Excellent two-part article at Politcal Mavens by Boston College professor Dennis Hale, one of the seventeen defendants sued by the Islamic Society of Boston. He writes about his experience of being sued and offers some advice. Excerpt from Part 1:
"In October of 2005, I received formal notice that I was being sued for defamation by the Islamic Society of Boston. The ISB, with headquarters in Cambridge, was planning to build the largest Islamic center in the Northeast, on land that it had purchased from the Boston Redevelopment Authority for a substantial discount — despite numerous reports in the press about the links between ISB officials and militant Islamic groups such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as their preaching of anti-Semitism. I was part of a group – Citizens for Peace and Tolerance – that had attempted to get the city to reexamine its partnership with the ISB; my “defamation” consisted of making statements about the ISB for which there was a wealth of documentary evidence."
".... On May 29, 2007, the ISB dropped its lawsuit, roughly a year-and-a-half after it was filed. None of the defendants had to apologize or pay any money. In the months before the ISB decided to abandon its claims against us, the discovery process – often the worst part of a protracted civil litigation – was uncovering even more disturbing facts about the ISB than we had previously known: multiple out-of-state bank accounts; millions of dollars in subsidies from Saudi Arabia; a close connection to imprisoned terrorist Abdurhaman Alamoudi and Muslim Brotherhood “spiritual director” Yusef Quaradawi; donations to the Holy Land Foundation; and more. We had said that the ISB’s leaders were not the moderate Muslims they were pretending to be. The discovery process was proving that we were more right than we knew. "
"Unfortunately, the end of the lawsuit did not mean the end of the story. The men who sued us are still in control of the ISB, and in the days after the lawsuit ended, they went public with their longstanding connection to the Muslim American Society, which is the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The largest Islamic center in the northeast will thus continue to be what it was from the beginning: a center for the promotion of the intolerant religious ideology of the Wahabbi clerics, and the fascist political ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, right in the heart of Boston, with the assistance of the city’s taxpayers."
You can read the rest of Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
My orevious postings on the ISB lawsuit can be found here.
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