It becomes wearisome

No I've not tired of blogging in the few days since I got my laptop back from the cowboys technicians who fixed it.

No, the wearisome thing is the extent to which writers with whom I am in agreement are suffering from the scrutiny of the law.

I mentioned Susan Ehrenfeld a while back- a lady who cannot publish in or visit the UK after being landed with a GBP250,000 libel order from a British judge. Ehrenfeld was just among the most vocal in a line of victims of Islamic terrorist conduit sewer suer-in-chief, Khalid bin Mahfouz.

As I mentioned below, Mark Steyn is now in the line of fire, predictably- through his Canadian publishers Macleans. I've had a read of the muslim lawyers' complaints document and they are predictably lacking in substance and long on generalities- but perhaps the law relating to "Islamophobia" is too.

Stanley Kurtz makes a valid point when he says "the anti-free-speech attacks on Steyn and Maclean’s, by Western-trained lawyers, no less, show that Steyn’s concerns about poorly assimilated Western values are more than justified."

The only problem with that is that it isn't Steyn's viewpoint- he sees such lawyers as understanding all too well the lessons of their education. I think he's right. Arguing in generalities laced with a vague scent of human rights is about the level of public discourse, and I would say not so far from the standard of legal discourse, today. The whole incitement of religious hatred thing is a vague nonsense open to abuse from day one- and so it is proving.

From not-always-quotable-Norm-

"what a lot of useless claptrap postmodernism is. For, while (as I've said) I don't know what the truth of this particular case is, one thing that's clear to everyone is that there is a truth about it: something really happened, an event took place involving Madeleine"

It's just common sense really. From an academic. Today. Talking about the Madeleine McCann case is something of a departure for me, and actually I am not going to do so here.

What happened to Madeleine was no doubt a very specific train of events which resulted in A) tragedy, and B) mystification. Any conclusions I could draw would be terribly politically incorrect and practically speaking indefensible. I do think however that our era is rich in the qualities that made Greek drama tick. I think that's a strong hint, actually.

Censorship whackamole- more upsidedownness

I tried to draw attention to the case of Susan Ehrenfeld recently- an author hounded through the UK libel courts by Islamists seeking to suppress her work, along with the work of other anti-Islamist writers. A commenter then wrote:

"what's more shocking, is that it doesn't seem to be a big story in the UK".

Too true. Yet I wonder if you have heard of a gentleman by the name of Udo Ulfkotte? He is becoming a little better known outside his native Germany following his leadership role in the anti-Islamist march planned for Sept 11th - but banned by Brussels Mayor Freddie Thielemans.

His story though is a remarkable one. And guess what Allah's little helpers have been up to in his case? Why, censorship in Germany, of course. And of an even more vicious sort than related previously.

His story is interesting on a number of fronts.

One is that it shows how a relative insider today can become an outsider following pressure from Islamists virtually overnight. His contacts in the intelligence sphere failed to help him when he was confronted by legal claims against his book, "The War In Our Cities - How Radical Islamists Undermine Germany". He could not back up his documents amid Islamist denials of their veracity. Later the tables were turned and he was accused (and acquitted) of the crime of bribing officials.

All this happened to a man on the verge of a professorship, who had been given a Civic prize by the state of Bavaria for his research against terrorism, and who has had a long and distinguished career in journalism as Foreign News Editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine

Another interesting feature is his direct contact with Islamists in Sudan and Afghanistan.

He is a thoroughly educated man, a man travelled in the Islamic world, and he speaks about things which he knows.

He may not be a perfect moral specimen, for all I know, but it is more than irritating- it is deeply worrying- that there seems to be a hyper-standard applied concerning whether those who write works critiquing Islam or Islamism deserve our support when faced with a backlash.

The rest of his story can be found here.

Libel Scandal

Yes, it's pretty shocking. So much seems to slip past the British blogosphere it's scary. I've long been suspicious about our strict libel laws, and now it seems they're being used in a meaningful way by the kind of person who'd like nothing better than to bring an end to all our laws in favour of Sharia law.

You can find out about the attempt to stifle free speech at HotAir, here and here, and Mark Steyn has an opinion piece about it today. If you want to find a copy of "Alms for Jihad" however, you may have more difficulty...

