Yesterday, a Corner commenter wrote: “I just googled Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and only get sites espousing her point of view, not reporting from a news site.” He asked for links to news items about the story.
Most media outlets are ignoring yesterday’s conviction, which I noted in the Corner, of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff by an Austrian trial court of the crime of denigrating Islam’s Prophet Mohammad. This is probably due to the fact that she is an ordinary person and not an acclaimed writer, politician, or celebrity (think Mark Steyn, Geert Wilders, and Brigitte Bardot) — the most prominent examples of the growing ranks of Western Europeans and Canadians who have faced legal problems for criticizing Islamic teachings.
I had interviewed Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff last year and followed her trial through the trial observer sent by the superb Washington-based Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, a non-profit group of “conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order.”
— Nina Shea is director of Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and co-author with Paul Marshall of Silenced (Oxford University Press), a forthcoming book on contemporary Islamic blasphemy and apostasy rules.