The Assault on Freedom of Speech in Israel

  "Anyone who speaks or writes against the Disengagement Plan is guilty of incitement.” 
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to his cabinet
February 13, 2005

   In Isaiah 42:6 it is written:

I, the Lord, Have Called you in Righteousness, and Will Hold your hand and Keep you. And I Will Establish you as a Covenant of the people, for a Light unto the nations.

   Compared to the countries surrounding her, Israel is a shining light in a sea of dictatorial Islamic fanaticism.  However when it comes to free speech in Israel, the light is flickering. 

   The attack on freedom of speech in Israel by the Jewish left has a long history.  In fact before the modern Jewish State of Israel was born, back in 1930, Jewish demonstrators against British restrictions of Jewish immigration were arrested by the Tel Aviv police.  The Jewish commander of the police ordered the police to beat the demonstrators.

  Several years later the Englishman Josiah Wedgwood wrote "I want to see in Palestine once again a fighting nation, free and courageous like the Maccabees...An army of forty thousand fit to defend what is dear to them and to me..."   Wedgwood wanted Jews to fight for their rights against his own country since England was preventing Jews from fleeing Europe into their ancient homeland of Israel.  Josiah was supportive of the Irgun that was struggling to smuggle Jews past the British blockade into Palestine.  David Ben Gurion the left wing leader of Labor, exploded when he read Wedgwood's words.  He cabled the Jewish Agency in London to approach British Labor immediately to muzzle comrade Wedgwood, and stop his support of "the Jewish Fascist Organization."  (Days of Wrath, Days of Glory, Yitzhak Ben Ami 1983)

   Ben Gurion later ordered troops to fire on a ship bringing arms to Israel because the arms were being smuggled in by "the Jewish Fascist Organization".  Ben Gurion has passed away but the outrageous efforts to suppress free speech in Israel have not. 

   A widespread tactic used to silence free speech is to label it "incitement".  This tactic has been used by the Israeli left in their assault on the free speech of those they don't agree with.  Israelis live in a sea of fanatical Islamic anti-Jewish incitement incitement that must be stopped if there is ever to be peace in the Middle East, yet instead of fighting that incitement they fight those who disagree with their appeasement policies towards the Arabs.

    One example of this is the use of the accusation of incitement against those Israelis who have proposed a "Jewish Alternative Disengagement Plan" to the one being pursued by the Sharon government.  The Sharon's plan involves removing Jews from their homes in Gaza, Judea and Samaria.  An organization named Mishalot Yisrael, proposed an alternative plan in which Arabs who refuse to swear allegiance to Israel are removed instead of Jews.  They posted an online referendum  at www.mishal.org and www.referendumforisrael.com.   On Saturday night February 5th 2005, police arrived at the residence of one of the leaders of Mishalot Yisrael, Ben Ya’akov's and detained him for several hours of investigation after which he was released. The official reason  "Search for inciteful material".  If proposing removing Arabs from their homes is incitement then why is it not inciteful for the government to propose removing Jews from their homes?  The purpose of the government is to squelch opposition to their policies, if their purpose was to stop incitement than they wouldn't engage in it.

   Jonathan Rosenblum in an article in the Jerusalem Post wrote: (Think Again: The Beautification of Yitshak Rabin, 11/3/05)

Incitement, we are instructed, must be vigorously prosecuted. The catch, however, is that only one side of the political spectrum is deemed capable of incitement because only one side is made up of rabid fanatics capable of being incited. On the other side, there is only the exercise of free speech.  Words that would be condemned as incendiary if spoken by one side - comments about the sometimes salutary effects of civil war (Ephraim Sneh), calls for an intifada against one's political or religious foes (Yonatan Gefen), or reveries about mowing down fellow Jews with a machine gun (Uri Avnery) - are deemed harmless when uttered by those on the Left. (Yonatan Gefen, Ephraim Sneh and Uri Avnery are all leftists)

   According to Daniel Doron, one tactic used by the radical left in Israel to silence their opposition is to bring frivolous law suits.  Mr. Doron wrote about this left wing tactic as follows (The Pathological Left: The Jerusalem Post 12/18/03):

They file suits simply to harass critics and intimidate potential adversaries by causing them great expense and loss of time.

   One of the frivolous libel suites is against Judy Lash Balint, an Op Ed writer who has during her writings had the nerve to criticize the Israeli left.  Another of their targets is Dr. Steven Plaut, author of most of the exposes of the suppression of free speech in Israel that I have included below.   Dr. Plaut is currently being sued by Dr. Neve Gordon one of the many radical left wing professors from Ben Gurion University.  The outrageous story of this lawsuit was written by Richard Lakisher, a scholar who follows academic trends in Europe and Israel and is titled The David Irving Trial in Israel.

   Another tactic of the left in Israel has been to take over academic departments at Universities and to give bad grades to students they don't agree with.  An excellent article about this, Of Intellectual Bondage, appeared in the Jerusalem Post on 12/26/03.

   In Israel the media is controlled by the government.   There were two radio stations that were not controlled by the government, Abie Nathan's left wing radio station and Israel's right wing, Arutz 7 radio station because both broadcast from offshore.  While the right wing were in power in Israel they respected Mr. Nathan's right to free speech.  However Israel National News radio has been silenced by the left wing Israel supreme court.  A law suit has been brought to silence their internet broadcasts as well although I believe that lawsuit was unsuccessful.   The following is an audio interview about the silencing of Arutz 7 radio.

  Yaacov Katz on the Silencing of Arutz 7 radio by the Israeli Left.

The following are articles about the assault on free speech in Israel.  One of the key authors to fight against this is Dr. Steve Plaut of the University of Haifa and so many of his articles are included.

Israel's First Amendment Strikes Again
Israel National News Steve Plaut 2/3/06

Click here to read article.

The following link is to an article about the attack on freedom of speech in Israeli academia

Click here to read article

  Israel's Campus Watch
By Steven Plaut <http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=1223>
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 7, 2005

Jailed for Ideology
Excerpt from Our World: Recipe for Social Disintegration
Jerusalem Post 11/29/05
Caroline Glick

AS AVITAL MOLER of the Public Defender's Office pointed out in October in her report on the criminal justice system's mistreatment of minors arrested while participating in demonstrations against the expulsion plan, the system's treatment of the protesters was characterized by "selective enforcement of the law based on political affiliation." Moler found that "new law" was invented by authorities for the purpose of punishing arrested protesters who had yet to stand trial. ..

THE NEED for a fair and thorough review of the law enforcement and judicial authorities' suspected systemic abuse of the civil rights of anti-withdrawal opponents is urgent today. This is so because the apparent selective abuse of the civil rights of religious Israelis by law enforcement and judicial authorities does not seem to have ended in the aftermath of the withdrawal and expulsion plan.

Case in point is the continued incarceration of Avri Ran. As I noted in a column last month, Ran, who owns and runs the Eternal Hills ranch in northern Samaria, was indicted last March for aggravated assault. Ran was arrested and indicted after punching, on March 20, a trespasser who had entered his cultivated field with a tractor with the intention of destroying his crop.

Although Ran has never been found guilty of any crime and although the action for which he is under indictment was clearly motivated by the context in which it was enacted (that is, Ran's desire to protect his property), the state prosecutors have demanded since the day of Ran's arrest that he be jailed pending trial due to his "ideology." ..

On November 19, Ran's family and friends held a vigil outside Ayalon prison, where he is being held. His 10 children spoke to their father through a megaphone and told him how much they miss him. As his children spoke, prison guards entered the Torah wing of the prison and took Ran into solitary confinement. The next day he was told that he would be even more severely punished if his family and friends repeated the vigil in the future.

 

 

Gov’t Regulation of Internet Broadcasts Could Undermine Arutz-7
Israel National News 11/9/05
By Scott Shiloh

A government body responsible for regulating satellite and cable broadcasts is considering extending the scope of its authority to Internet broadcasts aimed at the Israeli public.

The Council for Satellite and Cable Broadcasting is currently charged by Israeli law with regulating the content of satellite and cable broadcasts.

Broadcasting via cable or satellite to the Israeli public requires a license. The council has the power to grant licenses to selected content and service providers who meet its requirements, and revoke the licenses of broadcasters who do not.

If the council’s authority is broadened to include Internet radio broadcasts, broadcasters such as Israel National News (Arutz-7) might be subject to government regulation and oversight, something that could severely compromise its independence, objectivity, and ability to report and comment on current events the way it sees fit. Arutz-7 radio, broadcasting from off-shore, was shut down by the government two years ago.

The reason for concern is that government agencies have been selective in their regulation of terrestrial radio. Arutz-7 National Radio's offshore station, serving the public dubbed as "the national camp radio," was shut down in 2003 despite its rank as the third-largest commercial radio station in the country. However, the same agencies allowed the left-wing "Voice of Peace" station to broadcast freely from offshore until the station's manager ended the broadcast due to financial and medical problems.

Yoram Mokdi, chairman of Israel's Council for Satellite and Cable Broadcasting, said that while the council is only beginning to study the issue, Israel’s big cable and satellite content providers, such as Hot and Yes, are already making plans to broadcast to subscribers via the Internet.

While satellite and cable companies must receive a license to start Internet broadcasting, companies who limit their broadcasting only to the Internet can still reach out to the public without government interference.

But once such broadcasts “reach half the country via the Internet,” Mokdi said, many people, particularly Israel’s media conglomerates, will demand that the government start subjecting them to regulation as well, or in the alternative, exempt satellite and cable broadcasting from government regulation.

Mokdi said, however, that in his opinion, “regulation is not always a good thing,” and that the council does not intend to create “a dictatorship for Internet sites,”

Arutz-7 broadcasts over the internet daily and weekly TV programming in English and Hebrew at its site: IsraelNationalTV.com.

Asked what would happen if Arutz-7 started streaming 24-hr. television news content over the Internet the way CNN or Fox News do in the United States over cable, Mokdi said he could not be certain that Arutz-7 would be exempt from Israeli government regulation and supervision.

Under current regulations, the state would have to grant Arutz-7 a special license for broadcasting news, if it were on cable or satellite.

In today’s political reality, with Arutz-7 more often than not at odds with government policy, especially on the sensitive issue of holding all the land of Israel under Jewish sovereignty, getting a license to broadcast news and commentary from the government would be highly unlikely.

Baruch Gordon, Director of Arutz-7's English website IsraelNationalNews.com, said it was no coincidence that the government shut down Arutz-7’s over-the-air broadcasts shortly before announcing the Disengagement Plan to the public.

He said the best way to safeguard the right to freedom of speech from government intervention would be to allow unregulated Internet news broadcasting regardless of how many Israelis decide to tune in, “even if it’s half the country.”

Gordon explained that Arutz-7 broadcasts only over the Internet because the Israeli government would not issue a tender for a national radio station that would be allowed to broadcast news and commentary freely without government intervention.

Most over-the-air radio and television broadcasting in Israel is controlled by the state. Israel allowed private firms to operate regional radio stations, however with many limitations. Initially, the regional stations were forbidden to broadcast their own news on matters of national public debate. They had to default to the state-run news stations. The regional newscasts were limited to coverage of local issues pertaining to the region they operate in.

In contrast, virtually all television and radio stations in the United States are privately owned, and the government does not regulate the content of broadcast news or opinion. Traditional over-the-air broadcast media in the United States do, however, require a license from the Federal Communications Commission.

The U.S. initiated licensing of over-the-air broadcasts in order to ensure fair public access to limited radio frequencies. Cable and satellite broadcasts, on the other hand, are subject to very little government regulation and interference. Controversial radio talk host Howard Stern recently moved to satellite radio in order to avoid certain regulatory limitations on speech.

Internet broadcasting in the United States is virtually free of government regulation, except for certain pornography issues, and legal concerns involving the use of copyrighted material.

Mokdi said the council will be examining the American model as well as the one being developed in Europe which tends to view more favorably government regulation and supervision of Internet broadcasting.

The council will be holding public hearings on the issue until March 7, 2006. After that, it will formulate its policy along with the Justice Ministry and the Ministry of Communications.

“We might reach the conclusion that it is impossible to regulate the Internet,” he said.
 

The following link is to an article in  the New York Post about how the Israeli government is attempting to silence the opposition to their plan to withdraw from Gaza by making it illegal to protest.

March Madness, 7/20/05, New York Post

Note:  Orange is the color those who are opposed to forced removal of Israelis from Gaza and parts of Judea and Samaria by the Sharon Government.

Prayer in Orange Forbidden At Western Wall
Israel National News 5/15/05

Sarah Baumol from Gush Etzion said her 8th-grade son and his class went to the Western Wall in Jerusalem to pray at the conclusion of a school trip this past day, Memorial Day. "A policeman stood there and demanded that my son, and several of his friends, remove any orange T-shirts or bands, and [he] tossed them in a pile," said Baumol.

She said his son asked the guard for his name, and that the latter responded only that he was acting under orders.

"My son was wearing his orange T-shirt under two other layers, a sweater and a white shirt. He was forced to undress in front of the crowds pouring in, and give up his shirt," she said. "My other son had his orange bracelet removed by this policeman."

9th-graders from a girls' high school in Beit El also attended the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Western Wall, and witnessed a similar scene. Some of the girls said they were shocked when classmates who were wearing orange-colored clothing and bracelets were told at security checks to step aside. Those who didn't agree or couldn't remove the orange articles of clothing from their bodies were denied access to the holy site.

Don't Call it Racism
Dr. Steve Plaut
The Jerusalem Post Online 3/23/05

Suppression of Academic Freedom and Free Speech At the Weizmann Institute
Dr. Steve Plaut
Internet Broadcast 3/23/05

Ordinarily Weizmann Institute is not the main target on our radar
screen for political correctness and suppression of academic freedom.   It is
usually the least politicized of Israel's academic institutions and has
the smallest number of leftist faculty moonbats (even fewer than Bar Ilan
University).  But today's headline is an exception.

    Igor Pecherksi is a Russian-born (St. Petersberg) Israeli
computer programmer, who works in the molecular genetics department at
Weizmann.  Here is his personal web page:
http://longitude.weizmann.ac.il/~igor/cv.htm

     The administration at Weizmann Institute is threatening to fire poor
Igor.  His grievous sin?  He expressed his political opinions quietly by
wearing a small pin on his lapel.  The pin is about the size of one of
those AIDS ribbons the PC profs often wear.  But it shows a small orange
Jewish star.  It is the symbol of the movement to support the Jewish
"settlers" in the Gaza Strip and oppose their expulsion under the
Sharon-Mitzna "disengagement plan".

     Doctor Igor wears the pin when he comes to work.  Some leftist
busybodies on campus complained that the pin is interfering with their
ability to do THEIR work.  Now if you open the URL at
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/SearchArticle.jhtml
you will see exactly what Igor looks like in his pin, not exactly Hulk
Hogan threatening the leftist secretaries.   The pin in the picture is the
one the lefties on campus claim is  interfering with their work.  Leftists
at Weizmann of course always park  their cars with the "Expel the
Settlers" bumper stickers on campus parking lots but  THAT is protected
academic free speech!

    Doctor Igor is now under threat of expulsion and dismissal from his job
for quietly expressing an opinion.

    If you would like to tell the chiefs at Weizmann what you think
of all this, go to http://www.weizmann.ac.il/homepage/pages/pres.shtml
and http://www.weizmann.ac.il/homepage/pages/leaders.shtml
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/committees/

    Doctor Igor can be reached at igor.pechersky@weizmann.ac.il

Intellectual Terrorism Strikes Israel

by Paul Eidelberg

 On February 13, 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told his cabinet, "Anyone who speaks or writes against the Disengagement Plan is guilty of incitement.”  Mr. Sharon thus went on record saying that the _expression of even the slightest opposition to his highly controversial plan is a criminal offense.

 The next day Likud Minister of Internal Security Gideon Ezra, in a live interview on Israel Radio, said that people who yell at ministers should be placed under administrative detention—which means incarceration of up to six months without trial. 

 Also, Likud Transportation Minister Meir Shitreet (a former justice minister) told Israel Radio that Likud party members are guilty of incitement when they write letters to Likud MKs informing them that future political support for these politicians is dependent on their voting against the withdrawal/ expulsion plan.

 Finally, acting on a proposal of Likud Justice Minister Tsipi Livni, the cabinet approved the establishment of a special Justice Ministry unit to combat incitement and perceived disruptions to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement//expulsion plan.

 The Yesha (Judea, Samaria and Gaza) Council criticized the establishment of the new unit, calling it the "thought police.” The Council said that the purpose of the new body is to "shut the mouths of those who are opposed to the expulsion plan, and to brand them inciters. [Its purpose is to] forbid us to think differently than the government. The democratic right to protest is slowly disappearing in face of the ‘sanctified’ disengagement plan."

The new unit will combat anti-disengagement protests and demonstrations, and will work in coordination with the General Security Services to deter activists from engaging in mass civil disobedience.  Nor is this all.

 Police Chief Moshe Karadi announced the opening of an official inquiry into the activities of the speakers and participants in an anti-disengagement gathering of thousands of people at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center on February 25. The protest was organized by Chabad.  One of the speakers was attorney Elyakim Haetzni, a forme! r member of the Knesset and an outspoken critic of disengagement.

 It should be evident from the preceding that “intellectual terrorism” is descending on Israel—the “only democracy” in the Middle East.   Why?  Why is Prime Minister Sharon’s disengagement plan transforming Israel into a police state?  Why this reign of intimidation, t! his suppression of freedom of _expression?

