A sufficient-unto-the-day Israeli leader would have to be both capable of learning about the reasons for the Arab war on Israel and unafraid to do so. That means not only studying the texts and tenets, but coming to understand how those texts are received as the literal word of God by the masses of Muslims (and it is the masses, and not the de-rigueur "Palestinian friends in Jerusalem" that the amos-ozzes and edward-grossmans rely on for their view of geopolitical reality.

Two Israeli students of Islam at Hebrew University-- Moshe Sharon and Raphael Israeli -- have written keenly about Islam and the war on Israel. A curious and intelligent would-be Israeli leader would not only read what they have written, but make others in his entourage thoroughly assimilate the same material. And then, on the basis of that understanding, such a would-be leader would force the issue: the issue of the Slow Jihadists and the Fast Jihadists, and of the folly of seeking, as the Americans seek, a "solution" to what is not a "problem" to be solved but a situation to be permanently managed. The same thing -- not a problem to be solved but a situation to be managed -- can now be seen in Infidel lands other than permanently-threatened Israel: in the countries of Western Europe, for example.

The more the Israelis understand the situation, the more they will be able to help other Infidels to grasp the meaning, and menace for themselves, of Islam.

All over the Western world the leaders have mostly proven inadequate to the task. Here and there, however, one finds glimmers of understanding. It's a race. Do enough of those in the Infidel lands figure out what Jihad is, and what the most effective instruments of Jihad are, in time to do what they need to do to most effectively counter the Jihad and weaken the Camp of Islam -- not by bringing toys and good things to eat to Muslim boys and girls on the other side of the mountain, in I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can fashion (as in Iraq today, with the squandering of American money, men, matériel, and morale both civilian and military)-- but by intelligently recognizing, and then exploiting, the pre-existing fissures within the Camp of Islam. In Iraq that means the sectarian (Shi'a and Sunni) and ethnic (Arab and Kurd) fissures; the best way for the Americans to exploit them is to stop doing so much to prevent them, but instead to withdraw, and allow Islamic nature to take its course, with what happens in Iraq making its slow-motion way through the Islamic world. The Kurdish example, especially if they hold off the Arabs and obtain full independence (and get to keep the northern oilfields) could conceivably inspire other non-Arabs, such as the Berbers. The transfer of power from the Sunnis (Ba'athism in Iraq was merely a cover for a Sunni despotism, as in Syria Ba'athism is a cover for an Alawite despotism) to the Shi'a in Iraq likely would cause difficulties between Shi'a and Sunnis in Bahrain, eastern (Al-Hasa) Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Lebanon, Pakistan, and even between different groups of Muslims now in Infidel lands.

Israel's cause is not hopeless. But it will become hopeless, and so will that of the West, if those who presume to protect and instruct their peoples refuse to learn about Islam. That is the minimum demand that must be made. Whether they will then prove adequate to the task of dividing and demoralizing, and keeping constantly off-balance, the Camp of Islam, working to diminish its oil revenues, its campaigns of Da'wa, its presence in the West, its appeal to the psychically and economically marginal in that same West -- is another matter, and many "know about Islam" without having the wit or intelligence to figure out what can and should be done.

But if they read around in the Archives of this website, and know where else to look, they may find that much of that task has already been performed. They need only take that stuff, rewrite the same contents and glossily reprint it as their own, as coming from some prestigious think-tank with such words as "strategic" and "international" in their self-description, and they'll be off like gangbusters. How many millions the Pentagon will pay them for such repackaging, how many column-inches will be solemnly devoted to their "recommendations as to how to defeat Jihadists" or "weaken Islam," how many admiring columns will be written about these well-paid consultants, these "tough-minded realists," is anyone's guess.

But just as long as they copy it all out correctly. I hate mental typos.