Remember when the Left was all a twitter (and I don’t mean they pontificated in 140 characters or less) about the “chill wind” descending on free speech from the Bush Administration. They let their hatred for Republicans and conservatives to transform their reason into a leather-bound fetish freak.  They should have been more concerned with a hot desert blast coming from the Arabian Peninsula in the form of libel tourism.

The Moving Picture Institute has created The Libel Tourist, a short documentary detailing Rachel Ehrenfeld’s experience with a dust storm, created by the courtroom bloviating of Islamic supremacist Khalid Bin Mafhouz, that threatens to bury the West’s freedom of speech under a mass of lawsuits. From the YouTube summary:

This documentary short film, produced by the Moving Picture Institute, shows how Saudi billionaire Khalid Bin Mafhouz exploits the British legal system and sues for libel whenever he is the subject of a terrorism accusation.

Directed by MPI fellow Jared Lapidus, the film explains how Mahfouz filed a libel suit against Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed — and How to Stop It. The suit was not filed in the United States, where the book was published and sold, but instead in London, where Mahfouz associates ordered 23 copies online. The judge ordered all copies of the book pulped, and ordered Ehrenfeld to pay the legal fees and damages, despite the fact that nothing in her book about Saudi funding of terrorism was ever disproved.

A bill is currently before Congress, the Free Speech Protection Act, designed to protect U.S.-based authors from libels lawsuits meant to stifle free expression. The American Culture generally refrains from commenting on politics per se, except as politics finds expression in the cultural influence professions. This situation, however, is a matter of some Muslim antagonists using foreign law to stifle free expression.

Share the video with your friends. Contact your Congressional representatives. Let them know you value free expression. When I visited the film’s YouTube page, The Libel Tourist had less than 30 views. That should be in the hundreds of thousands of views. This is a very real threat by people for whom liberty and freedom are curse words, if they have any meaning at all.

Libel tourism cannot be allowed to stand. If the West loses this fight, instead of a vibrant omniculture where numerous voices express a variety of ideas and opinions, we will find ourselves within a dhimmi culture where Muslim clerics decide what we hear and read.

Go to the American Center for Democracy for more information and articles by and about Rachel Ehrenfeld and her fight on behalf of freedom of speech.