 The reason is this: There is simply no rational justification for Sharon’s disengagement plan.  Both IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon and Shin Bet Director Avi Dichter have testified before ! the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that disengagement will lead to an increase of terrorism—which testimony or attitude is why both of these men have been sacked.  It should also be noted that Chief of IDF Intelligence Maj. Gen. Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash, who is retiring this summer, also testified against disengagement. 

 No wonder ex-Deputy IDF Intelligence Chief, Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, has said:  “The Israeli government has not succeeded in producing a single serious argument that can refute objections [to disengagement] and justify the grave step that it is taking.”

 Since the Sharon government has not and cannot justify disengagement on rational grounds, which is to say, since this government cannot persuade the public by means of logical argument and solid evidence that withdrawing from Gaza and northern Samaria and turning this land over to Arab terrorists will contribute to Israel’s overall security, it must resort to intimidation and the suppression of freedom of _expression and individual liberty to implement Sharon’s plan.

 But now let us probe a little deeper.  First, notice that the intellectual terrorism descending on Israel is the work of secularists.  This secular coercion—which will be imposed primarily on religious Jews—reveals the hypocrisy of those who declaim against religious coercion. 

 Second, with disengagement and its necessary accompaniment, intellectual terrorism, Israel is approaching its denouement.  The veneer of democracy is being stripped away.  The idol of peace is being shattered.  Thanks to the Arabs, Israel will have to redefine itself.  It will be Jewish or it will be nothing.

The Incitement of Ideas, Caroline Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2/18/05

More Selective Free Speech
Steve Plaut
2/14/05

Nazi symbols are prohibited throughout the EU, which is why the
Neonazis this week protesting the "Holocaust" of German nazis in Dresden
had to use symbols other than the swastika.  Now a group of Euro
parliamentarians from th ehuman rights lobby want communist symbols also
banned, as part of a proposed set of measures against racism,  although their
proposal has not yet been accepted.  No one seems to think these measures
constitute violations of democratic protections of free speech.

    So if Europe can ban symbols of totalitarianism, why can't Israel jail
people who endorse Islamofascist terrorism, wave Hamas and PLO flags, call
for the country to be destroyed, or teach political science or geography
at Ben Gurion University?

    There is of course a form of free speech that is prohibited in Israel,
namely, expressing opposition to Sharon's "disengagement plan".  The
government is rattling its  swords now and today's headline is an open
threat by the Likud-run Ministry of Justice to place anti-Oslo protesters in
"administrative arrest", detention without trial usually reserved for Arab
terrorists the state does not wish to bring to trial in order to avoid
revealing identities of undercover informants.  The new leftist editor of
the Jerusalem Post joined the calls to suppress free speech for anti-Oslo
dissidents in an editorial at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1108321452463&p=1006953079865...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Haggit Rotenberg of the Besheva weekly was requested by police to hand over her interview notes following a story on Noam Livnat of Chomat Magen campaign to refuse service with the disengagement.  She refused, noting not only professional immunity but said also that no
reporter she knows was asked to do so after interviewing Palestinian terrorists.
http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//670326

Cabinet Approves Evacuation Bill

Ariel Sharon the Prime Minister who once said "Unilateral disengagement under fire means we made concessions and got nothing"  decided that the way to gain peace in the Middle East is to force the Jews in Gaza to evacuate their homes.  His Bill was approved by his cabinet.  According to Israel National News (10/26/04) Clause 27a(5) of his bill states, that one who participates in a gahtering of three or more people "for the purpose of disturbing the implementation of an order" given by a security officer in the framework fo the disengagement plan is subject to three years in prison - and five years if he was armed at the time.   Minister Natan Sharansky said, "This is an exact copy of a law that was in force in Russia, and under which hundreds of people were imprisoned."  Though he strongly opposes the disengagement plan, he said that he even more strongly opposes the "manner in which the Prime Minister is going about implementing it.  How can you try to pass such a controversial law and not allow three people to talk among themselves?"

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Background Info:  Bassi is a religious Jew who was appointed by Sharon to head the evacuation administration that will force Jewish settlers to leave Gaza. 

'Women in Green' head to be investigated for incitement
By YAAKOV KATZ

Jerusalem Post 9/29/04

The state prosecution on Tuesday night decided to launch a criminal investigation into remarks made recently by Nadia Matar, head of the right-wing movement Women in Green on the suspicion that she insulted a public official.

Deputy State Prosecutor Shai Natzan said that authorities have noticed a sharp increase in extremist remarks which incite to violence and as a result decided to take action when "red lines are crossed."

Last week Matar branded Disengagement Administration director Yonatan Bassi "a far more terrible version" of the Judenrat. In a letter faxed to Bassi, Matar noted "the chilling similarity" between his role and that of the Berlin Jewish Community's "Judenrat," in transferring its Jews to concentration camps.

Addressing the letter personally and by his first name, Matar continued writing "you are a modern version of the Judenrat, actually a far worse version," because at least the Nazi's forced Germany's Jewish leaders to hand over their flocks.

"We decided to launch an investigation against Matar due to the recent escalation in remarks which are incitement," Nitzan said, "We will investigate her for insulting a public official and will continue to crack down on people who make remarks which incite to violence against soldiers."

Earlier in the day, Nitzan sent a letter to Uri Elitzur, former bureau chief of the Prime Minister's Office under Binyamin Netanyahu and now the editor of the Nekuda monthly magazine, informing him that Attorney General Menahem Mazuz decided not to launch a criminal investigation against him for controversial remarks he had made.

Elitzur, in an article in the Sheva newspaper in June, called on the public to resist the evacuation of settlements and wrote that he understands people who use violence against security forces. "Uprooting settlements is illegal and appalling," Elitzur wrote in the Sheva paper. "Therefore a refusal of the evacuation orders by IDF soldiers and violence are perfectly justifiable as well as any other way a person finds suitable to protect their home."

In a letter sent to Elitzur by Nitzan, the right-wing activist was warned that if he makes similar comments in the future, a criminal investigation will be launched against him.

"After reviewing he evidence we arrived at the conclusion that the remarks raise criminal suspicions," Nitzan wrote. "However, considering our general restrained policy in the matter, the attorney general decided, this time, not to order an investigation. We do however find it right to warn you that any similar extreme remark made in the future may lead to an investigation."

Explaining the reasoning behind the decision to launch an investigation against Matar and not open one against Elitzur, Nitzan said, "We are trying to work according to a restrained policy but if there is no choice, we will not hesitate to take action."

Responding to news of the announcement of the launching of the investigation, Matar said: "I am not excited, they do not have a case, and it is an attempt to close the mouth of the nationalistic camp and all those who are opposed to the transfer of Jews of their homes."

"I will continue to scream out against this plan which essentially is giving in to the Arab-Nazi enemy and presents a danger for the state of Israel," Matar said. "Investigations must be opened against Sharon and Bassi and they should be placed in administrative detention since they pose a danger to the state of Israel."

Leaders of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip who arrived at the Justice Ministry Tuesday evening for a meeting with Mazuz, State Prosecutor Eran Shendar, and Nitzan said at the entrance to Mazuz's office that they are opposed to all incitement but that they believe that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is the real cause for the recent escelation.

"We reject all calls of incitement and violence," Yesha council leader Benzi Lieberman said. "But we think that the prime minister, in his behavior, encourages incitement and the only way to stop this phenomenon is to return to the people and to hold a national referendum over the disengagement plan."

At the meeting, Mazuz told the settler leaders that there is no excuse for public figures who call on soldiers to refuse evacuation orders or on civilians to violently resist the evacuation.

Indict Me!
Dr. Steve Plaut
9/14/04

As part of Ariel Sharon's efforts to implement his "disengagement
plan," he is launching an energetic asaault against free speech and free
expression in Israel.  That is not an exaggeration.
  
   This week saw a large demonstration against Sharon's plan held in
Jerusalem.  About 100,000 people participated, which is why the leftist
media said 70,000 and Haaretz, the Palestinian newspaper printed in
Hebrew, said 40,000.  In this demonstration, some protesters held signs
reading "Ariel Sharon is a Dictator".   To prove that the signs are
correct and that Ariel Sharon really IS a dictator, Ariel Sharon has
evidently instructed his leftist Attorney General to "investigate"
whether those holding such signs should be indicted for criminal
prosecution.
  
  I am not kidding.
 
  Now, describing Sharon's actions as dictatorial is not only protected
speech, or at least would be if Israel were a democracy, but it is
empirically well-founded.  After all, Sharon was elected on a platform
OPPOSING precisely the plan he is now trying to implement, and so is
disenfranchising those who voted for him and against the plan. 
Reasonable rational people might fairly regard that as dictatorial.  
Sharon is also ignoring the 60% of his own party who rejected the plan in
the party referendum a few months back.  And now he has
rejected calls from within his own party and from various other corners of
Israeli society to hold a national referendum on the plan before trying
to implement it.   After all, since voters have rejected the plan, it
behooves Sharon to ask them again before implementing it.  Sharon's
people, joining the Left, are now insisting that ballot referenda are
anti-democratic.  Tell that to California.

   This is not the only part of the assault against free expression. 
Sharon's people have been planting story after story in the media about
how the evil settlers and the anti-disengagement protesters opposing his
plan are a clear and present danger of violence, how they are plotting
murder and mayhem, how they are planning a civil war.  Yeah, sure they
are.
 
  The General Security Services (Shin Bet) has taken time off from
tracking  terrorists  to operate surveillance of these "inciters".   This
is all part of Sharon's attempt to delegitimize those disagreeing
with him.  AT the same time, the leftist Attorney General, a crony of
Yossi Beilin but an appointee of Sharon, has ordered an investigation to
prepare indictment of a haredi  ultra-Orthodox newspaper for "racism".  

    Its crime?  The paper, Sha'a Tova
(The Good Hour) ran an article about the deaths of 242 Moslems stomped to
death in riots and disorders in Mecca during the haj.  A columnist
commented that, "This time the sacrifice was really a holiday," a play on
words of the "Holiday of the Sacrifice".  The columinist went on to
write that
these victims "at least made this day a holiday for us".  Now you might
disagree with the columnist, and you might think that other people's
religion should not be a target of mockery.  But there is a difference
between poor taste and criminality.   I mean, come on, Haaretz runs worse
comments than that against Judaism and Rabbis every day.  Moreover, the
investigation was in response to a petition by pro-terror Knesset Member
Ahmed Tibi.  Tibi himself has made far worse comments than this newspaper,
endorsing and justifying Palestinian terror and atrocities, and Tibi has
yet to be indicted for incitement or racism or worse.

    Let us note that the Israeli judicial establishment has long argued
that it is protected speech and decidedly NOT racist for Arabs and Jewish
leftists to praise terrorists, suicide bombers, and otherwise praise
those who murder Jews.  Not a single one of these has ever been indicted
for "racism".  It is supposedly ok to praise murders already committed, as
long as you do not actually call for NEW murders.  Those are not MY speech
rules but those of the legal establishment.

    SO where exactly is the criminal offense in the newspaper's column?  
The answer is that Ariel Sharon and his Attorney General are unhappy with
Israelis having free speech at this juncture in history.  With free
speech, too many people disagree with their agenda.

   Since Sharon wants the protesters indicted for "incitement", I have a
suggestion.  I suggest that Sharon first indict ME for incitement.

   Seriously.

   After all, I have repeatedly referred to Sharon as Israel's Mugabian
leader.   THAT has gotta be worse than holding a sign saying he is a
dictator.  SO I hereby issue an open invitation to the Attorney General
and the police to indict me for "incitement" for exercising this
prohibited form of free speech.  I will make it easy; I will collect all
me incitements onto a CD-Rom and provide it to you for free.

    What do you say?
-----------------------------------------------------------

Meretz's Jihad Against Rabbis
Steve Plaut

Meretz has always been an anti-democratic party opposed to free speech
for non-leftists.  The latest McCarthyist assault upon free speech is to
be seen in Meretz' new jihad against West Bank Rabbis.  As you know, the
Israeli leftist media fabricated an urban legend about how un-named Rabbis
supposedly told Yigal Amir it would be nice if he murdered Rabin and who
allegedly otherwise endorsed violence.  Never mind that no one has ever
produced any evidence of any Rabbi endorsing murder of Rabin or of anyone
else.


   Now Meretz sees a new opportunity for Rabbi-slandering.  Seems that a
group of Rabbis in the West Bank held a Rabbinic pow-wow and called on the
Israeli government to take serious military action against the Palestinian
terrorists and to strike them EVEN if it meant some Palestinian bystanders
and civilians would get hurt in the retaliations.  In other words, these
Rabbis simply endorsed the same position on retaliation against terrorists
that is contained in and ratified by the Geneva Convention and
international law.  While agreeing of course that, where possible,
innocent civilian collateral damage should be avoided, the Rabbis'
position was that priorities should be kept straight and that the top
priority was to annihilate the murderers attacking Israel.   As you can
see, this is really controversial stuff.


    Meretz of course completely disagrees with the racist Rabbis.   Rather
than killing terrorists, Meretz wants them rewarded and wants Israel to
capitulate to their demands.  That is why Knesset Member Roman Bronfman
from Meretz, Yossi "Call Me Ishmael" Sarid, and their Marxie sidekicks are
petitioning the police and Attorney General to prosecute the Rabbis for
incitement to murder and for racism (Haaretz, Sept 8).  Zeev Segel,
professor from Tel Aviv University and Haaretz legal commentator, makes it
pretty clear that he also thinks they should be indicted.


     This is merely the latest twist in the saga of the Israeli First
Amendment, under which leftists and Arab fascists may endorse terror and
murder as protected speech but Rightists must be prosecuted for expressing
their opinions.  You may recall how the Kahanists have been criminalized
and banned as a "racist" "terrorist organization".   You may, like me, be
highly critical of the Kahanists or disapprove of them, but that hardly
justifies McCarthyist attempts to deny them free speech rights, especially
when leftist rhetorical atrocities are always protected under selective
free speech absolutism. 


     The McCarthyism has already been used against Rabbis as well.   In
July 1996 Rabbi Ido Alba was convicted of "racism" and jailed because he
had stated in front of his students that the commandment "Thou shalt not
kill" does not apply to a Jew who has murdered a non-Jew.  You may or may
not agree with the content of his statement.  But where is the crime here?   
Let us bear in mind that the same ludicrous Israeli anti-racism law has
never been used to prosecute Israeli Arabs endorsing mass murder of Jews
and terror, nor has it been used to prosecute Israeli leftist professors
supporting Arab terror and justifying murder of Jews nor against leftist
journalists and "artists" who have openly called upon Arabs to murder
Jewish "settlers".    

_________________________________________________________________________________________
A Major Victory for Free Speech in Israel
By Steven Plaut
(3/29/04)

   Israel's Hebrew University of Jerusalem has long been a bastion for
leftist anti-Zionism, tenured treason, support for mutiny and
insubordination by Israeli soldiers, support for "New History" (meaning
Israel-bashing pseudo-history), and leftist extremism.

    Among the radical leftists at the Hebrew University, arguably the most
extremist of all may be Moshe Zimmerman.   Zimmerman is a Professor of
German History and may be best known for his pronunciations that the
children of Israeli Jewish settlers are "Hitlerjugend" (The Jerusalem Post  
April 30, 1995) and for repeatedly comparing Israeli soldiers and settlers
to Nazis
(http://israelvisit.co.il/cgi-bin/friendly.pl?url=Jan-17-03!gevalt5 ).  
When Benjamin Netanyahu ran for re-election on the campaign slogan, "A
strong leader for a strong people,"  Zimmerman wrote in the Jerusalem Post
that Israeli political candidates who use terms such as "strong leader" or
"strong people" are employing language reminiscent of the Nazis
(http://www.netaxs.com/home/q/afsi/OUTPOST/99MAR/mar12.htm ).  During
Operation Defensive Wall, Zimmerman made the headlines when he decided to
grant exemptions from exams and assignments to all students in jail for
refusing to follow orders or serve in the military, but all students
called up to serve in the reserves, to serve their country, would enjoy no
such special consideration.  He has been repeatedly accused of using his
classroom as a bully pulpit to coerce his students to accept his extremist
anti-Israel views (see below, from
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=194141&contrassID=2&subContrassID=14&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y&itemNo=193793)
and is now even being investigated for this by the Ministry of Education,
which funds most of the budgets for all Israeli universities.

      Zimmerman is so extreme that he sometimes shocks even the other
ordinary leftist anti-Zionists on Israeli campuses with his radicalism.

    One of the more amusing distractions of recent months was the SLAPP
suit Zimmerman filed against Haaretz and one of its writers.  SLAPP refers
to Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation and a SLAPP suit is a
frivolous anti-democratic libel suit designed to harass one's critics for
purposes of denying them free speech and silencing them.

    The very same Zimmerman filed a
frivolous SLAPP suit against Anat Peri, a writer at Haaretz (and an ex-PHD
student of Zimmerman's) and against Haaretz itself for writing there that
Zimmerman regularly compares Israel to Nazi Germany at the same time that
the German government has been financing his own research.  Zimmerman
decided to pull a Neve Gordon and tried to suppress his critic by filing a
SLAPP suit.  It is part of the current wave of SLAPP suits in Israel by
leftist extremists trying to use the courts to suppress free speech for
non-leftists.

    A few days ago Zimmerman lost his SLAPP suit and was ordered to pay a
cool 75,000 shekels in court expenses.   The judge went out of her way to
express her disgust at Zimmerman's hubris and arrogance in the courtroom. 
She expressed astonishment that a professor, who is also a public figure
who writes controversial things in the media, should attempt to silence
his own critics using such a "libel" suit.  Zimmerman himself was
protected in the past from people trying to sue HIM for libel, on grounds
of free speech, yet here he was trying to conscript the courts as
bludgeons to silence his own critics, noted the judge.  The judge also
accepted as reasonable the assertion that Zimmerman was granted German
government funding thanks to his own political opinions (Haaretz Mar 28).

     As you know, I am the target of a very similar harassment SLAPP suit
by Ben Gurion extremist political science lecturer Neve Gordon. The
similarities between the two trials are astounding.  Like Zimmerman,
Gordon publicly endorses mutiny and insubordination by Israeli soldiers
who refuse to do service as long as Israel is not following the policies
advocated by the country's most extremist leftists.  Like Zimmerman,
Gordon has enjoyed funding for his anti-Israel "research" from sources
wishing to assist him in promoting his own political agenda.  In Gordon's
case, the source was the Kroc Institute, a "center" so radical that it
also finances (according to the NY Sun) the activities of a Moslem French
anti-Semite with ties to al-Qaida, and which financed a "research paper"
by Gordon and a friend of his that "proved" that Israel is a terrorist
state.  Like Zimmerman, Gordon is trying to use the court as a bludgeon to
silence his critic (me), because I dared criticize some of his political
columns - and especially his columns prasing Holocaust Denier Norman
Finkelstein and which compared Finkelstein ethically to the Prohpets in
the Bible -  and also because I publicly criticized the fact that Gordon
entered Ramallah
illegally in the middle of Operation Defensive Wall to show his solidarity
with Arafat - exactly at the same time that Arafat was hiding the two
murderers of an Israeli cabinet minister as well as other wanted
terrorists in the same offices where Gordon affectionately clasped arms in
solidarity with Arafat.  Gordon is determined to try the same failed
harassment tactic as Zimmerman and now has yet another legal precedent
working against him.

    As you will see in the article below which singles out Zimmerman and
also Ben Gurion University, the Minister of Education is
starting to pressure Israeli universities to take action when faculty
members engage in treason, use their classrooms to force their extremist
views on their students, and otherwise use their positions for the purpose
of battling against their own country.  You will notice from the article
how prominently Ben Gurion University figures in such activities.  Please
contact the Minister and encourage her to take serious action in this
matter:
Education, Culture & Sport
Limor Livnat Tel  02-560-2330 Fax  02-560-2246 Email 
sar@education.gov.il


     Then please read the two important items below.  After reading these,
if you would like to express your opinion about the radicalization and
extremist anti-Israel activities so common at Ben Gurion University, I
suggest you make your opinions known to

 Officials at Ben Gurion University:

 Professor Avishay Braverman
 President, Ben-Gurion University
 Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
 Beer--Sheva 84105, Israel
 Fax: 972-8-647-2937
 avishay@bgumail.bgu.ac.il

 Professor Jimmy Weinblatt
 Rector, Ben-Gurion University
 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
 Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
 Beer--Sheva 84105, Israel
 Tel. 972-7-6461105
 Fax: 972-7-6472945
 weinb@bgumail.bgu.ac.il

 Professor Avishai Henik
 Dean of Social Sciences
 henik@bgumail.bgu.ac.il
 972-8-6472945
 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, P.O.B. 653
 Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
 Be'er-Sheva 84105, Israel.

and also American Associates of Ben Gurion University:
1430 Broadway
8th Floor
New York, NY 10018
phone 212-687-7721
fax 212-302-6443
email info@aabgu.org
Lis Gaines
President
Vivien K. Marion
Executive Vice President
If you have already told them what you think of leftist extremism at Ben
Gurion University, why not tell them again?


2.   Haaretz is suddenly alarmed at "threats" to free speech:
" Clipping the (lunatic)
fringes of academic freedom"  
 
By Dalia Shehori
Haaretz
A member of the Hebrew University's Law Faculty believes the dangers
facing academic freedom are more serious today than ever before, `due to
the addition of trying events that are continuing longer than they ever
have in the past.' 
 
Last March, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor lodged a complaint
against his colleague, Prof. Moshe Zimmerman for venturing a remark in the
classroom in support of Israel Defense Force soldiers who refuse to serve
in the territories. A demand for disciplinary action against Zimmerman was
reviewed - even after it was established that the complaint was factually
unfounded - and that it would not have warranted censure even if true.

At Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, lecturers demonstrated against
conferring an honorary doctorate on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Others
protested when Yossi Beilin was invited to lecture on campus.

In recent months, Education Minister Limor Livnat has complained to
University of Haifa Rector Prof. Aharon Ben-Ze'ev about political
statements Prof. Avraham Oz from the theater department made in class.
Livnat has also complained to Ben-Gurion University President Prof.
Avishai Braverman over comments in an article published by the head of the
university's Institute for Social Research, Prof. Lev Grinberg (Grinberg
writes sometimes in Tikkun -- SP) and
Livnat protested to the Hebrew University's President, Prof. Menachem
Magidor about Zimmerman's statement.

Responding to reports of Zimmerman's remarks, and also to a petition
signed by some 40 Hebrew University lecturers (the document was later
signed by 250 university teaching staff members) which expressed support
for "students who refuse to serve in the conquered territories," Livnat
knocked on the door of government attorney general Elyakim Rubinstein. She
asked for his opinion as to how she should "act against lecturers from the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, since their activities encourage
infraction of the law, and perhaps also sedition."

Livnat's turn to Rubinstein set the stage for a Knesset Education and
Culture Committee hearing on academic freedom sponsored by Zahava Gal-On,
MK (Meretz). To her chagrin, Gal-On found that at the end of this meeting
she was in a minority - most Knesset committee members supported Livnat's
approach on the issue.

It's worth mentioning that the Education and Culture Committee asked Prof.
Magidor to submit as evidence the petition that dozens of Hebrew
University staff members had signed. The Hebrew University President
refused to cooperate with this request, even though he personally opposes
refusal to serve in the territories. "I don't supervise what faculty
members say and what they disseminate," Magidor told Ha'aretz.

He insists that just as such matters are not for University administrators
to monitor and censor, the Knesset Committee has no business dealing with
it. Nonplussed, Livnat pushed on. She informed the Knesset Committee that
she intends to turn to the University of Haifa Rector about another
political statement made by Prof. Vered Krauss, during a lecture on
statistics.

Do the events outlined here pose a threat to academic freedom in Israel?
According to Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer, a member of the Hebrew
University's Law Faculty, dangers facing academic freedom are more serious
today than ever before. "This is due to the addition of trying events that
are continuing longer than they ever have in the past. The events of the
times have created an atmosphere of impatience toward ideas that are not
part of the consensus. Worthy political leaders should have made a major
effort to stem this wave [of intolerance], and send a message of openness
and tolerance toward unorthodox opinions. I think that the leadership is
doing the exact opposite."

Prof. Shlomo Avineri, an expert on political thought from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, agrees that the mix of war-like events and grave
social polarization creates circumstances that endanger academic freedom.
"Without making any comparison, McCarthyism came to the fore in the U.S.
at the peak of the Cold War." Avineri calls attention to efforts made in
America after September 11, 2001 to curb the scope of academic freedom, at
least with respect to the expression of criticism toward U.S. policy.
Current circumstances in Israel, Avineri reflects, "enjoin great
responsibility and restraint on the part of members of the academic
community, and also considerable restraint on the part of state
authorities."

It appears the attorney general concurs. In a written response to Livnat,
Rubinstein wrote that Zimmerman's statement and the petition "are an
irresponsible outrage. However, demands involving criminal prosecution in
a sphere outside of the IDF, in the public realm, have to be forwarded
with extreme caution." The State Prosecutor's Office has "discussed the
possibility of initiating criminal steps with respect to calls for refusal
to serve; but in the end it was decided not to proceed with [these steps],
not at this time," Rubinstein wrote. He added that when legal authorities
consider taking action against the expression of opinions, "considerable
weight is given to the crucial centrality of the principle of freedom of
speech." Rubinstein notified Livnat that complaints about concrete
statements made by lecturers will continue to be reviewed on a
case-by-case basis.

In Avineri's view, "anyone who calls on soldiers to refuse to serve in the
territories undoubtedly puts himself under fire; in moral terms, his
action is an abomination." Nonetheless, the prestigious Hebrew University
political scientist, says "I don't think that it's the business of the
Education Minister to intervene" in Zimmerman's case. Surely, Livnat can
state her view on any matter in cabinet meetings, Avineri says, "but as
Education Minister, she lacks status and authority to deal with the
enforcement of the universities' laws."

Kremnitzer regrets that "instead of standing up for freedom of speech,
which is currently endangered by a general public atmosphere of
intolerance, [Livnat] is acting in the opposite direction, operating as a
quasi-policewoman by monitoring statements made by academics. My
expectation is that the Education Minister should uphold academic freedom
rather than acting to curb it, and to intimidate the academic community."

Kremnitzer points out that the petition did not include an explicit,
illegal endorsement of refusal to serve. The letter, he says, was
formulated in a "careful manner which approaches the legal limit, without
transgressing it." He too opposes refusal to serve in the territories, but
believes that public discussion of the subject is important.

Prof. Magidor, who also chairs the committee of Israeli universities, says
that whenever provocative statements are made nowadays on campus or in an
academic context, "an atmosphere of hysteria" develops. He stresses that
all the nation's universities, certainly the Hebrew University, "uphold
the principle that any view which is not tantamount to incitement, and
does not endorse violence or any reprehensible act, can be articulated."

The root of the problem is apparently the lack of clarity inherent in the
concept "academic freedom." Everyone agrees that freedom of expression, a
staple element of civil liberties, applies to each citizen so long as he
or she does not break the law and academic freedom is subsumed within this
principle of free expression. But, beyond these basic precepts, there
remain a number of questions. The answers to them are far from obvious.
Does the principle of academic freedom apply to political statements made
by university lecturers? If the answer to this question is "yes," does the
principle also protect the expression of a lecturer's personal opinion in
class? If the answer here is "no," what rules of conduct apply to an
academic who teaches political science, history, sociology, philosophy or
other subjects in which handling of current events is sometimes
unavoidable?

Testifying to the Knesset Education and Culture Committee, Livnat offered
the following definition of academic freedom - the right is not unlimited,
and it does not protect "any reprehensible" comment, and matters which do
not pertain to research and professional treatment of a particular
academic discipline. The Knesset Committee's majority decided that
Livnat's appeal to the attorney general was "legitimate, and did not
represent infringement of academic freedom."

Livnat's definition and the Committee's decision are supported by Dr. Ron
Breiman, chairman of the Professors for a Strong Israel (PSI) group who
took part in the Knesset panel's meeting PSI has about 500 members, most
of them academics from fields of sciences and medicine. Dr. Breiman, from
Tel Aviv University, acknowledges that there is less occasion and
prompting for a lecturer in the sciences to express a political opinion in
class.

Breiman views refusal to serve as an illegal form of "desertion."
Encouragement of refusal to serve is also illegal, he believes. Such
infractions are not protected by the rule of academic freedom, the PSI
chairman maintains; they are subject to rule of law norms which govern
freedom of speech. Anyone who advocates "desertion" should face criminal
prosecution.

Academic freedom, Breiman explains, has limits. A lecturer has no right to
express his or her own opinion in class, he says, since such statements
pressure students, since they are afraid to express a contrary view, wary
that doing so might hurt their grades, or chances of advancement. He also
believes that discussion of the extreme right in a class must also be
balanced by treatment of the extreme left; otherwise, a lecture is
tendentious, and illegitimate. Should the idea of the transfer of Arabs
come up in a class, Breiman says (he himself opposes transfer), the
transfer of Jews should be opposed in a manner analogous to the
condemnation of the transfer of Arabs.

Breiman says that it's hard to precisely demarcate the borders of the rule
of academic freedom. Statements made by academics must be plausible and
prudent; it is best, Breiman says, to leave these standards of prudence
and good taste to the discretion of the lecturer. Prof. Zimmerman violated
these standards, Breiman believes, but he does not argue that Zimmerman
should face trial. The best course of action is for the academic community
as a whole to prohibit such wrongful statements of personal opinion.

Kremnitzer upholds a different conception of the essence of academic
freedom. It is clear, he says, that academic freedom does not protect
racist comments or remarks which can humiliate and flagrantly insult
persons, and statements that incite violence have no place in academia.
But racist or inciting expressions are banned by law. The specific meaning
of academic freedom as part of the principle of free speech is that
"persons from the academic community are allowed in in academic
institutions to pursue thoughts to the fullest extent. That is the ethos
of academic freedom."

Academics are expected to examine consensus ideas critically, and not to
accept them passively. An academic's vocation is to be critical and
skeptical. In order to protect this role, "the rule of academic freedom
has to be protected to the fullest extent permissible," Kremnitzer
concludes.

The principle of academic freedom is anchored in the law. Section 15 of
the higher education law maintains that "a recognized [academic]
institution is free to administer its academic matters under its budgetary
framework as it sees fit." Yet a review of specific university regulations
which hold sway at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, the
University of Haifa, Ben-Gurion University and Bar-Ilan University
indicates that the concept of academic freedom is not detailed.

It appears that this absence of a definition is no academic. Kremnitzer
explains that academic freedom is a complex concept, and "I am not sure
that any specific formulation can describe it in a full, satisfactory
fashion. So it's best to leave this as a matter of the general ethos."
Avineri says that were attempts made to define academic freedom, each
university would define the idea differently, and not standard, accepted
formula would be reached. However, Avineri adds, this fact is not
problematic. "The state enables universities to function economically, and
it does not intervene in terms of the contents of what is taught in them;
on the other hand, it upholds academic freedom in the sense that it allows
academic to enforce its own limits." He adds: "The academic community and
its members must relate to academic freedom as a cornerstone to be
protected."

The basic question remains: what is a lecturer allowed to say in class?
Prof. Zimmerman represents the extreme approach. As a historian, he says:
"History ends in the present. Thus, all these subjects, including refusal
to serve or Israeli behavior in the conquered territories, or problems
with Israel's political regime, are just as pertinent as any other
historical topic."

Avineri, in contrast, does not believe that "it is the role of a
university lecturer to express his political view in class." A professor
should "be cautious, and not digress toward current events, so as not to
transform university study into a derivative model of a current events
talk show."

As to Zimmerman's contention that history ends in the present, Avineri
replies: "That is the position of someone who wants to transform the
universities from responsible research institutions into schools for
political activity. That would be the end of the universities as we know
them."

Kremnitzer rejects the contention that a lecturer's expression of his or
her personal view imposes pressure on students. For the same lecturer can
write an article in a newspaper, and his or her views are known in public
in any case. Students, Kremnitzer says, are not children, and a lecturer's
views have no special influence upon them.

He thinks it is acceptable if Prof. Zimmerman makes a comparative
reference to current events during a lecture on the history of Germany -
such current event comparisons are legitimate so long as students have the
right to express contrasting views. Such current event references "make
learning more challenging and real," says Kremnitzer. In any case,
academics tend to prefer persons who disagree with their own views rather
than ones who blindly agree with what they say. "It just isn't interesting
when somebody duplicates [my views]," he says. "I'm looking for someone
who will argue with me."

Prof. Moshe Zimmerman teaches a course for first years students at the
Hebrew University entitled "Introduction to the late modern period." Some
200 students were enrolled in the course this year. These included a group
of 40 students who are officers from the IDF's Tactical Command Academy.
In March, half an hour before the first class of the second semester,
Zimmerman was notified that this group would not make it to the lecture
since its members were deployed at roadblocks.

Zimmerman related to this development at the start of his lecture. A
review conducted by the Hebrew University in response to a complaint
lodged about the incident established that Zimmerman said the following:
"There is a group of students which cannot come today due to the excuse
that its members are guarding at checkpoints, and the like. Such an excuse
is not acceptable to me. Were they to be missing because they were serving
in jail due to a refusal to serve in the territories, that would be
satisfactory to me."

Prof. Menahem Kahana, from the Hebrew University's Talmud Department,
lodged the complaint against Zimmerman, based on a report of the incident
in the Makor Rishon newspaper. Kahana noted that the report suggested that
Zimmerman would discriminate against students who were absent from the
university due to reserve service, and that he would give preferential
treatment to those who refused to serve. Kahana withdrew his complaint
after the University's review established what Zimmerman actually said -
had he been aware of the precise contents of the remarks, he would not
have lodged the complaint, even if Zimmerman's statement was unworthy, the
Talmud scholar explains.

In parallel, the head of the Tactical Command College, Colonel Danny
Davidi, along with Brigadier General Yaakov Zigdon from the IDF's Command
and Staff College, sent a harsh letter to the Hebrew University's Rector,
Prof. Haim Rabinowitch. "The statements made by the professor are more
damaging and dangerous than the sale of weapons and ammunition to the
Palestinians," the letter declared. Zimmerman's comments, the two IDF
officers objected, would furnish an unlimited supply of propaganda
ammunition to the Palestinians. The letter's authors claimed that
Zimmerman used a history lecture as a platform for his own views, and
imposed his opinion about the officers on the class.

