Well, well. The Islamic Society of Boston, who has been filing harassment lawsuits against every critic of its planned mega-mosque project, has suddenly abandoned all their claims without receiving any payment. Apparently, the ongoing discovery efforts by the targets of their suits were getting uncomfortably close to exposing things the ISB didn’t want exposed.

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.

The David Project, whose public records litigation against the BRA forced the public disclosure of evidence regarding the below-fair-market land deal between the BRA and the ISB and the role played in that deal of BRA Deputy Director Muhammed Ali Salaam, will proceed exactly as before with its litigation, seeking the remainder of the documents presently withheld by the BRA. That litigation, The David Project v. Boston Redevelopment Authority, is on file in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston.