Libel Tourism: Silencing Scholarly Work on the Middle East

by Cinnamon Stillwell
Wed, 29 Aug 2007

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I have a new column at SFGate.com, the online arm of the San Francisco Chronicle, on the worrisome trend of "libel tourism" and how it's impacting various university publishing houses and, by extension, scholarly work on the Middle East. Authors who have written about international terrorist financing have been finding themselves on the receiving end of libel lawsuits, the bulk of which are filed through the plaintiff-friendly British court system. And, in some cases, these voices are being effectively silenced.

Campus Watch has been following the case of Alms for Jihad, which involves Cambridge University Press and co-author UC Santa Barbara professor emeritus of history Robert O. Collins, for some time now. To read more about this case, and those involving Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld's Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed -- And How to Stop It and Matthew Levitt's Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, read "Libel Tourism: Where Terrorism and Censorship Meet."

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