The officers' anger continues to simmer. Recently they worked out an
agreement with the Hebrew University's Dean of Humanities, Prof. Gabriel
Motzkin by which the introduction to modern history course will be given
to officers from the Tactical Command college in summer school, by a
different lecturer. The IDF Spokesman and the Hebrew University Spokesman
deny that this agreement constitutes a dictate imposed by the army, and
that the university surrendered to IDF pressure. Both spokesmen present a
number of specific, professional arguments to support the change in
arrangements for the course.

Prof. Kremnitzer says: "Had Zimmerman announced that `I will give bonus
points to persons who refuse to serve,' I would say that his remark is
unacceptable, and that it ought to be denounced. But if someone says, as a
personal opinion, `the refuser is closer to my heart than one who serves,'
I don't regard it an unacceptable remark." Kremnitzer also responded to
the harsh language in the officers' castigation of Zimmerman: "The
comparison drawn between Zimmerman's comments and the sale of guns to the
enemy is insidious. To put him in the category of persons who commit clear
acts of treason ... is the way of the witch hunt."
 
 
WITCH HUNT: Officers said Prof. Zimmerman's support for refuseniks was
"more dangerous than selling weapons to the enemy." 
(Rafi Kutz, Kol Ha'ir)
 
 
3.  Subject: Yemini vs. Yiftahel:  Maariv Takes on a Ben Gurion University
anti-Israel Extremist

Enemies of the "Zionist enterprise"

A response to Prof. Oren Yiftahel
Ben Dror Yemini

A week ago I was subject to a hail of invective by Prof. Oren Yiftahel, after critiquing Yiftahel's political commentary, in the guise of academic analysis. I could answer Yiftahel line by line, and point out that despite the fact that we are talking about a senior member of Israeli academia, he suffers, I fear, from serious difficulties with reading comprehension. After all, I have published my views-in favor of a return to the '67 borders, against the settler enterprise, against the occupation and all its miseries, countless times. And if despite all that, I am still one who "spreads the neo-conservative right wing party line", then any further response on my part would be superfluous.

Such that I will not waste time settling scores with Yiftahel, I will just get right to the point. Yiftahel fumes principally over the fact that I dare to criticize "important great thinkers" on the basis of their "attitude towards Zionism". Well, actually he's right, but let me be precise: I blame a group of several dozen of members of academia who spread lies and libels against Israel, while indirectly encouraging anti-Semitism. I blame this group of disregarding, even purposefully, the basic facts which contradict the demonic narrative that they try to lay on Israel.

Most of the members of this group are ecstatic fans of the saint Edward Said, now deceased. Said is the father of the paradigm that blames the west and Zionism for all of the misfortunes and maladies of the Arab world. How so? The Arab world vacillates between two different approaches. In one approach: the oft-repeated chorus of how the Zionists are to blame, the west is to blame. In the other, arising from the reformist's camp, which says hating the west is simply self-deception, and that the key to change is to be found in the processes of democratization and secularization of the greater Arab nations.

Said is the crown prince of the first approach. Despite paying lip service to criticism of Arab rulers, his greatest project is to place the blame on the west, and on Zionism. Said succeeded. The reformist camp, who despises this self-deception, has been left in the minority. The Arab world is now paying a terrible price for Said's success: Two reports issued over the past few years by Arab intellectuals indicate that social gaps are widening, and that a culture of oppression reigns.

And enough already of always hearing about how it is because of Bush and the Americans and Zionism. In countries where there is no American influence, such as Sudan and Syria for example, oppression is far greater than anywhere else.

Said's ignorant adherents disseminate their rabbi's bible wherever they can. For example, they circulate to the world the libel that "the Zionist enterprise" (Yiftahel's terminology) is the root of all evil. Al Qaida then claps its hands.

Not that there are no injustices committed against the Palestinians, and not that there is no room for criticism of Israel. But they ignore, almost completely, the historical Arab refusal to accept any sort of arrangement, starting from the time of the British Mandate, continuing on to the offer of dividing up the territories between Jews and Arabs, and on to the famous "three No's" of Khartoum, and of course- rejecting Clinton's exaggerated offer, which would enable the end of the occupation and the rise of a Palestinian state. They ignore the fact that Arafat does not want a Palestinian state, nor does he want an end to the occupation. He wants the destruction of Israel.

On the Saturday that Yiftahel published his diatribe against me, a program was broadcast on the official Palestinian Authority television channel asserting that Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs. And here's another official statement: Arafat's closest advisors have clearly said that as far as they are concerned, "the right of return for Palestinians is the key element to successfully bringing about the annihilation of Israel".

But just as in the rest of the Arab world, there is a pragmatic element in the Palestinian camp. 135,000 people have already signed the Ayalon-Nusseibeh document, which includes renouncing the demand for the right of return. That's one of the realistic keys to a final arrangement. Rather than encouraging them, Yiftahel and his ilk publish articles against the "Zionist enterprise", and support, in one way or another, the Palestinian right of return.

Some of them, like Said, and like the extreme right wing among us, support the idea of one big country here, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Some of them do pay lip service to the desired solution of two states, but only under certain conditions. According to Yiftahel, a Palestinian state will be free of all Jews, but the other state, must under no circumstances be a state with a Jewish national identity, rather it should be a state for all of its citizens. The hypocrisy of Yiftahel and his group reaches astounding new levels: The Palestinians will have the right of return, but the Jewish right of return will have to be nullified.

So how exactly should a pragmatic Palestinian feel, one who wants to sign the Ayalon-Nusseibeh document, which subjects him not only to incitement against him from his own people, but also to Yiftahel's theses as well, who recommends the annihilation of the "Zionist enterprise"? This is how Yiftahel and his group ruin any chances of an agreement. This is how Yiftahel and his group encourage the insane demands of the Palestinians. This is how they help preserve the occupation.

People like Yiftahel have good intentions. They want a better world. But that doesn't release them from their responsibilities. They aren't willing to let facts confuse them, they are blind to them. And so that is how a dangerous coalition is born: made up of the Hamas, Arafat, the extreme right and the extreme left. It's a coalition of delayers of the only realistic solution that is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian: A democratic Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one.

And one more thing: according to the "forces of progress", America and the "Zionist enterprise" are the root of all evils. In the Ayatollah version they are referred to as "the Great Satan" (America), and "the Small Satan" (Israel). But despite all this, contrary to Yiftahel's claims, I never tried to shut these people's mouths up. I'm not so certain that history will be as forgiving of them.

yemini@maariv.co.il

http://www.maarivintl.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=5276

Zionist Professor Sued For Views in Israel  By Susan Rosenbluth (The Jewish Voice and Opinion)

The Israeli Left Defends Art
By Steven Plaut (1/04?)

Ah, the Israeli Left!   Every days brings us new wonders from it, new manifestations of anti-Semitism and treason.

   Among the Israeli or ex-Israeli leftist anti-Semites trekking the globe is one Mapplethropian "artist" named Dror Feiler.  Feiler hates Israel with a passion and supports Jihad and Palestinian terrorism.  He lives in Stockholm with his Swedish wife whence he spreads his views, including on the internet.  He also claims to be a musician who makes "music and noise" and my guess is more of the latter than the former.

    Among Feiler's recent "artistic" creations is a work celebrating the terrorist woman who blew herself up inside the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, murdering 21 people, some of them Arabs, many of the children.  Feiler seems to think this woman is a great hero, so he drew a portrait of her floating happily in a pool of Jewish blood.  The work is entitled "Snow White and the Madness of Truth" (http://www.makingdifferences.com/site/calendar.php?id=20 ). It was displayed in Sweden in a museum, the Historiska Museet, together with a poem that included the following phrases:

"She was also a woman

as white as snow, as red as blood, and her hair was as black as ebony

…. like a weed in her heart until she had no peace day and night

Hanadi Jaradat was a 29-year-old lawyer

Weeping bitterly, she added: "If our nation cannot realize its dream and

the goals of the victims, and live in freedom and dignity, then let the

whole world be erased"

Run away, then, you poor child

…. and the red looked beautiful upon the white".

It was all part of the preparations for some sort of Swedish conference on "genocide", which by all expectations will end up endorsing Arab plans to conduct genocide against Jews.

     The "art" was on display in Stockholm when the Israeli Ambassador decided to respond to it in a manner almost unseen by Israeli officials since the start of Oslo appeasement.  He responded to it as a Jew and a Zionist; after asking nicely that it be taken down, he vandalized the obscenity.    Curiously, the Ambassador is an appointee of Labor Party dove Ehud Barak, who was on Israeli TV soon afterwards cheering on the Ambassador for this rare act of Israeli self-pride and courage.  Surprisingly, Barak’s party and Meretz have NOT suggest that Feiler be granted the Israel Prize.

     Feiler runs a PLO front group called Jews for Israeli Palestinian Peace (JIPF).   He also serves as head of European Jews for a Just Peace, which might or might not have other members besides himself. The "artist" has filed a complaint with the Swedish police against the Ambassador for the vandalizing, and it set off a diplomat confrontation between Sweden and Israel. I personally think the Ambassador should say he was just engaging in theater and so his actions should be protected artistic expression.

"This was not a piece of art," the ambassador told Sweden's SR radio news

station. "It was a monstrosity. For me it was intolerable and an insult to the families of the victims," he said. "As ambassador [of] Israel I could not remain indifferent to such an obscene misrepresentation of reality."

Feiler describes himself as the "eye-bleeding ultimate composer of intifadic

and eruptive lung-outs." It turns out his parents were both communist party members in Israel and he was raised on a kibbutz.

     What is most interesting about this is how readily much of the Israeli Left has been to denounce the Ambassador for defending Jewish dignity and to defend the anti-Semitic "artist" and his absolute right to produce such obscenity. The Far Leftist daily Haaretz ran an editorial, several Op-Eds and lots of letters to the editor denouncing the Ambassador as a bully and vandal and defending the piece of "art".  They were joined by many others on the Israeli Left. Suddenly "artistic" expression is absolutely protected.  Except the theater by the Ambassador is not.

    Some in the academic Left are also chiming in.  Here is a letter written by Prof. Amiram Goldblum, one of the founders and long-time leaders in Peace Now, circulated this week on the web:

"The Stockholm Bully"

The aggressive response of Mazel to what seems to be an idiotic

artistic expression, will remain in public memory as another

display of Israeli violence, deriving from 35 years of occupation.

That is also the source of the governmental response, praising

the bully rather than recalling him and replacing him ASAP.

Israel has enough rednecks in the academy, no need to have them as

diplomats.

Amiram Goldblum, Ph.D. Cell

Professor of Medicinal Chemistry

School of Pharmacy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

ISRAEL 91120 email: amiram@vms.huji.ac.il

    Now it is interesting to place this sudden absolutism of the Left regarding artistic expression in context.  This is the very same Israeli Left that insists that any poster

that shows politicians the Left likes in unflattering manner, such as Yossi Beilin or Yossi Sarid wearing an Arab kafiya, should be grounds for prosecution for "incitement".   This is the same Left that cheered uncontrollably when Tatiana Suskind, the poor young woman who had made a poster of the Prophet Mohammed as a pig, was sentenced to a long prison term.  These are leftists who want pornography suppressed because it dishonors women. This is the same Israeli Left that has campaigned to tear down and bulldoze a memorial stone marker for Baruch Goldstein, who shot up the Mosque in Hebron.  This is the Left that wants all members of the Kahanist groups behind bars because some of them put up posters or write graffiti whose artistic value the Left questions.  And this is the Left that argues that T-shirts that read "Where there are no Arabs there is no Terrorism" should be jailed for "racism" and "incitement".

    In other words, by defending this nazi obscenity in Sweden, the Left is showing how openly anti-Semitic and anti-democratic it is.

Speaking of leftist confusion, every time a gynonazi from the Palestinians has blown herself up as a murdering suicide bomber, the Left has whined that her actions prove how oppressed and suffering the po' Palestinians are, especially their

womenfolk.   Naturally, the same blubberings were heard this week after a mother of two from Gaza murdered four Israelis, including those guards who had just shown her pity, and wounded 9 others, two very seriously, when she made her children orphans.

    Now it turns out that the Feminist Take on the murderess has met with some snags.  It seems, the mother was suspected by her Gaza husband of carrying on an extramarital affair and the only way she could escape being murdered by him and to "restore" her family's honor was to carry out the suicide bombing.  She was coerced into carrying out the mass murder by the Hamas, which has now announced it will adopt as its general policy the coercion of women suspected of "moral offenses" to redeem themselves through such mass murders.

    So much for the theory that Israeli "occupation" and brutality cause

the terror....

    My guess is that one of these moons, the Palestinians will start

equipping pregnant women with explosives around the bellies to try to blow

up Jews.  You realize what that would mean?   Why, it would be the

Palestinian version of Roe vs Wade!

    Oh and I can guarantee you that at the next world Feminizt conference,

the Palestinian women will be there, cheered on by the Left, wailing about the harshness of the treatment of women ... by the Israelis.

Israel National News 12/29/03

FINES OF CLOSE TO $200,000 HAVE BEEN LEVIED ON ARUTZ-7!  Your contribution can make a difference.  Send just your phone number to <donations@ArutzSheva.org> and Arutz-7 will contact you.

1. PUBLIC SERVICE FOR KETZALEH, TZUR AND MRS. MELAMED
Justice Yoram Noam of the Jerusalem Magistrates Court handed down this afternoon the sentences of the ten Arutz-7 directors, broadcasters, and employees who were convicted of operating an illegal radio station.  Four defendants will perform community service for 3-6 months each.  The ten defendants were also fined between 20,000 and 50,000 shekels each, in addition to the fine imposed on Arutz-7 to the tune of 450,000 shekels.   The judge noted that the fines and/or community service can be served in the form of prison sentences.

Yaakov Katz, known as Ketzaleh - indefatigable Executive-Director of Arutz-7 and Beit El Yeshiva Center Institutions, wounded as an IDF officer during the Yom Kippur War and bound to a wheelchair for months afterwards, a founding member of the community of Beit El - was sentenced to a six-month term, commutable to public service, as well as a fine of 50,000 shekels and a suspended sentence of six months.  On his way out of the courtroom, Ketzaleh said, "All my life I have been doing public service work.  Neither would I have been afraid of actual jail time; I would have been able to study Torah there.   The most important thing is the preservation of freedom of speech."  He said that Arutz-7 would appeal the "unprecedentedly stiff fines," and the State Prosecution, as well, has said it will appeal.

Arutz-7 Directors Mrs. Shulamit Melamed and Yoel Tzur, and engineer Ya'ir Meir, were each sentenced to three months in prison, also executable in the form of public service.   They were fined between 25,000 - 30,000 shekels each.

The seven other defendants were sentenced to pay fines and/or serve suspended sentences.   They are:
Rabbi Zalman Baruch Melamed, Rabbi of Beit El since its inception in 1977, Dean of Yeshivat Beit El and Beit El Yeshiva Center Institutions, leading member of the Yesha Council of Rabbis, and co-founder of Arutz-7;
Haggai Segal, Arutz-7 News Director;
Gidi Sharon, veteran music broadcaster;
David Shapira, broadcaster and director of Arutz-7's French department;
Adir Zik, veteran fiery nationalist broadcaster;
Sha'ul Avni, captain of Arutz-7's Eretz HaTzvi ship.

The three broadcasters received four-month suspended sentences, as well as fines of 20,000 shekels each.  Rabbi Melamed received the same sentence, though his fine was for 25,000 shekels.  News Director Haggai Segal was sentenced to a six-month suspended term and a fine of 30,000 shekels.  The ship's captain Sha'ul Avni was sentenced to a three-month suspended term and a fine of 20,000 shekels.

Justice Arnon noted today that he took into account the fact that as soon as the conviction was handed down, Arutz-7 ceased its broadcasts and sold the ship from which the broadcasts emanated.  He further said that Arutz-7 consistently paid royalties, and noted that there was no proof that Arutz-7 ever interfered with air-traffic communications.  "The fact that the government did not enforce the law against the station over the course of many years," he stated, "gave its operators the impression that their sin was not grave - especially when important public figures, including MKs and ministers, were interviewed on the station."

Some 3,000 fans of Arutz-7, including several Knesset Members organized by MK Uri Ariel (National Union), demonstrated outside the courtroom prior to the sentencing.   "No to Shutting Mouths!" was the theme.  Among the participants were also Rabbi Dov Lior of the Yesha Rabbinical Forum and Tourism Minister Benny Elon.   Ariel said, "Arutz-7 is the mouthpiece of a very large public sector, and its silencing is a grave blow at the right to freedom of speech."

The Arutz-7 management has consistently denied the accusations against it.  Many Arutz-7 listeners continue to enjoy the station's broadcasts via the internet and over regular phone lines.  One of Israel's leading internet providers is now offering special deals for internet connectivity tailored to the Arutz-7 listening public.   For example, one deal for families that don't want exposure to the internet enables tuning into the webcast using a computer with no screen.

Tommorow! VISIT ARUTZ 7, Beit El & Shiloh!! Bullet Proof Bus from Jerusalem Call 02-970-9804
 
2. "HEROES WHO SAVED ISRAEL'S HONOR" SPEAK
Haggai Segal said afterwards, "The real punishment was the trial itself, which lasted almost six years...  The sentences were not light; a 30,000 shekel fine for a reporter whose only sin is broadcasting the public voice is not light."