This a big story because:

A)Cambridge University press has issued a craven apology rather than stand up for a respectable book by a respectable author.

B)It's one of several such cases.

c)It's using UK law to impinge on the freedoms enjoyed by US writers and readers.

d)It's undermining national security by disengaging the public from matters which concern them, and creating an ever closer relationship between Islamist interests and the UK authorities.

"There has been with each passing day an ever-swelling cast of BBC Television staff, and BBC Radio staff, and BBC World Service staff and BBC News 24 staff and no doubt BBC Papua New Guinea Service staff, none of whom attended a moment of the trial but turned out en masse to capture live the march to the scaffold. The trial wasn’t worth sending a solitary Beeb reporter to, but the hoist to the gallows merited dozens of ’em."

Steyn on the circus which assembled at the Conrad Black trial, which ended negatively for Black and his colleagues today.

Of course I am disappointed, and the BBC are trying hard to restrain themselves now that there is a guilty verdict to clap along to. Their summary has already calculated Black's possible jail-time. But not so fast, Beeboids. I realise that winning on a majority of points doesn't help Black directly, though that's what he did. He won nine of thirteen counts in a trial of great ladle-fuls of detail- most of it obfuscatory, it has seemed to me. If one believed in the US justice system at all, one would be inclined to say, as the jury seem to have, that's there's no smoke without fire.

So in a way, given the appeal which has been announced, it's really nine down, four to go for Lord Black. Maybe a narrower range of charges will make the air clearer for his continued defence.

Legal Calculation

When I make a few remarks on the British legal system, one of the things I have to explain to the uninitiated is how numbers just mean different things in Britain. Take the case of Sheik Abdullah el-Faisal. He's the guy who preached serious hate and went to jail for a hefty nine years. four years. And now he's out and sunning himself in the Caribbean (which, after all, is what he should have stuck to).

According to the BBC at the time "The judge recommended that el-Faisal, from Stratford in east London, should serve at least half of the sentence and then be deported."

Maybe we're there now, taking into account custodial time before the trial. Or maybe we're not. And maybe that too is a point worth arguing. In any case, it's simply absurd to append the tag "nine years" when we only mean four.

But that's me naively assuming that a crime carries a price, rather than prison as being a form of social management. We're all part of that continuum.

The Big Story you haven't heard about.

The BBC is usually all over stories of violence from America, especially those with a racial dimension, like this.

Curiously enough they're not all over this story, which comes via the excellent la Shawn Barber. And saying that the US media would rather ignore it is not an excuse: Greg Dyke boasted once that the BBC covers topics too hot for the US media (he was actually talking about Iraq, but the same would be true regarding white on black crime, which would be generally referred to as race hate crime). Not on this occasion, it seems.

It made my blood boil. Swift and accurate justice would stop people such as the criminals concerned from getting as far down the line of evil callousness as to commit such crimes against the very humanity of us all.

Update: HotAir now has a barnstorming vent on the subject which pretty much says it all.

Hello again.

Black is not the conspiratorial type.

Mark Steyn is in danger of turning me into a Conrad Black trial-geek. His coverage is getting hotter and sharper by the day, as is the nature of the case. The point, however, that I have summarised above, is the Black may be an intellectual dreamer, an other-worldly oddly patriarchal figure out of his time- but he is no conspirator, whereas David Radler clearly is.

I only hope US justice is strong enough to demonstrate that, since it wasn't strong enough to prevent the abuse of Black's name and twilight years up till now. And, yes, since you ask, I am buying the Steyn line on his former boss and friend.

Dangerously Good

If you're not following the Conrad Black trial as blogged by Mark Steyn for Macleans, I strongly suggest that you do. Writing with such unpolitical perspicuity Steyn does what the great satirical writers have always done: open their opponents to ridicule while remaining scrupulously observant. I suppose none of the jury will get to read any of it, but if they did...

Sorry for my absence.

I've been really busy and then when had an hour or two a strange phenomenon of non-connectivity came over my computer. Back now.

I have been taking a few mins most days to follow Mark Steyn's coverage of the Conrad Black trial.

Following this and some of the stuff surrounding the Scooter Libby trial makes me wish America had a Dickens to follow these Jarndycian affairs. No offence to Mark Steyn, he's doing a great job, and maybe the novel is waiting until later, as it was with Dickens.