The Democracy Project has good news from New York, where the state legislature has passed a law to protect writers from being sued by Islamic billionaires.

Saudi billionaire Khalid Salim Bin Mahfouz, who successfully sued Cambridge University Press last July, has failed in his efforts to silence Rachel Ehrenfeld.

The American Center for Democracy in Defense of Freedom, which Ehrenfeld directs, has just issued the following press release. The New York State legislature today passed the “Libel Tourism Protection Act,” which will help protect American writers from the likes of Bin Mahfouz, who uses his millions to silence critics of his own past and of others who work to spread Wahhabi Islam around the world. For the likes of Bin Mahfouz, the inability to convince people of the merits of your arguments leads instead to efforts to sue them into silence. That underhanded assault on our freedom of speech has now become more difficult, as this new legislation corrects holes in New York’s law that had left Ehrenfeld, and other authors, open to suits from foreigners like Bin Mahfouz.