Noam Arnon, spokesman for the Hevron Jewish Community who spoke regularly on Arutz-7, delivered a moving public statement after the sentence was handed down: "This group of defendants saved the honor of the Nation of Israel, and instead of being brought to trial, they should have been on their way to the President's Home to receive the Israel Prize.  They are like an air-freshener, purifying the media air that is all but conquered and polluted by the left side of the political spectrum.  No punishment will break them, and they will continue, with G-d's help, to work for the good of the Jewish people...  We here today who escorted them to the courthouse represent the hundreds of thousands of Arutz-7's loyal listeners."

Asked afterwards about the sentences, Arnon said, "I spoke with legal experts, and they said that these sentences are not at all light.  True, they won't be going to jail, and for this we are grateful, but they were sentenced to months in prison that can be commuted to public service - whoever heard of such a thing for actions of this type?   The fines, too, are very heavy, and we should not make light of this."

 

ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN ISRAEL'S UNIVERSITIES DURING THE OSLO DECADE: 1993-2004

Bans of Free Speech When Politically Incorrect or Insensitive

   Not only are Jerusalem police tearing down the posters on public
billboards that are making fun of Ehud Olmert in a manner that some might
find tasteless, but they have announced that they are hunting for the
perpetrators who pasted those posters up and will arrest them if they are
identified.  Their felony?  Exercise of the right of free speech by
non-leftists, which in post-survivalist Israel constitutes "incitement".

   So let us get this clear.  Screening of the Goebbals film "Jenin Jenin"
is protected speech in Israel.  So is justifying Arab suicide bombers and
praising mass murderers.  Arabs marching through the streets or on
campuses screaming "In fire and blood we will redeem Palestine" or
"Massacre the Jews", those are all forms of protected speech.

    But putting up a poster on a public billboard that shows Olmert
marking boxes of produce from the West Bank with a yellow star - now THAT
is criminal incitement and the perps must be jailed.    By the way, those
very same Jerusalem public billboards are regularly decorated with posters
advertising "escort services" and other establishments of prostitites. 
THEY are still up there and have not been torn down by the Jerusalem
thought police nor have their sponsors been busted.

The Israeli Thought Police
By Ariel Natan Pasko

Clump-clump, clump-clump, clump-clump, hark, I hear the sound of the
goose-stepping Bolshevik Israeli thought police in the distance.
Ultra-leftist Meretz MK Zahava Gal-On is at it again. This time she's going
after Arutz-7 - the Israel National News - Hebrew website. It's not good
enough that the Israeli Left-Wing Thought Police, hiding behind the
smoke and mirrors of legalism, have managed to silence the most significant
independent voice on the airwaves, Arutz-7 Radio. The erstwhile MK,
"guardian of the public," wants to protect the innocent from hearing other
views different than those she hears in her Leftist Ghetto. She claimed
that an opinion article published on their website entitled,
"Expulsion, not Transfer" constituted a violation of laws against incitement, and
called on Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein to investigate into it,
and he is.

Clump! -clump, clump-clump, clump-clump, MK Zahava Gal-On, just a couple
months ago, asked the Attorney General to look into a Jerusalem Post
editorial she said had "words of incitement to murder" in it. The
Jerusalem Post editorial said, "The world will not help us; we must help
ourselves. We must kill as many of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders as
possible, as quickly as possible, while minimizing collateral damage, but
not letting that damage stop us. And we must kill Yasser Arafat,
because the world leaves us no alternative." Where is Freedom of the Speech?
Where is Freedom of the Press? When was it ever "incitement to murder",
to call for the death of the enemy in wartime? Only in Israel, only on
the Bolshevik Left, only to shut people up and divert attention from
discussing the real issue, Arafat's war against Israel. By the way, in
the end the Attorney General found nothing prosecutable in the editorial.
Freedom of Speech 1, Thought Police 0.

Back in May 2003, MK Gal-On called on the Attorney General to "warn"
members of the Yesha Rabbinical Council against releasing a Halachic -
Jewish law - ruling against the Road Map "peace" plan. Well, what are
they supposed to issue, an economic impact report, they're rabbis? What?
They're not allowed to think differently from Zahava?

And what does Gal-On think? Well for one she thought that after 12 Jews
were killed in Hebron last Nov. 2002, the deaths be exploited to expel
the entire Jewish community of Hebron from the city. That's what she
told an Israel Radio interviewer, just days after the slaughter. And she
thinks it's just fine to meet with the leader of the enemy during
wartime. That's right she's met Arafat several times in the last three
years. Now that should be illegal!

Though Arutz-7 does not endorse the opinions it publishes in its op-ed
section, Arutz-7 noted that the sentence MK Gal-On questioned was taken
out of context, and does not incite to murder. "Incitement" you should
know, is the new catchall phrase the Left has invented since the Rabin
murder, to frighten all those who would think differently than them. In
fact, the author, Gil Ronen, writes in the article, "no one will have
to take the law into his own hands."  So, where's the incitement? I went
to check out this article myself on Arutz-7's Hebrew site. But
frightened of further persecution, it seems Arutz-7 deleted the listing from
the current articles list, and the page itself, although they forgot to
delete the title from Ronen's archive list. "Expulsion, not Transfer,"
the now "ghost" article, ran on October 28th.  

According to Arutz-7, the article's basic assumption was that since
there is no chance for reaching peace with the Arabs of Yesha - Judea and
Samaria, the West Bank and Gaza - there is therefore no alternative but
to "remove this 'nation' from our midst." Isn't that National Union MK
Benny Elon's plan? Ronen wrote that he does not support transfer, as
"the Palestinians are not European Jews, and we are not Germans."
Instead, he suggests a "gradual deterioration" in which the war against
terrorists expands, including more targeted killings, more house demolitions,
and more air raids. Sounds good to me, in fact I've written several
such articles, for example calling on the Israeli government to use attack
helicopters against Hamas political-rally funerals - "The Call of the
Israel Apache" - and suggested that, "There is Only A Military
Solution." I dare Gal-On to "investigate" me. It seems our dear "guardian of the
public," a child Olah - immigrant - from the former Bolshevik S
oviet Union - hasn't learned a thing about democracy, freedom of
speech or the press in her life! And as a policy analyst, that is my
professional opinion.

"No one will have to take the law into his own hands," Ronen writes.
"It's enough that officers and soldiers interpret their instructions as
broadly as possible and employ maximum force," noting as an example that
if a Jewish neighborhood is fired on, the military response should not
be limited to one specific window or house, but to the entire row of
houses from where the attack emanated. The sentence that troubled MK
Gal-On so much reads, "The only ones who will die will be Palestinians, and
whoever doesn't want to die, will be forced to run away." I disagree
with Ronen, it should become government policy, not just the purview of
individual soldiers; by the way, in wartime the goal is to kill the
enemy and not be killed. And, an overwhelming majority of Israelis consider
this wartime.

Gal-On implied that Ronen's call to abandon dangerous house-to-house
searches for terrorists, in favor of air-bombings! , is a form of
incitement "to genocide of hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians."
Notice her exaggeration to justify suppression. House-to-house searches
have claimed many Israeli soldiers' lives in the past three years. Why
chase after political commentators and media outlets? Why doesn't she take
her beef to where it really belongs, with Sharon and the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF)? They've used air-bombings several times already, against
Hamas targets, rather than go into the houses to get the wanted men.

By the way, several public figures including MK's have also expressed
the opinion that air-bombings should be stepped up. For instance, in
Dec. 2001, National Union MK Eliezer Cohen said, "This is war, not just
terrorism, and we must fight back accordingly. They are fighting us with
all of their resources and weaponry, and we must do the same. Our army
knows exactly what to do, and it is time to do it." And in Dec.! 2002,
National Union leader MK Avigdor Lieberman called for a "decisive
military victory." So why save Arab terrorists and their supporters, when you
can save the life of Jewish soldiers?

Zahava, they didn't teach you that in Bolshevik training school did
they? Clump-clump, clump-clump, clump-clump, here come those thought
police!

Ariel Natan Pasko is an independent analyst & consultant. He has a
Master's Degree in International Relations & Policy Analysis.  His articles
appear regularly on numerous news/views and think-tank websites, in
newspapers, and can be read at: www.geocities.com/ariel_natan_pasko

(c) 2003/5764 Pasko

====================================
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FREEMAN CENTER BROADCAST - November 28, 2003

ISRAEL'S INCREASINGLY SELECTIVE DEMOCRACY
By  Steven Plaut

Consider the following statements. At the end of them you will be asked to
explain what exactly the difference is among them:
1. Mohammed was a pig.
2. Butcher the Jews.
3. In fire and blood we will redeem Palestine.
4. Zionists are Nazis.
5. Bibi Netanyahu is a Nazi.
6. Rocks are not enough; bullets must be used by Arabs to liberate
themselves.
7. The children of Jewish settlers are Hitler-jugend.
8. When I see religious Jews I really understand the Nazis.
9. The Germans had the right idea of how to deal with the Jews.
10. Israeli soldiers are Nazi storm troopers.
11. Religious Jews are collectively guilty of murder.
12. Judaism is a gutter religion.
13. Zionists are Judeo-Nazis.
14. We need many suicide bombers and "Engineers".
15. We will have a jihad until Israel ceases to exist.
16. Rabin was a mass murderer of Arabs and no one should honor him.
17. It is right and proper that settlers be gunned down.
18. We will never stop killing until Israel ceases to exist.
19. Zionism is a form of racism and colonialism that must be ended with force.
20.     Israel behaved like Nazi Germany in Jenin.
21.  Israel should expel the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.

Ok. So what is the difference? Well the answer is simple. Quotations #1 and  #21 above are criminal speech in Israel, for which one will do real hard jail time.  All the other statements above are protected speech, legal expressions of legitimate political opinion in Israel. Not only may you say all of these other things in Israel, for some of them you are likely to be granted tenure at the Hebrew University.

Statements #2 (Butcher the Jews) and #3 (In fire and blood we will redeem Palestine) are the universal chants at each and every gathering of Palestinians, and increasingly also of Israeli Arabs. Number 3 was chanted at Haifa University by Arab. For #8 (When I see religious Jews I really understand the Nazis) the "artist" Yigal Tomarkin was almost granted a Yad Veshem honor last week. Professors at the Hebrew University have stated #4, #5, #7, #10, #11 and #13.

4. Zionists are Nazis.
5. Bibi Netanyahu is a Nazi.
7. The children of Jewish settlers are Hitler-jugend.
10. Israeli soldiers are Nazi storm troopers.
11. Religious Jews are collectively guilty of murder.
13. Zionists are Judeo-Nazis.

Arab Knesset Members from the Communist party have stated #6, #15, #16 and #17.

6. Rocks are not enough; bullets must be used by Arabs to liberate
themselves.
15. We will have a jihad until Israel ceases to exist.
16. Rabin was a mass murderer of Arabs and no one should honor him.
17. It is right and proper that settlers be gunned down.

And PLO officials have said almost all of the above, except of course #1. As for #12, (Judaism is a gutter religion) Chicken Lou Farrakhan's famous chirp, this did not cause Israeli officials to deny him entrance to Israel.

Of all the above, except for #1 (Mohammed was a pig) and #21 (Israel should expel the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza), it is the official position of the Israeli political establishment and of the Israeli courts that the statement is simply protected free speech, perhaps crude, vulgar and objectionable, but protected speech nonetheless.  

A few years ago Tatiana Suskin made leaflets with the offensive passage about Mohammed.   She may have been a
fanatic, a naif, and perhaps even a bit dangerous. She used poor taste and was vulgar and crude. Yet her poster of the Prophet Mohammed as a Pig would be protected (if tasteless) speech in any true democracy in the world.

But not in Israel. In Israel it is a crime for which one does real jail time in hard-core prison, for a period of two years, more than many drug smugglers and rapists get.

Then the political establishment, under the Likud this time, launched a jihad against Arutz7, the only independent voice of non-leftist political dissent in Israeli broadcasting.   First the station was shut down, then the government announced it would seek to toss the owners into prison for long terms.  And now it wants to prosecute the Arutz77 web site owners because a columnist wrote an opinion containing point #21.   Zahava Gal-on, the Chief McCarthyist for the Meretz Party, petitioned the Attorney General to prosecute the web site operators because the columnist called for expulsion of Palestinians.  Of course, Gal-On's own party calls for the mass expulsion of Jews from the West Bank and Gaza, yet they have not been indicted for "racism".

Suskin's case and the jihad against Arutz7 have been proof of how selective democracy has become in Israel. Ever since the Rabin assassination, the Israeli Left has promoted a unique political philosophy holding that free speech protection should apply only to leftists, and that expression by non-leftists is criminal incitement and sedition. This was the official position of the Attorney General and the courts under the misrule of Israel's increasingly-fanatic Labor Party and its Marxist Meretz partners.

The Israeli establishment argued that Suskin's actions offend the Moslems.  Well, Moslem anti-Semitic speech and actions offend the Jews, or at least all Jews who are not self-hating lemmings. What is worse, porking Mohammed or applauding the Engineer and the mass murderers of Jews?  Israeli freedom and democracy are now in serious danger, this from a government led by the party of that great believer in democracy and constitutionalism Menahem Begin.

Free Speech For Fundamentalist Leftists Only Endorsed by the Supreme Court of Israel
Steve Plaut
11/19/03

Israel's Supreme Court has taken yet another step towards fulfilling its
agenda of imposing leftist fundamentalism on Israel.   The Court has just
ordered the Israel Broadcasting Authority to broadcast propaganda in favor
of the treasonous "peace plans" of Yossi Beilin and Ami Ayalon.

Lest you think this is simply an application of free speech in a
democracy, let us note that the TV station and radio stations operated by
the IBA are non-commercial state-owned stations that do not HAVE any
commercial advertisements.  While they are allowed
to broadcast "public interest messages", usually things like short sound
bites asking people to contribute to the Cancer Fund or to save water or
similar things, they explicitly are supposed to be prohibited from airing
political commentary as ads.

But evidently the Supreme Court judicial tyrants of the Fundamentalist
Left do NOT see anything political or controversial about the airing of
ads endorsing the treasonous "peace initiatives" of non-elected persons
who do not represent the country nor even their own party.  In other
words, ads promoting leftist ideology are not political at all, just
promoting peace, and so must be aired.

  What would be political, you ask?   Well,
things like ads suggesting that Oslo had been a tragic mistake, or ads
suggesting Israel should use force against Palestinian barbarism, or
reading the Rabin quote below, or reading the wrong parts from the Bible. 
THOSE would be political and controversial and so would be prohibited.

Let us note that just a few months back the Court supported the IBA in
banning ads asking people to recite Psalms from the Bible!

Here is the news blurb about the decision:

High Court nixes IBA ban on Geneva Accord, People's Voice  
 
By Yuval Yoaz, Haaretz Correspondent
 
The High Court of Justice on Wednesday morning
overturned a decision by the Israel Broadcasting
Authority and the Second Broadcasting Authority to
ban commercials promoting unofficial peace plans.
 
A three-justice panel headed
by Supreme Court President
Aharon Barak heard the
petitions filed by the
brokers of the People's
Voice, an Israeli-Palestinian
civil initiative established
by Ami Ayalon and Sari
Nusseibeh and aimed at
promoting peace between the
 
two sides, and the initiators of the Geneva
Accords.

The legal battle had become a fight in principle
to annul regulations pertaining to the
broadcasting of advertisements dealing with
political disputes.

The petition filed by the initiators of the
Geneva Accords deals with the IBA's refusal to
air commercials notifying the public of the
start of a campaign to distribute copies of the
agreement in mail boxes around the country.

Some 1.5 million copies of the Geneva Accords
were sent out Sunday to addresses countrywide,
with another 1.5 million copies to follow in
the coming days.

The copy mailed to the home of Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon has yet to reach its destination,
after the security guards outside the Prime
Minister's Residence refused to accept the
envelope delivered by Yossi Beilin and MKs Haim
Oron (Meretz) and Yuli Tamir (Labor). Over the
past few days, the Geneva Accords initiators
have requested a meeting with Sharon, but have
yet to receive a response.

Also Sunday, Beilin, Oron and Labor MKs Avraham
Burg and Amram Mitzna presented the Geneva
Accords at a meeting of the Kibbutz Movement's
secretariat. A unanimous decision to adopt and
support the agreement followed the meeting.

The Kibbutz Movement also called on its members
at kibbutzim around the country to promote and
help to drum up support for the Geneva Accords
as an important alternative to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Holocaust Denial Now Legal in Israel But Not in Europe
11/15/03
Steve Plaut

In many countries in Europe it is against the law to deny the
Holocaust.  These countries believe that those who deny there ever was a
Holocaust of Jews, who deny there were no death camps in World War II, are
not naive and simple-minded deluded people but rather they are nazis.  
Denying the Holocaust in these democratic countries is a hate crime. 
Lying about the Holocaust is a felony there.

    Israel, as you know, this week adopted free speech absolutism for
anti-Semites, in the form of a Supreme Court ruling holding that the
Goebbels-like film "Jenin Jenin" cannot be banned in Israel.  An Arab
fascist Knesset Member even proposed that it now be aired in the
parliament itself.

    Free speech absolutism in Israel appears to be restricted to
anti-Semitic lies.  So it is entirely likely that Holocaust Denial films
and books will now be proclaimed protected sppech in Israel in the
middle of a war for its national survival.  While the academic Left has
not yet produced open Holocaust Deniers in Israel, there are already a
handful who, in their anti-Zionist zeal, do themselves endorse OTHER
people who are Holocaust Deniers and neonazis, people such as Norman
Finkelstein or Abu Abbas or Hanan Ashrawi.

