There’s been a story brewing for a couple weeks about a lawsuit against Jimmy Carter and Simon & Schuster, who published Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The plaintiffs in this $5 million lawsuit claim that the book should not be classified as non-fiction because they dispute some of the Carter’s assertions. As Kevin Jon Heller of Opinio Juris writes:
The goal of the lawsuit isn’t to force Simon & Schuster to pay damages for publishing Carter’s book; its goal is to bully Carter and other would-be critics of Israel into not writing books like Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in the first place.
You want to talk about lawfare? This is it in its purest form.
But we actually have nothing to worry about. As I wrote last month (in a two-part post), there is a non-profit devoted to combating this exact kind of legal bullying. The Lawfare Project is committed to countering efforts “[t]o silence and punish free speech about issues of national security and public concern.” As the organization’s director, Brooke Goldstein, stated in an interview earlier this year:
We live in a time when authors such as Mark Steyn are forced to defend themselves before Canadian ‘human rights’ commissions for writing about Islam and its demographics. When Swiss magazine editors are indicted for the crime of ‘vilifying members of the Islamic religion.’ When U.S.-based cartoon networks and a university printing press are too afraid to republish any image deemed offensive to Islam. We are living in a time when a Danish cartoonist is thrown into jail for printing images of the prophet Mohammad in his own country.
Surely they will take up Jimmy Carter’s cause as well. After all, as Goldstein asserts, they are careful to avoid bias:
The delineation is not as simple as some may like to make it; that is, that lawsuits against terrorists are good, and legal actions against the U.S. and Israel are bad. The question is not ‘Who is the target?’ but ‘What is the intention?’ behind the legal action: Is it to pursue justice, to apply the law in the interests of freedom and democracy, or is the intent to undermine the very system of laws being manipulated?
Now, if you look at page on their site where they post recent news items about “lawfare” stories of note, you’ll notice that the Jimmy Carter lawsuit story hasn’t made it up there yet. But I’m sure they’ll get around to it, right?
