Sarah Gold

Libel Tourism: Welcome to the UK

It's always refreshing to know that David Irving is alive and kicking. Remember David Irving? He’s the Holocaust denier whose biography of Goebbels was canned by St. Martin’s Press after Frank Rich wrote a scathing op-ed column ran in the New York Times.

Irving is also the prankster who sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier in her book Denying the Holocaust. He sued in the U.K., where libel laws are more favorable to plaintiffs than in the U.S.; nevertheless, his case was crushed in court by Lipstadt’s defense lawyers (as she relates in another book, History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier).

The mischievous imp is still up to his old tricks, hounding Lipstadt, according to her blog; He’s spreading false rumors, she writes, that “there is a judgment against me and that if I showed up in the UK I would be jailed.”

Is Irving a denier? In 2006 he ctually pled guilty to the charge in Austria, where Holocaust denial is banned. (I’m not advocating the banning of speech, but it is the law there.) Accord-ing to the BBC Web site, he said, “I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.” Just a little boo-boo, really. Why make a fuss?

I chanced on Lipstadt’s blog in reading up about two other recent libel cases—both against university presses—one here and one in the UK, where others have found the liberal libel law more hospitable than Irving. Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire, threatened to sue over allegations that he has funded terrorism in Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Is-lamic World, by Millard Burr and Richard Collins, from Cambridge University Press.

Sadly, Cambridge has settled the suit, agreeing to pulp unsold booksoand pay bin Mahfouz damanges and resimburse his legal costs. And, according to a New York Post article by Rachel Ehrenfeld (an expert on terror funding and also facing a lawsuit by bin Mahfouz in the UK), Cambridge “has asked more than 200 libraries worldwide to pull the work off their shelves.” Cambridge says the book’s sources have already been discredited in earlier law-suits brought by bin Mahfouz which left the press no choice but to fold.

Yale University Press fought back when KinderUSA sued in California over the book Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad,by Matthew Levitt, which calls KinderUSA a funder of terrorism.The organization, which says it supports needy Palestinian children, dropped the suit last week in the face of Yale’s tough response, filing a countersuit, according to insidehighered.com.

Many American media have reported U.S. government allegations of bin Mahfouz’s connec-tion with terroroism, but none, to my knowledge, have been sued (if I'm wrong about that, please do let me know). But in the U.K. he has brought more than 30 libel suits.

Also in the UK, as reported by Sarah Lyall in the New York Times, Craig Unger’s House of Bush : The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties, was cancelled before publication for fear of libel suits. The UK, it seems, has become a libel refuge for those who can’t  meet America’s tougher standards. The New York Sun quotes Lipstadt on this matter:" ' the Saudis were "systematically, case by case, book by book' challenging anything critical of them or anything that linked them to terrorism. She said that she could not think of any publisher that would now accept a manuscript critical of the Saudis. 'This affects not only authors but readers,' she said, adding that 'ideas are being chased out of the marketplace.' " Agreed.

Posted by Sarah Gold on August 21, 2007 | Comments (2)