    And what is NOT protected speech in this new Orwellian Israel?

    It is NOT protected speech to wear a T-shirt on which it is printed,
"Where there are no Arabs there are no terrorist atrocities."   That has
been proclaimed racist incitement.  Those sporting such garb have been
arrested and are now awaiting trial in the land of free speech absolutism.

WHY THE LEFT CONTINUES TO DOMINATE ISRAEL
Freeman List 10/24/03
by Nadia Matar

The media dictatorship has struck once again. The directors of Arutz 7
(Israel National Radio) were convicted. The holy cannon of the leftist
judicial system, that represents a minority of the people, is trying to gag
the national camp,which speaks for the majority of the People of Israel. It
is a direct continuation of the Altalena affair - in which the shock troops
of the left shelled the Altalena ship with the "holy cannon".   The
conviction of Arutz 7 by the court is no less than a direct shelling of the
Arutz 7 ship, with the goal of sinking and silencing the national camp.

And so it happens that anti-Jewish radio stations, such as Kol Yisrael and
Galei Tzahal (IDF Radio) (which the national camp calls "Kol Yishmael [the
Voice of Ishmael] and Galei Ashaf" [PLO Radio]), that provide a free and
sympathetic forum to the internal and external enemies of Israel, continue
to broadcast. Arutz 7, a proud Jewish radio station, that broadcasts
programs of love and loyalty to the people of Israel, the Torah of Israel,
and the Land of Israel, is, however, forced to cease its broadcasts. The
"liberal people" who pretend to champion democracy and the basic right of
freedom of expression are silent. It seems there is freedom of expression
in Israel only for the left.

Totalitarian Purity is Restored
Israel National News
by Steven Plaut
October 22, 2003

Yet another nail was banged this week into the coffin of Israeli democracy. On Monday, the McCarthyist Left succeeded, at long last, in shutting down Arutz-7, the main voice of non-leftist dissidence in Israel. This under a government headed by Ariel Sharon.

Israel's Hebrew media are the occupied territories of Israel's Far Left. Haaretz is considerably less pluralistic than was Pravda in the days of Brezhnev and is increasingly advocating the "One-State Solution", meaning the Rwanda Solution, to Israel's existence, where Israel would cease to exist as a Jewish state. Yediot Aharonot is just slightly less extremist than Haaretz and its Op-Ed pages have been dubbed by some wags "Fatahland". Maariv is the most balanced of the Hebrew papers, although it also is more leftist than not.

The Jerusalem Post is balanced, but has a tiny market share - only among English speakers. Israel's three TV stations compete against one another over who can be the most extremist and leftist, who the most biased. They are considerably less pro-Israel than the BBC and CNN. Most radio stations are still state-run and - by definition - that makes them leftist. The Likud has never challenged the hegemony of the Left over the state-owned electronic media when it has held office.

That leaves the "pirate stations". Israel has a long history of "pirate" radio stations. These are broadcasters that operate transmitters technically outside the legal jurisdiction of Israel, at sea on ships, or just illegally from someone's attic. Pirate radio exists largely because the government has refused to sell broadcast licenses to private-sector groups.

The first pirate ship was that of leftist wacko Abbie Nathan, who used it to broadcast obnoxious rock-and-roll noise mixed in with political caterwauling from the Far Left. He was allowed to broadcast unfettered for decades, starting in the early 1970s, by governments of both the Labor Party and the Likud. He eventually went bankrupt and celebrated the shutting down of his "Peace Boat" by scuttling it smack in the center of Israel's shipping lanes.

But sauce for the goose in Israel has never been sauce for the lemmings. When the Right set up its own pirate radio station on a ship outside the territorial waters of Zion, the McCarthyist Left launched a jihad from its first day designed to shut it down. Despite repeated legal and legislative attempts to shut it down, Arutz-7 (meaning Channel 7 in Hebrew) has struggled on, with its shoestring of a budget, until this week. (A handful of other pirate stations, many with Orthodox religious orientation, have also broadcast on and off. Unlike the United States, the Israeli government has never looked kindly on religious radio stations having a right to part of the airwaves.)

Arutz-7 was a breath of fresh air in Israel's near-totalitarian world of Leftist media hegemony. It proved itself absolutely correct in its denunciation of the Oslo Accords, the only media outfit in Israel daring to oppose Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres' policies. The Left denounced Arutz-7 as "inciters", McCarthyist terminology for people who disagree with the Left, and the Leftists made no secret of their belief that Arutz-7 was directly responsible for Rabin getting assassinated. And this, at the same time that they said the Leftist media should not be held accountable for the 1,300 Israelis murdered so far by the Oslo "peace process" they touted.

The quality of Arutz-7 broadcasts varied. By far, the best program was the weekly commentary by Adir Zik. Zik is an eloquent and intelligent commentator, although he lost a lot of credibility by his promotion of the infantile Chamish conspiracy theories. Hagai Segal, who sometimes writes in Yediot, and Eliakim Haetzni are just behind Zik.

The Left had been filing petition after petition to shut Arutz-7 down. The same Labor Party that defended Abbie Nathan's ship to its last decibel has led the jihad against Arutz-7. It was joined by a host of leftists who have served as Attorney-Generals. Incredibly, some of the worst assaults against Arutz-7 were carried out when the Likud was in office, since the Likud always seeks to be the me-too Labor Party and to out-Mapai them.

Five years ago a leftist lawyer filed a suit with the court to shut down the station and indict its owners/managers. It took five years for the Court to find for the plaintiff and restore pure leftist hegemony over Israel's media.

Another Attack on Free Speech in Israel
splaut@mail.hevra.haifa.ac.il
Jun 3, 2003

     Free speech in Israel suffered yet another defeat
yesterday.  Left-wing McCarthyism enjoyed yet another victory.

      The latest assault on free speech took the form of a decision by
Israel's Attorney General to prosecute Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzberg under
Israel's ridiculous "anti-racism" laws.

       Ginzberg is a Kahanist and a Right-wing extremist.   You may strongly
dislike his views.  But meaningful tests of free speech are never performed
with moderates, only with extremists.

       Ginzberg has a long track record of supporting Kahanist "population
transfer" solutions with respect to Palestinian and Israeli Arabs.  He
wrote a book praising, or at least justifying, the murderer Baruch
Goldstein, after Goldstein killed 29 Arabs in the Machpela Cave's mosque in
Hebron, one of the every few actual cases where a Jew murdered Arabs.  And
Ginzberg has said other things that are generally not acceptable in polite
company or repeatable before young children.

       But the issue at hand is not whether or not you agree with
Ginzberg's extremist views and style of rhetoric, but rather whether you
believe in freedom of speech.   Nothing Ginzberg has said or written goes
anywhere near the level of venomous hatred and support for violence that is
expressed every day by Israel's Arab politicians and Islamic movement
leaders.  Yet the political establishment has long insisted that THOSE Arab
oral atrocities are all protected speech.   The same Attorney General who
has decided to prosecute Ginzberg and who has already prosecuted other Far
Rightists in Israel has NEVER prosecuted Far Leftist Israelis nor Israeli
Arabs for the countless expressions of support for Arab terrorism, for
calls to Saddam to annihilate Israel, for calls to see Israel destroyed,
for cheering on the murders of "settlers", etc.   So why is sauce for the
goose not sauce for the lemmings?

       The position of the Attorney General has always been that mere
praise for terrorist atrocities and mass murders that have ALREADY taken
place does not constitute criminal incitement, only direct calls to
perpetrate NEW atrocities.  That is the fig leaf used by the Attorney
General to justify his refusal to prosecute leftists and Arabs for such
incitement and speech endorsing terrorism and murder.   But at the worst,
this is precisely the same thing that Ginzberg did.  He praised Baruch
Goldstein's murders AFTER they had been perpetrated.   Actually, the
Attorney General is technically not even prosecuting Ginzberg for praising
violence, but for being a "racist".   But "racism" in Israeli Newspeak has
always been a term restricted to Kahanists saying negative things about
Arabs or calling for "transfer", and has never applied to Far Leftists
cheering when "settlers" are murdered, nor Arabs denouncing Jews in
blood-curdling terms and chanting "Massacre the Jews".   Not a single Arab
nor Israeli Jewish Leftist has ever been prosecuted under the Israeli
"anti-racism" laws.   SO why is Ginzberg being prosecuted while the Far
Leftist traitors are not?

        The prosecution of Ginzberg is part of the broader assault on the
expression and speech of Right-wingers in Israel by the Left, following the
Rabin assassination.   The Left has always preached the ridiculous canon
that holds that free speech by Rightists somehow caused the Rabin
assassination.  Moreover, leftist McCarthyists have always insisted that
some mysterious Rabbis were behind Yigal Amir's assassination of Yitzhak
Rabin.

       No one of course has ever produced any evidence that any Rabbi
anywhere called for Rabin to be killed or even justified the assassination
AFTER it took place.  As far as I know, even Ginzberg  never called for nor
justified that assassination, and if he had - it would have been the main
clause in the Attorney General's writ of indictment (but is not there,
reinforcing my contention).   Rather, the indictment of Ginzberg in my
opinion actually has nothing to do with his words of praise for Goldstein's
1994 atrocity.   If it had, he would have been indicted years ago.  His
book praising Goldstein came out in 1995.

       Instead, Ginzberg is to be indicted because of the desperation of
the Israeli Left to invent fanatic pro-violence Rabbis who can be blamed
for Yigal Amir and for Baruch Goldstein.   Beyond those two, the Left has a
great difficulty identifying any other violent "byproducts of the rhetoric"
of the Right.   A no less important reason is that the current Attorney
General, Eliakim Rubinstein, desperately wants to get himself appointed to
the Supreme Court and he needs the support of the Left for that to happen.

      So poor Rabbi Ginzberg may do some hard prison time to help
Rubinstein get that robe.

___________________________________________________________________________

A Tee Shirt and Arab Incitement
Israel National News Opinion
Isaac Kohn
13 March 2003

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2092

JUDGE SILENCES PRIME MINISTER
Israel National News (Arutz 7)
January 10, 2002

    The Central Elections Committee will convene tomorrow night in the wake of the political storm caused by the abruptly cut-off press conference given by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last night. Sharon was in the midst of explaining, in a nationally televised speech, his position regarding the accusations that had been made against him over the preceding few days. As of yesterday, public support was down by some 25%, compared to a month ago, following several weeks of press reports of Likud party corruption. After about 14 minutes, however, the broadcasts were stopped, by order of Elections Committee Chairman Judge Michael Cheshin, who said that Sharon's speech included illegal electioneering.

    The Likud is furious at the decision, with at least one official accusing Judge Cheshin of "shutting the Prime Minister's mouth." Likud campaign headquarters announced that the attacks on Sharon had been ongoing for a number of days, "yet when he wants to respond to the unrestrained attacks, he is prevented from doing so." A Likud strategist said that the broadcasting networks had "arranged to interview Labor Party officials after the speech, thus maintaining balance - but Cheshin's hasty and reckless order disrupted the balance."

    The Labor Party demands not only that last night's appearance be deducted from the time allotted to the Likud for electioneering, but also that Sharon be indicted on charges of violating the campaign propaganda laws. The law forbids media electioneering in the weeks prior to the election, and carries a punishment of imprisonment.

    Many Labor spokesmen mocked Sharon's claim that he "did not know" the source of the money he used to pay back the campaign contributions.

    Despite the outcry, some Likud sources - including, reportedly, Sharon himself - said they were satisfied that his message had gotten across. It was noted that the order to end the broadcasts was implemented only after Sharon had inserted into his speech several sharp comments against the Labor Party and its head, Amram Mitzna.

2. SHARON'S SPEECH UNTIL IT WAS CUT OFF Prime Minister Sharon began his talk last night as follows: "I have come to respond to the despicable plot that has been woven against me and the Likud, and which has one goal: to topple the regime in Israel, and to take over in a deceitful manner.

    "I would like to describe to you the turn of events of the past months. About two months ago, the Labor Party decided, with its own internal political interests in mind, to drag the entire country into an election campaign. I said then that the elections were unnecessary, and that Labor's behavior in the midst of a struggle against terror, and on the eve of a possible war with Iraq, was wanton and irresponsible. I must admit that even I did not conceive how wanton and irresponsible their behavior could be. I will give you an example.

    "A few weeks ago, I paid a visit at the Home Front command, in order to check the preparations being made for war with Iraq... The chances that Israel will be attacked are not great - but they exist, and we must therefore be prepared in order to give Israeli citizens the best protection. Every child understands this - except for the Labor Party, its supporters, and all who help her. This responsibility is, in the end, upon me. I'm Prime Minister, and the ultimate responsibility falls on me. I go to visit and to check - sometimes in surprise visits - to see how the preparations are being made. I would betray my responsibilities if I did not do this. And here, the Labor Party and all who help it, started to attack me personally, as if these war preparations were just an election campaign trick - as if there were no crisis in Iraq, as if the entire world is not preparing for war, as if we were not attacked once before by Iraq contrary to the predictions of all the experts. [An attack like this] happened in the past, and we must be ready - but not according to the Labor Party. In their minds, there are only elections. The whole world revolves only around them, and around their chances of winning another piece of power. This is how they think - or at least, this is how they talk. This behavior, at the expense of our most sacred thing, is shameful - but even more, it is wanton and irresponsible.

    "This example is an indication of everything that has happened here in the past weeks. First, they embarked on a "witch hunt" against the entire Likud, trying to blacken the entire movement and all of its members, and present us as a Mafia and a bunch of mobsters and all for political motives. "You can compare the way in which I acted during this incident and the way in which Amram Mitzna acted. For in the Labor Party, incidents of the most serious nature were revealed - of election forgeries, polling booths that disappeared, buying positions with money. There are police investigations, indictments, invalid appointments, false affidavits, everything. Mitzna himself was interrogated by the police regarding two corruption scandals, and his lack of purity of action and his ties with contractors and financial figures in Haifa have been publicized. I, for my part, took immediate action; Mitzna has done nothing. I announced immediately that I would distance from the Likud and from the government anyone whose election was tainted - and I did so. Mitzna did nothing, nothing at all. I appointed a committee to change and revamp the Likud's primaries system, and adopted its recommendations. Mitzna did nothing when he saw the election forgeries - he did nothing, and will do nothing, because Mitzna and the press that accompanies him are interested not in corruption, or in proper behavior, but only in blackening the Likud. Only the Likud interests it."

    "Damage was done to the Likud in the polls, but despite this, Labor stayed stuck [in these polls], and Mitzna just didn't take off [and gain support]. So they decided to strike out at me via my sons. They took Omri, whose only sin was to come and help me as Prime Minister, and they tried to turn him into a mobster. When this did not work, they found some story about a Greek island and tried to stick it forcefully onto my son Gilad. Let it be clear: this is an old story of a few years, it has nothing to do with me, and the authorities have never asked Gilad even one question about it or to testify about it. Some journalist comes and writes a gossipy story, and the Labor Party immediately jumps on the booty. "Gilad, who is an economist, made an financial deal - and they call it corruption! Gilad received a fee for his work, and they call it Mafia. I ask: What, have you gone crazy? Have you gone out of your minds?! "And again, it didn't work. Mitzna was still stuck in the polls, he still can't make it, the aroma of power is still far away from them. So they go on to the next stage. Someone - whose identity is being investigated right now, by order of the Attorney-General - leaked a document filled with gossip and lies about Gilad's business dealings, as if they are tied to me. I would like to tell you the exact facts.

    "More than a year ago, the State Comptroller found that donations had been taken against the law, and he informed me of such. I was astonished at the findings. I returned home, discussed it with my sons, and told them - on my own initiative - that we must return all the money to the donors immediately, without waiting - even if we must again mortgage the farm, our home, in order to do this. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only one who did so, who returned this money. Barak has not done so until today, and Mitzna and his association have not done so, even though he should have. Only I did this, on my own initiative, without anyone forcing me to do so. The Comptroller didn't tell me to return it, but I did it on my own when I heard that the donations were beyond that which were permitted. I went on my own and decided on my own to return it all.

    "Now, we're talking about a large sum - almost five million shekels. I, after all, do not have financial means. Back in 1989, I removed the farm from my hands - and even before that there had been a trustee, until the boys returned from the army - as the law demanded. When the boys completed their army service, they took over the running of the farm. Today, Gilad runs it successfully, and I am not involved. This is what the law demands. I took my savings, and those of [my wife] Lili of blessed memory, and I gave about a half-million shekels - half of it in an overdraft from the bank - and Gilad took it upon himself to get the rest of the money. After a short while, he brought me the rest of the sum, a bit over four million shekels, and I then returned the money to the donors. [Actually] I returned the first half-million from our savings even before the other money came, in order to show that my intention, as opposed to others, was to return the money. With this, the incident came to an end as far as I was concerned.

