In August 2007, Hot Air reported on How one wealthy jihad supporter is using UK courts to kill American free speech

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this story. The Chronicle of Higher Education .. on Wednesday published an article about Khalid bin Mafouz, a wealthy Saudi banker, and his successful effort to persuade the Cambridge University Press to halt the publication of four books that detail how Saudi citizens use their wealth to finance global terrorism. One of those books, Alms for Jihad, was once on sale at Amazon and elsewhere, but it has been pulled from sale and copies of it are now being pulped. Cambridge has even sent out letters to libraries that stock it and the other three books, asking for their return so that they too can be pulped, meaning they will soon disappear, burying the details they contain on how terrorism finance works and who is behind it.

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld of the American Center for Democracy is one of the authors whose books have been subject to judicial attack by Khalid bin Mafouz. I interviewed her about the case of the censorious jihad financier, and Cambridge Press’ cowardly capitulation to him. She is the author of Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It. She is the only author to date who is fighting back.

Mark Steyn also focused on the Saudi Jihad against free speech in his article "The vanishing jihad exposés"

How will we lose the war against "radical Islam"?

Well, it won't be in a tank battle. Or in the Sunni Triangle or the caves of Bora Bora. It won't be because terrorists fly three jets into the Oval Office, Buckingham Palace and the Basilica of St Peter's on the same Tuesday morning.

The war will be lost incrementally because we are unable to reverse the ongoing radicalization of Muslim populations in South Asia, Indonesia, the Balkans, Western Europe and, yes, North America. And who's behind that radicalization? Who funds the mosques and Islamic centers that in the past 30 years have set up shop on just about every Main Street around the planet?...

...Unfortunately, if you then try to buy "Alms for Jihad," you discover that the book is "Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock." Hang on, it was only published last year. At Amazon, items are either shipped within 24 hours or, if a little more specialized, within four to six weeks, but not many books from 2006 are entirely unavailable with no restock in sight.

Well, let us cross the ocean, thousands of miles from the Amazon warehouse, to the High Court in London. Last week, the Cambridge University Press agreed to recall all unsold copies of "Alms for Jihad" and pulp them. In addition, it has asked hundreds of libraries around the world to remove the volume from their shelves. This highly unusual action was accompanied by a letter to Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, in care of his English lawyers, explaining their reasons:

"Throughout the book there are serious and defamatory allegations about yourself and your family, alleging support for terrorism through your businesses, family and charities, and directly.

"As a result of what we now know, we accept and acknowledge that all of those allegations about you and your family, businesses and charities are entirely and manifestly false."

Who is Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz? Well, he's a very wealthy and influential Saudi. Big deal, you say. Is there any other kind? Yes, but even by the standards of very wealthy and influential Saudis, this guy is plugged in: He was the personal banker to the Saudi royal family and head of the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, until he sold it to the Saudi government. He has a swanky pad in London and an Irish passport and multiple U.S. business connections, including to Thomas Kean, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission.

I'm not saying the 9/11 Commission is a Saudi shell operation, merely making the observation that, whenever you come across a big-shot Saudi, it's considerably less than six degrees of separation between him and the most respectable pillars of the American establishment.

As to whether allegations about support for terrorism by the sheikh and his "family, businesses and charities" are "entirely and manifestly false," the Cambridge University Press is going way further than the United States or most foreign governments would. Of his bank's funding of terrorism, Sheikh Mahfouz's lawyer has said: "Like upper management at any other major banking institution, Khalid Bin Mahfouz was not, of course, aware of every wire transfer moving through the bank. Had he known of any transfers that were going to fund al-Qaida or terrorism, he would not have permitted them." Sounds reasonable enough. Except that in this instance the Mahfouz bank was wiring money to the principal Mahfouz charity, the Muwafaq (or "Blessed Relief") Foundation, which in turn transferred them to Osama bin Laden.

In October 2001, the Treasury Department named Muwafaq as "an al-Qaida front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen" and its chairman as a "specially designated global terrorist." As the Treasury concluded, "Saudi businessmen have been transferring millions of dollars to bin Laden through Blessed Relief."

Indeed, this "charity" seems to have no other purpose than to fund jihad. It seeds Islamism wherever it operates. In Chechnya, it helped transform a reasonably conventional nationalist struggle into an outpost of the jihad. In the Balkans, it played a key role in replacing a traditionally moderate Islam with a form of Mitteleuropean Wahhabism. Pick a Muwafaq branch office almost anywhere on the planet and you get an interesting glimpse of the typical Saudi charity worker...

...We've gotten used to one-way multiculturalism: The world accepts that you can't open an Episcopal or Congregational church in Jeddah or Riyadh, but every week the Saudis can open radical mosques and madrassahs and pro-Saudi think-tanks in London and Toronto and Dearborn, Mich., and Falls Church, Va. And their global reach extends a little further day by day, inch by inch, in the lengthening shadows, as the lights go out one by one around the world.

Suppose you've got a manuscript about the Saudis. Where are you going to shop it? Think Cambridge University Press will be publishing anything anytime soon?

The anglosphere's media and the publishing world showed where they "stood" during the Danish cartoon crisis, when they basically laid down and apologetically peed all over themselves in reaction to the Muslim world's alpha dog behavior. Those anti-cartoon riots were organized and paid for by wealthy Saudis like bin Mahfouz.

Those anti-free speech Sauds also took a few potshots at the blogosphere.

But why are the Saudis going through all this trouble? As Steyn and many others note, the US government already knows about these saudi shenanigans and other acts of war. They know and they don't care. They cover it up, and they continue to insult our intelligence by claiming that the Sauds are our "allies and strategic partners". Republicans and Democrats have been selling us this bullshit for decades.

Since the government already knows that these wealthy Sauds support terror, why are our Wahhabi "allies" spending so much time and money trying to hide the truth?

Could it be that they actually care about, and worry about what the average American or Englishman thinks? Do they truly believe that we common folks can actually influence the actions of our government?

If they do, then in their own strange way, these Sauds may have more respect for the power of free speech than our own government does. They have more faith in Joe Sixpack's ability to influence the course of the world than our own politicians, academics, media hacks or state department trough-feeders.

We can't let this time and effort go to waste, so let's pay some attention to the facts that our wealthy wahhabi patrons are working so hard to hide. Buy this book * - and read it. Do a google search for the googolplex of sources linking Saudis to their war against us, including 9/11, Hamas, the spread of Islamism and the Iraqi insurgency. Take a minute to click on a few of the links above. It's the least we can do.

* links thanks to marvelous Doris and Atlas Shrugs