Another judicial defeat for those who try to silence by lawsuit those who criticize Islam and Islamic organizations and their activities. From American Thinker:

The American system of litigation, allowing anyone to sue anyone for anything, thereby inflicting major costs (for legal counsel and time) on any enemy, is an open invitation to legal thuggery by the wealthy. Proposals to implement the English system, whereby the loser in a lawsuit pays the winner's legal costs, have always run into fatal opposition by those protectors of the rights of the little guy, the tort lawyer lobby and its captive political party, the Democrats.

In this era of deep-pocketed Islamic groups, it was inevitable that this available tool would be exploited by groups seeking to stifle any criticism of Islam or radical Islamists. The phrase "jihad-by-lawsuit" has been invented to cover such instances, the most recent of which is CAIR's notorious lawsuit threatened against passengers on the USAirways flight in Minneapolis who alerted authorities of the suspicious behavior of the Flying Imams.

But long before the Imams asked for seat belt extenders for svelte clergy, a particularly troublesome lawsuit was brought in Boston in 2005, by the Islamic Society of Boston, against private groups and individuals as well as selected press outlets, which brought to light embarrassing details of a deal between the Boston Redevelopment Authority and the ISB, handing over land for construction of a new mosque at an extraordinarily cheap price.

Solomonia brings us the good news that the ISB has completely dropped the lawsuit. Quoting from a press release of the David Project, one of the groups sued,

The David Project has announced that the Islamic Society of Boston ("ISB") and its officers have withdrawn all of their claims against all of the citizens who raised concerns about the ISB, its funding and its leadership, as well as all of their claims against the Boston Herald, Fox-TV and the various journalists whose investigative pieces about the ISB in 2003 and 2004 disclosed damaging information about the ISB and its controversial land deal with the Boston Redevelopment Authority ("BRA"). The ISB and its officers have abandoned all of their claims against all of the defendants they sued 2 years ago, without payment to the ISB or to them of any money whatsoever.

The ISB's decision to drop all of its claims against all of the 17 defendants it sued back in 2005 alleging "defamation" and accusing them of conspiring to violate its civil rights comes just months after the defendants--who included a Muslim cleric, a Christian political science professor and the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, as well as Boston civic leader William Sapers and national terrorism expert Steven Emerson--had begun through their lawyers to conduct discovery into the ISB's financial records, its receipt of millions of dollars in funding from Saudi Arabian and other Middle Eastern sources, its contributions to certain organizations and the records of certain of its officers and directors. The ISB's abandonment of its lawsuits comes only weeks after two of its original Middle Eastern Trustees, Walid Fitaihi of Saudi Arabia and Ali Tobah of Egypt, suddenly resigned as Trustees just before they were required to submit themselves to the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts court hearing the case.

While this is a victory, it could be a Pyrrhic one, for immense costs have already been inflicted, and there is not much prospect that they can be recovered. It is not at all uncommon for meretricious litigation to be dropped when discovery looms. If the defendants are tied up and impoverished, the litigant may accomplish its purpose without a courtroom victory.

Read it all.