    "I say here clearly: I did not know exactly how the money was obtained. We had talked about mortgaging the farm, and as far as I knew then, that's what happened. When the police asked me about this, I told them exactly that, and that according to the best of my knowledge, the farm had been mortgaged. If another way had been found, fine. My son Gilad is a businessman, a successful one, and he has made money, and I'm very proud of him. I know that everything was done legally and above board, with documentation and the way it should be. By the way, -"

    --At this point, Channel One television apologetically interrupted the broadcast, explaining that it must begin broadcasting the official election propaganda infomercials "in the spirit of the arrangement of the Elections Board headed by Judge Michael Cheshin." Voice of Israel Radio continued to broadcast the speech for another minute or so, however:

    "...but what will be with the scandal?! After all, he who leaked, and those who blew up the story, and those who celebrated it - did not do so because they sought the truth. The truth could have been found out very simply, by asking questions, receiving answers, checking documents. But if it's done that way, then of course there's no juicy scandal, and it can't be taken advantage of for political needs. They [knew that that's] not the way to take over power. So they make up things. They tell lies, blow up gossipy stories, and deal with illusions. Take, for example, the incident of my friend Cyril Kern. He is a man who -"

    --At this point, Voice of Israel Radio announced that the broadcast had to be stopped by order of Elections Board Chairman Judge Michael Cheshin, because of the electioneering that Sharon had woven into his remarks. The announcer then immediately began to interview Labor Party Secretary-General MK Ophir Pines, asking him not to engage in electioneering but rather to answer Sharon's charges that he had acted resolutely to deal with corruption on both the party and personal level, while the Labor Party leaders did not do so. Pines responded that Sharon had promised to produce facts and documentation, and instead of doing so, he produced "poisonous, deceitful, debased and vile propaganda..."

    Excerpts from the remainder of Mr. Sharon's remarks: "Kern [Sharon's old friend who loaned the money] has no, and probably will not have, business interests in Israel. Is there anything I can give him? Have you gone totally crazy?!"

    Regarding Mitzna's demand that he tell the police his story, Sharon said, "What am I supposed to tell them? About the despicable gossip and the wretched rumors they are spreading? Did he go to the police about his corruption? I refuse to play this low-down game. If the police want to talk to me, they can come; I will hide nothing."

    In conclusion, Sharon said, "I have confidence that the Israeli public will know how to differentiate between the dirty politics of cheap slander, and the politics with which, with national responsibility, we continue to manage the complex affairs of the State of Israel."

ARUTZ-7 SHIP RAIDED, WARNED NOT TO BROADCAST
Israel National News (Arutz 7)
Tuesday Dec. 24, 02

Arutz 7 or Channel 7 is an Israeli station that broadcasts conservative views from International waters.  The Israeli left has tried to silence it several times.   Here is a news item about a recent effort by the Israeli left to silence Arutz 7.

Israel Police and Communications Ministry personnel raided the Eretz HaTzvi
broadcasting ship of Arutz-7 Israel National Radio this afternoon, halting
the station's signal for over an hour.  The ship's captain was warned not
to resume transmission of the broadcasts.

The raid began at 1 PM, just as the news magazine hour was about to begin,
and ended approximately 2:15.  The police photographed equipment and
workers, but confiscated nothing.  Reports on Israel Radio that the police
found only one person on board - the captain - are groundless, and in fact
there were close to ten crewmembers on board at the time.

Arutz-7 broadcasts from outside of Israel's territorial waters in order to
circumvent legislation that prohibits privately-owned radio stations from
airing nationwide.  A law duly passed by the Knesset granted Arutz-7 a
broadcasting license was recently nullified by the Supreme Court.

Arutz-7 management noted that this was the first time in the history of
Israeli off-shore broadcasting - including 22 years of Abie Natan's Voice
of Peace ship, and 15 years for Arutz-7 - that police had ever made such a
raid.  "Not under the governments of Yitzchak Rabin, Shimon Peres, or Ehud
Barak were police ever sent to raid a ship broadcasting from sea," the
station said.  "Only under Ariel Sharon did this happen.  Could it have
something to do with our opposition to a Palestinian state?"

Condemnations of the apparent blow against freedom of speech came only from
the right-wing.  Communications Minister Ruby Rivlin of the Likud said
today that he was "furious" at the raid, citing in particular its timing
during an election campaign.  While the raid was underway, the Council of
Jewish Communities in Yesha called upon Public Security Minister Uzi Landau
- ministerial supervisor of Israel Police - to renew at once the broadcasts
on Arutz-7, "which, especially during this period, is a national and
patriotic mouthpiece for the struggle on behalf of the Land of Israel."

A spokesman for Minister Landau told Arutz-7 that he did not know of the
raid in advance, and that it was initiated by the Communications Ministry a
while ago.  He preferred not to comment on the political aspects of the raid.

National Union party leader MK Avigdor Lieberman said that the raid is
"nothing more than political scheming, based on election-campaign
considerations and as revenge for Arutz-7's clear policy against a
Palestinian state."  His party colleagues also commented: MK Tzvi Hendel
said that this is a case of "political persecution on the eve of
elections," and demanded that Communications Minister Rivlin open an
immediate investigation into how this occurred.  MK Uri Ariel said that the
raid is an attempt to "shut mouths."  MK Benny Elon said that the
authorities of the Supreme Court - which put a freeze on a duly-passed
Knesset law legalizing Arutz-7 - must be curtailed "in order to prevent it
from making a mockery of Israel's democracy."

Blame for the raid is already being freely apportioned.  The police say
that the Communications Ministry ordered the raid as part of its efforts
against unlicensed stations.  The Communications Ministry, however, says
that the raid came in response to Elections Committee head Hon. Michael
Cheshin's call to ensure that unlicensed stations do not broadcast election
propaganda.  Arutz-7 announced in response that it is more careful not to
allow its interviewers and interviewees to speak on behalf of specific
parties than are Israel's public stations.

*** ANNOUNCEMENT BY ARUTZ-7 MANAGEMENT
"For 15 years, the State Prosecution and the police have waged a campaign
to harm Arutz-7 by "hitting us in our pockets."  On two previous occasions,
police have smashed and confiscated our state-of-the-art broadcasting
equipment, under the pretext that the station's broadcasts are against
Israeli law.  No court has ever ruled that this is the case, but Arutz-7
has had to pay top lawyers' fees in order to defend itself against these
allegations.  Police raids like the one today are aimed solely at
portraying the station as illegal, thus bringing about an immediate
decrease in advertising income.
"The Prime Minister, Communications Minister, and Public Security (Police)
Minister all denied prior knowledge of and involvement in today's attempt
to silence Israel's only radio voice opposing the establishment of
Palestinian state.  How, then, did it happen?  Raids of this sort happen
under right-wing governments because extremist left elements control key
government institutions, including the police, the State Prosecution, the
courts, and the Israel Broadcasting Authority.  They are largely behind the
systematic attempts to financially cripple and harm the lone nationalist
voice on Israel's airwaves.  We turn to our listeners and internet readers
to fight this trend in whatever legitimate manner is available.  Please
speak out, write letters and faxes, and support the station in its
continual struggle to survive these blows against our right to champion the
Jewish Nation's right to in the Land of Israel."

Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee
by Steven Plaut
Jewishpress.com 12/18/02

IDF BANS SPEAKER FOR CALLING DIR YASSIN A NON-MASSACRE
Israel National News
12/10/02

The IDF has decided that former Lechi fighter Ezra Yachin will no longer be
allowed to lecture to soldiers as part of the army's educational
seminars.  Meretz MK Naomi Chazan complained that Yachin tells his
audiences that Lechi soldiers did not carry out a massacre in Dir Yassin in
1948.  Yachin himself, who took part in the Dir Yassin battle, says that
the decision to keep him away from soldiers "astonishes" him.  He says that
just as there was no massacre in Jenin, there was none in Dir Yassin.

A work by ZOA National President Morton A. Klein, entitled, "Dir Yassin:
History of a Lie," brings to light important documents disproving the claim
that 250-300 Arab civilians were massacred by Jewish fighters in the
Jerusalem-area village.  The study finds that Dir Yassin was actually a
legitimate military target overlooking the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, from
where Jewish traffic was regularly attacked.  The pamphlet can be read at
<http://www.zoa.org/pubs/DeirYassin.htm>.

Arutz-7's Nissan Ratzlav-Katz reports that Hazen Nusseibeh, an editor for
the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948, once told BBC the
true origins of the "Dir Yassin massacre."  Nusseibeh said that in
consultation with Hussein Khalidi, then-Secretary of the Arab Higher
Committee, "we wrote a press release stating that at Dir Yassin children
were murdered, pregnant women were raped. All sorts of atrocities."  When
residents of the village protested this portrayal of events, Nusseibeh
said, they were told that the lies were necessary to incite Arab armies to
help fight the Jews, and that Khalidi said outright, "We have to say this
so the Arab armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews."

Baruch Marzel Exiled from Hebron
The Hebron Press Office
Friday November 08, 2002

Yesterday morning 50 police approached Hebron resident Baruch Marzel on the
steps of Ma'arat HaMachpela (The Cave of the Patriarchs) as we was leaving morning prayer services. They
informed him that he was wanted for questioning concerning charges that he
had rioted during the eviction and destruction of Havat Gilad, the Gilad
Farm, several weeks ago. He told the police that he had to take his daughter
to the doctor in Kiryat Arba and following the doctor's appointment he would
arrive at the police station to be questioned. The police, despite that fact
that they did not have any kind of warrant, arrested him on the spot. Ten
policemen dragged him to a waiting police van, while beating him. From there
he was taken to the Kiryat Arba-Hebron police station, and from there to a
detention center at Ma'ale Adumim. Only at night was he allowed to see a
doctor, and was taken to a police medical facility in Ariel.

This morning Marzel was indicted for having maliciously attacked police
during his arrest yesterday, as well as for rioting during the Havat Gilad
eviction.

At today's court hearing, Marzel denied having attacked any police yesterday.
When the Jerusalem Shalom Court judge Dotan asked why he refused to
immediately agree to interrogation he told her that the police did not have
any kind of warrant, and that legally, they cannot force him to attend an
interrogation from one moment to the next. The police claimed that they had a
warrant, but when the judge asked the police to produce it, they 'could not
find it.'

 The police demanded that Marzel be held in detention until the end of all
legal actions against him and Judge Dotan so ruled, that Marzel would
continue to be held in jail.

 Following further discussion between the judge and Marzel's lawyer, the
judge agreed to rule that Marzel would be held under virtual house arrest in
Jerusalem. He may not leave Jerusalem at all, and must be at his parent's
Jerusalem residence from seven at night until the next morning. He was also
forced to sign a statement agreeing not to appeal the court decision, which
forbids him from going home for at least a half a year.

 Baruch and Sarah Marzel have eight children, the youngest of whom is a two
year old girl.

 Baruch Marzel issued the following statement:

The proceeding against me are a farce. Yesterday's arrest was illegal. A
citizen may not legally be forced to voluntarily agree to immediate
questioning by police for an event that occurred several weeks ago. The
police did not have any kind of warrant, neither for questioning, or for my
arrest. 

 The police beat me, but then accused me of attacking them, a physical
impossibility, with so many policemen holding me and dragging me. There are
at least 20 witnesses.

 I was forced to agree to sign an illegal and undemocratic document by the
police and the court, forbidding me to appeal the court's decision, exiling
me from my family, home and work in Hebron.

 The judge's decision is totally incomprehensible. A special 'va''ad peula'
(committee) to fight the court decision has been established, which will
raise money to help me fund this struggle against police-initiated terror,
supported by the prosecutor's office and the court. It is unthinkable that
the State of Israel should follow in the footsteps of the Arabs and the
British, who exiled Jews from Hebron in 1929.  The Israeli army withdrew from
80% of Hebron, leaving it in the hands of armed terrorists, yet the police
claim that I am dangerous and a threat to 'peace.' We will fight this
decision and win!

Leftist McCarthyism
Dr. Steven Plaut's Email Newsletter
Oct 4, 2002

   Leftist McCarthyism in Israel is still alive and doing quite well under the Sharon government. The Attorney General has just decided to prosecute the Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, for "incitement to racism". The Rabbi had denounced some of the anti-Jewish Arab Knesset Members and had said of Arab students studying in Safed that they are an "alien element who endanger the town's people from both a security and a moral perspective." He said this right after a wave of suicide bombings. He also said he favors population transfers that involve emigration of Arabs.

   Now whether or not you happen to agree with the Rabbi's opinions, surely nothing he has said comes anywhere near the dozens of calls by Arab leaders in Israel to murder Jews and destroy Israel, nor the countless cheers from Israeli leftists every time a "settler" is murdered, nor the comparison of a mass murdering terrorist to Moses by a leftist shyster, nor a Haifa University faculty member promoting anti-Semitism at the University of Michigan. But of course all of THESE would be protected speech in post-democratic Israel.

   In another act of Sharonite democracy, the government just put out an writ of "administrative arrest", ordinarily used against Palestinian terrorists, but this time against Kahanist activist Noam Federman. Federman will be under indefinite house arrest. Federman is not charged with any actual crime, although without a doubt is guilty of political incorrectness and unruly behavior and possibly even graffiti composition. It is not clear if Federman's brother, a national hero who killed a terrorist trying to ram a pickup truck into a dance club, will be able to go visit the inciter.

The Israeli Far Left storms the IBA's Winter Palace
Dr. Steven Plaut's Email Newsletter
Sept 25, 2002

    A few days back we nominated Professor Gabi Sheffer, a don in the Hebrew University's Politics Department, for the Stupidest Professor on Campus Award, this on the basis of his Op-Ed in Haaretz decrying the "Right-wing Putsch" that had taken over Israel's media. Sheffer was outraged because recently here and there smidgens of pluralism have appeared in the Israeli media, which is generally under the totalitarian hegemony of the Far Left. In Sheffer's eyes, any such crack in the barbed-wire perimeter of leftist thought control represents a Right-Wing Putsch.

    It should be noted that Sheffer's politics department at the Hebrew University is itself about as pluralistic as the North Korean People's Assembly, where no non-leftist points of view may be heard from any faculty members. Strangely, Sheffer is not upset by this lack of pluralism.

    Now what really has the Sheffers of the country all upset, more than anything else, is the fact that recently Uri Dan has appeared on the airways. Uri Dan is one of Israel's most prestigious serious journalists. Among his many triumphs have been his co-authoring the defining book on the 1973 Yom Kippur War, his interviews with Meyer Lansky, his pieces on the PLO, and many others. Dan however is about as welcome with the Israeli Fourth Estate as would be a box of pork rinds at the Lubavitch headquarters.

    The leftist journalist elite hates Dan because he is a supporter of Ariel Sharon. He has liked Sharon for decades, even before Sharon crossed the Suez Canal in 1973. He has helped write some of Sharon's speeches, and has advised him on his campaigns. Dan has written columns and articles for Maariv for decades. The Left believes that all journalists should serve as spin consultants for Yassir Arafat and the PLO, but never for Ariel Sharon.

    Dan was allowed recently to speak on an Israeli radio show. But Israel state-owned TV and Radio have long been under the complete control of the Far Left, even when the Likud is in office. The past IBA czar Moti Kirshenbaum always stted quite openly that the job of employees of the stations is to promote leftist ideology. The channels feature far-leftist columnists as "reporters". News reporting consists largely of these leftists interviewing one another on the air, and inserting their own personal opinions after each news item. Among the "objective" reporters are the ultra-red Moshe Hanegbi, Amnon Avromavich, Hamas-supporter Gideon Levy, and others like them.

    When Dan was speaking on the "All Talk" show, a gang of leftist "journalists" at the Israel Broadcasting Authority burst into the studio and prevented him from speaking (see below), shutting down the mike, almost like students at bastions of free speech like Concordia University or Berkeley.. The Left ever since the attempt to allow Dan to speak has been screaming about the "politicalization" of the IBA by Sharon, and that is what really is behind the tantrum of Sheffer noted above.

    But it gets better and better. Now the station manager of Israel Radio Two who had allowed Dan to be interviewed, Amnon Nadav, has had his life threatened because he allowed Uri Dan to speak on the radio. Haaretz today (Sept 25, 02) reports that anonymous phone calls to Nadav have been made, saying if he lets Dan speak on the air he is a dead man. Moreover, Nadav believes those threatening to kill him are leftist journalists within the Israel Broadcasting Authority. Of course the leftist head of the leftist Israel journalists association, one Amikam Rotman, says it is all nonsense. Rotman was one of the bolshies hoodlums who stormed the station and prevented Dan from speaking!

    In another twist, Dan has just been fired from his position at Maariv, after being its star columnist for decades. Maariv is owned by the Nimrodi crime family, whose members have been convicted in recent years of assorted felonies, ranging from plotting to murder rival newspaper editors to tampering with a witness. Their editor in chief is the Leftist-and-Rightist-at-the-same-time columnist Amnon Denkner, who use to write for Haaretz, and who used to appear on Israel TV until he partially broke with the Left. Denkner fired Dan, supposedly because Dan offended another Maariv writer, Shalom Yerushalmi. Yerusalmi had stated in one of his articles that convicted criminals had been conscripting their criminal friends to sign up as Likud members and vote in its primaries. Dan expressed skepticism over the baseless charges by Yerushalmi, charges for which he presented no evidence. Dan wrote, "If you have any evidence, take it to the cops. But don't sit and spill filth and slander just on the basis of someone who told someone who told you. Tell us the names of the sources."

    Denkner decided to utilize Dan's criticism of a "colleague" to boot him out of the newspaper altogether, no doubt pleasing his Nimrodi bosses, upset that Sharon has not done more to prevent their own indictments for sundry felonies.

2. Leftist journalist hooligans riot against Uri Dan: http://www.themedialine.org/news/News_detail.asp?NewsID=652

Leftist McCarthyism is Alive and Well under Sharon
Dr. Steven Plaut's Email Newsletter
Sept 18, 2002

    When I was 16 I was chosen in summer camp to be the Camper Judge in a show trial of Israel. It was the summer of 1967 and just a few weeks after the Six Day War. The show trial was to be an educational experience. Israel was on trial and of course would be cleared and the Arabs indicted. I agree to do it because I got to wear a mop on my head, bang a big hammer and threaten to clear the court.

