Tonight we’ll have on author, columnist, scholar and all-around anti-terrorism expert Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld on with us.  Dr. Ehrenfeld has been in the headlines recently when a Saudi named Khalid bin Mahfouz, allegedly a support of Islamic jihad, sued her for libel based on the fact that 23 copies of her book Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It were purchased over the internet by Britons.

Mahfouz has actually been successful in getting several books about terrorist funding pulled from publication in the past, and Dr. Ehrenfeld is just one of his targets.  Here is an excerpt from a recent San Francisco Chronicle article on Dr. Ehrenfeld’s legal bout with Mahfouz:

..."Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed—And How to Stop It”, was also targeted by bin Mahfouz through the British court system. Bin Mahfouz sued Ehrenfeld for libel in 2004, soon after her book’s publication in the United States, even though only 23 copies ever made it to the United Kingdom.

Ehrenfeld would not, as she put it in the New York Post, “acknowledge a British court’s jurisdiction over a book published here” and a trial was never held, but the court ruled in favor of bin Mahfouz by default. It also awarded bin Mahfouz $225,913 in damages and ordered Ehrenfeld to apologize publicly and to destroy all unsold copies of the book.

Instead, Ehrenfeld chose to fight back. No doubt aware of the larger implications at work, she took her case to the United States and, giving bin Mahfouz a taste of his own medicine, sued him in a New York federal court on the basis that “his English default judgment is unenforceable in the United States and repugnant to the First Amendment.”

Civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate has described her case as “one of the most important First Amendment cases in the past 25 years” and sure enough, in June of this year, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that it deserved a hearing. The court will begin hearing arguments this fall in what could turn out to be a pivotal case involving the clash between First Amendment rights and foreign libel rulings.

Here’s a brief biography of Dr. Ehrenfeld from her Wikipedia entry:

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the American Center for Democracy (http://www.acdemocracy.org) and an author who writes on terrorism and corruption-related topics. She has lectured on these issues in many countries, and has advised banking communities, law enforcement agencies, and governments, including the U.S. Defense Department’s Threat Reduction Agency. She testified before the European Parliament on how the Palestinian Authority uses aid money to fund its terror activities, provided evidence to the British Parliament on the corruption of the PA, and testified before the U.S. Congress on terrorism related issues. She currently works on issues related to the Financial and Economic Jihad against America and the West.

Dr. Ehrenfeld’s articles appear in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, National Review, the Eurobserver, The Jerusalem Post, the New York Sun, and the Los Angeles Times. She has appeared as a commentator on television and radio news programs, including The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News, CNN, ABC, NBC, and MSNBC. She is also a contributing expert on the Terror Finance Blog

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