    I was reminded of this cosmic event because the papers today report that Israel's leftist Attorney General is planning to indict one of the JDL acticists in the West Bank for running a summer day camp in which he organized a show trial of Shimon Peres. It turns out this is the exact same Kach-nik who had a salad throwing fight with the familty of Daniel Barenboim a few days back, Itamar Ben-Gvir, as reported in these incitements. He is to be indicted for criminal incitement.

  Now for those who think that the Israeli First Amendment, holding that free speech should be restricted only to leftists, was revoked when Sharon took office, think again. The leftist Attorney General continues to operate and continues the persecution of the Kach fringe groups as "racists" and "terrorists", while there has never been an Arab fascist endorsing terrorism and genocide and destruction of Israel who has been indicted on "incitement" charges by the same office.

  And, as a matter of fact, I have long called for putting Shimon Peres on REAL trial, not show trial, for "failing to prevent 1000 murders" and for performing cruel and unusual experiments on live Jews, both of which are real crimes on the books in Israel.

  I also believe that every law school should indeed be conducting show trials for the Oslo criminals as part of their education curriculum. Why not? Let the lefties make their case before the lawyer wannabes. What is wrong with that? The worst thing that can happen is that they will acquit.

  But of course suggesting such things is prohibited speech in the Israel of post-Rabin McCarthyism. And I am not sure what the statute of limitations is on all this. So if you do not hear from me for a few years, it may be because the Attorney General heard about my own judgeship in 1967.....

The Supreme Court´s Assault on Israel´s Self-Defense
Steven Plaut
September 4, 2002
Israel National News

One of the greatest threats to Israeli democracy is the anti-democratic behavior of its Supreme Court. Non-elected justices who cannot be impeached, and who are great advocates of “judicial activism”, which is essentially illegal judicial legislating by non-elected judges who trump the elected representatives of the people, dominate the Court.

The Supreme Court is composed largely of leftists and radical secularists who believe that their mission is, among other things, to constrain the Orthodox in
Israel and invent new "rights" that the people and the Knesset are unwilling to create, like the right to import pork but not kosher meat. The Chief Justice insists that the Court´s obligation is to issue rulings in line with "enlightened”- meaning leftist radical secularist- opinion.

A while back, the extremist Chief Justice of the Court ordered the Arab terrorist murderers of the Jewish child Dani Katz to be returned to the streets, until they were reconvicted of the murder. Perhaps the most outrageous aspect of the Court´s misbehavior, though, is its self-imposed need to micromanage Israel´s army and military defense activities. The justices believe that they have the right to dictate to the army in every single case what bullet, and in which direction, the soldiers may fire, and that they may second-guess every military micro-decision.

This week, the justices once again trumped the military by asserting their powers. The decision regarded the proposed expulsion of families of Arab murderers, as a deterrent to would be terrorists. As you know, an effective way to prevent Palestinian Nazis from blowing up busloads of Jewish children might be to execute the family members of the suicide bombers and similar murderers. In exchange for executing a couple of dozen guilty Palestinians, Israel would effectively save thousands of its own civilians from murder and maiming. But that offends the delicate sensitivity of Israel´s beautiful people, who prefer that Jews be murdered by terrorists rather than see "innocent" Arabs suffer due to atrocities committed by their kin. These are the very same people whose sensitivities never seem to be offended by hundreds of Jewish children being blown to pieces! (And the notion that all Palestinian adults must be regarded as ‘presumed innocent’ when polls show that nearly all of them endorse mass murders of Jews is mind boggling. Do I believe that endorsing and celebrating such terrorism in and of itself makes the endorser guilty and a legitimate target for reprisals? Absolutely!!)

The next-best option is to expel the kin of the murderers to Lebanon or Syria, but once again, the Israeli Left and its captive Supreme Court will not sanction any such "inhumane" behavior by the government. Never mind that the Palestinians being punished are not even Israelis but rather enemy aliens with no right to protection by Israel´s Supreme Court in the first place! The Left´s position is that it is okay for Israel to track down and punish those who actually plant bombs and blow themselves up, BUT if Israel cannot pinpoint these perpetrators with total 100% accuracy, then the country must simply put up with the Palestinians mass murdering Jewish civilians forever, rather than take any "collective punishment" action against their relations. In other words, since Israel will never be able to develop an effective defense and deterrent against terrorism that meets the utopian standards of the Left, the Left is willing to let the pile of murdered Israelis keep growing.

So as a third-best option, Sharon´s government has been trying to ‘punish’ the kin of suicide bombers by forcing them to ‘relocate’ from the West Bank to Gaza. Since Gaza is a sewer with worse living conditions than the West Bank, this is thought to have some deterrence value, although not exactly the same deterrence as teaching the siblings of suicide bombers how to dance the debka at the end of a rope. But even this mild step is “inhumane and racist" in the minds of Israel´s Left.

The Left filed a petition with the Supreme Court to prevent Israel from forcing three immediate family members of a Palestinian mass-murdering suicide bomber to relocate to Gaza. The Left prefers that they stay put and plan out some new mass murders to protest ‘occupation’. Leah Zemel, one of several accomplished Communist Party lawyers specializing in defending the rights of Palestinians to murder Jews, filed the petition.

This week the Court ruled that two of the three accomplices in question could in fact be ‘relocated’ to Gaza, but ordered the army NOT to move the third one, the brother of the suicide bomber. The Court stipulated that living in the same room with his mass-murdering, explosives-preparing brother and observing him setting off on his bombing trip did not make the brother an active accomplice and so he cannot be ‘relocated’.

So the bottom line is that once again the Court asserted its right to micromanage Israel´s defense policy against Nazi mass murderers and to second-guess professional military decision makers in Israel who are convinced of the deterrent aspect of relocation, if not deportation. However, there is an even more ominous aspect to this development….

Whatever else one might say about the Palestinian murderer’s brother who was rescued by the Supreme Court leftists from the fate of being "exiled" to the Gaza Strip, he was clearly guilty of "not preventing a crime". If for nothing else, on this charge he could have been prosecuted (it is a crime on the books of the Israeli judicial system). Nevertheless the justices decided he could not be shipped to Gaza as punishment for not preventing a crime, and in all likelihood will not pay for his crime.

BUT, THESE ARE THE VERY SAME JUSTICES WHO UPHELD THE CONVICTION AND IMPRISONMENT OF MARGOLIT HAR-SHEFI FOR NOT PREVENTING A CRIME.
Margolit Har-Shefi was a college student who was friendly with Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, and she might even have dated Amir a few times. She was later prosecuted and convicted by a vengeance-seeking politicized Attorney General, not on charges of poor taste in men, but for "not preventing a crime". The very same Supreme Court justices and Chief Justice ruled that her belief that Amir was just letting off steam and displaying false bravado when he said he would murder Rabin was not an acceptable defense against "failing to prevent a crime".

So in other words, the Court was perfectly willing to imprison a pathetic college girl who did nothing wrong, but insists that the brother of a mass murdering Palestinian, who watched him prepare to murder Jews, is as clean as a whistle and needs to be put back on the streets with the Court´s blessing.

Silencing the Military
From the New York Post 8/27/02

When military men in Israel say things the Israeli left doesn't want to hear they are accused of improperly intruding into politics.  If military men petition against the "occupation" you hear no complaints from the left.  A recent example of the left's attempt to silence the military was when Israel's chief of staff Moshe Yaalon called the Palestinian uprising "a cancerous threat that must be defeated at all costs".  His comments were denounced by the leftist members of the Knesset and media, who said the country's top military leader was improperly intruding into politics. 

The Attorney General is not Amused
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
28, June 2002 

   As you probably heard, Israel's leftist McCarthyist Attorney General, Eliakim Rubinstein, has ruled that Israel is prohibited from protecting Jewish children by expelling the immediate family members of Palestinian suicide bombers. You see, the Palestinian suicide bombers are dead, and there is nothing Israel can do to THEM to deter further mass murders. The only effective way to deal with suicide bombers is to expel their immediate family members, although it would be a far better and more effective way to protect Jewish children if Israel would assassinate these family members. It would also be a far more moral act, because it would deter mass murders of Jews more efficiently. It does not matter whether or not these family members actually participated in the suicide bombings. It is called war. In any case, the presumption in war should be that they all DID so participate. To refrain from killing them is to condemn far larger numbers of Jewish civilians to endlessly being murdered. Rubinstein does not seem to be very concerned about the mass deaths of Jewish children.

    In any case, as I say, Rubinstein declared that Israel cannot even expel the family members of the perps. The usual Far-Left anti-Jewish groups like Betselem have been lobbying against any such deportations, saying they would be "immoral", although the murder last week of a mother with her 3 children, or the other mass murders of civilians have never been denounced by Betselem as immoral.

    In an ironic twist, the Kach groups (JDL Kahanist related groups) have started harassing Rubinstein. Let us recall that Rubinstein sponsored the anti-democratic bans on the Kach groups and their being labeled by him "terrorists" and so placed on the US and EU lists of terrorist organizations (unlike the PLO). Rubinstein believes the free speech of every Arab openly calling for genocide of Jews and the annihilation of Israel needs to be protected while those of Kahanists do not. The Kahanists need to be arrested and denied free speech because Rubinstein disagrees with them.

    Yesterday, some Kahanists pasted a poster on the door of Rubinstein's offices that read "Rubinstein is a Traitor". Rubinstein is not amused. My guess is he will now file a petition with the courts to get the members of the Kahanist groups expelled from the country....

   David Wilder wrote the following in an article called Back to the USSR? on 5/24/02:

On Sunday it will be four weeks since several men were arrested for supposedly belonging to the new "Jewish Oslo Terrorist Underground." So far, no charges have been pressed. Some of the men are from the Bat-Ayin community just south of Jerusalem. One man is from Hebron and another from the Maon farm, just south of Hebron.

As of this writing it is very unclear, what exactly, if anything, these men perpetrated. A number of question marks have been raised, including a most  vital issue: are any of these men actually guilty of planning terror attacks against Arabs, or, are they the victims of another Avishai Raviv type plot, with Israeli intelligence baiting innocent citizens in order to begin a smear  campaign against the Israeli right.

   Ettie Dvir, was the wife of one of the arrested men.   She was interrogated by the GSS (Israel's General Security Services), and quoted by Israel National News (5/28/02) as saying that any confessions extracted by the GSS are not believable:

After what I went through for just two hours - they handcuffed me to a chair, slapped me, took my baby away with force, let her cry outside for an hour and a half and said that I couldn't nurse her until I talked, etc. - I can imagine that if my husband went through three weeks of treatment that was probably much worse, they would be able to get him to admit to anything they want.  They showed him pictures of the baby crying, and me tied to the chair and getting hit - so I won't be surprised at whatever he may have confessed to.

  After the interrogation three youths hung posters denouncing a police investigator involved in the recent “Jewish underground” case. The youths hung the posters, which included the officer’s name, address and telephone number, in his Mevaseret Zion neighborhood. The posters detailed alleged abuse by the police investigator during the questioning of Ettie Dvir.

The youth were arrested.  According to Israel National News Israel National News (5/31/02) the prosecution will be seeking conviction on charges of incitement. Friends of the three suspects have called the prosecution a violation of free speech. Similar posters were hung in proximity to the home of another police officer who was accused by Dvir of abusive behavior during her interrogation. In neither case did the posters call for harming the police officers.

Justice Mussolini
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
4/11/ 2002

    With each passing day, it becomes more important to rescue Israel from its anti-democratic judiciary. The judiciary is under the control of justices who spout the anti-democratic doctrine of "judicial activism", according to which non-elected justices should have the right to dictate to the public and its elected representatives in all matters.

    The Chief Justice Aharon Barak is the country's leading proponent of this doctrine. But there are many other reasons why Barak is a danger to Israeli democracy.

    Aharon Barak is the man who ordered a retrial for the Arab murderers of the child Dani Katz, and his sidekick, the wacky Dalia Dorner, then put those murderers back on the streets. They were later reconvicted.

    Barak has led the judicial jihad to impose the vision of the radical secularist Left on the country. He recently ruled that the parliament or Knesset has no rights to pass laws. He led the assault against Orthodoxy and against the Arutz7 radio station. He ruled that the Knesset cannot decide which Rabbis oversea conversion to Judaism for purposes of the law.

    Barak has expressed the opinion that people should be prohibited from expressing criticism of the Supreme Court's decisions. He has never once acted against the McCarthyist attacks on free speech by the Left. He did nothing when anti-Oslo dissidents were jailed. He did nothing when Margolit Har-Sheffi was jailed. He has long held that it is the job of the courts to impose ideas favored by "enlightened" people (meaning secularist leftists), regardless of what the parliament legislates.

    But perhaps even more serious is the system of appointing justices that has been perpetuated by Barak. In Israel judges are not elected. They also cannot be dismissed by either the parliament nor by popular ballot propositions. Judges, including Supreme Court Judges, are appointed by a panel composed mainly of other Supreme Court Justices. This way, Barak and his allies on the Court protect their turf and perpetuate their hegemony over the judicial system.

    In reality, Barak's dictatorial control of the process of appointing justices is more radical than that. Israel has a bizarre system by which contenders for the Supreme Court bench are "invited" to do a "test run", sitting there as judges, a sort of apprenticeship. They participate in Supreme Court decisions, but as temps and fill-ins. It is all but impossible to get a real Court appointment without first doing a tour gig as one of these temps.

    Only problem is, the Panel for Appointing Judges does not decide who gets invited to do such an "apprenticeship". The decision is in the hands of one man and one man alone: Justice Aharon Barak, Israel's Judge Mussolini.

    In a development this week, one of Israel's leading justices resigned from the bench because the Chief Justice refused to allow him to do such an "apprenticeship" and so effectively blocked his chance of getting a seat on the Supreme Court. This judge is Amnon Strashnov, one of Israel's most respected District Court judges. He was the judge in the espionage case in which Nahum Manbar was prosecuted for selling military equipment to Iran. Manbar's lefty lawyers tried to throw the case by spreading rumors that the judge was sleeping with the prosecuting attorney, rumors that turned out to be false.

    Barak's jihad against Strashnov appears to be personal. So where can we find a judge whose career Barak has been promoting? Why Judge Oded Alyagon, the Beer Sheba bigot who likes to scream that religious Jews are lice and vermin!!

    Meanwhile, in another interesting development, Justice Mussolini has gone on the war path against professors of law in Israel. Now do not get me wrong here - the bulk of those professors are Oslo lefties and politically correct ad nauseum. However, Barak has antagonized them intentionally. Barak has launched repeated ad hominem attacks on leading law profs, reported widely in the press, including in Haaretz April 11.

    The problem is that Barak expects all of the law profs to behave like groveling sycophants and simply praise Barak and his ideas and decisions. One of Israel's leading legal minds and a brilliant lefty, Prof. Ruth Gavison, has a book out attacking viciously Barak's "judicial activism", and others have also come out against it. Other dons refused to endorse Barak's jihad against introducing "constitutional courts" in Israel. The Knesset considered these, but Barak sees this as a threat to his own unchallenged hegemony and wanted the Law School Deans and profs to sign up for his jihad against the idea. Not all did so. Still others have the temerity to question the wisdom and legality of some of Barak's more outrageous judicial atrocities.

    Aharon Barak is a danger to Israeli democracy. The Knesset should not only dismiss him at once (let him try to call in the cops when he rules that his own dismissal is illegal) but strip him of his pension as well.

War on Democracy
by Steven Plaut
Arutz 7
March 29, 2002

We have been warning for many years that Israel's Supreme Court is a threat to Israeli democracy. The Court is dominated by leftist justices wedded to the anti-democratic doctrine of "judicial activism", which holds that non-elected justices have the right to impose their personal views on the electorate and on the elected representatives of the people, as long as their views make leftists and radical secularists happy.

In recent years, the Court has imposed a long series of rulings on the country that have no groundings whatsoever in the Law and are simply attempts by the imperious justices to act as judicial legislators - that is, judicial dictators. The Court is also increasingly politicized. As events serve to discredit Israel's Left from week to week, the Court has rushed forward to impose leftist and anti-religious views on the country. It has never criticized leftist attacks on free speech nor McCarthyist prosecution of anti-Oslo dissidents, while repeatedly placing Arab terrorists and murderers back onto the streets.

Things came to their crescendo this week. The Supreme Court of Israel has gone far beyond anything else it has done before. The Supreme Court, led by the anti-democratic Chief Justice Aharon Barak, ruled simply that Israel's parliament does not have the right to pass laws.

Really.

The background to this judicial jihad against Israeli democracy is the battle over freedom of expression, with the Israeli Supreme Court consistently opposed to such freedom. Specifically, the ruling has to do with the Arutz Sheva radio station. The Israeli Far Left exercises near-complete hegemony over Israel's media, including print and electronic. There has, however, been one important challenger to that hegemony and that is the Arutz Sheva radio
station. Arutz Sheva is described as a "pirate radio station", but that is only because the government has refused to allow it to buy a broadcasting franchise.

Arutz Sheva was first set up as a counterweight to the Far Left pirate radio station set up in 1973 by Far Leftist Abbie Natan. That station was based on the belief that broadcasting nonstop loud rock and roll music and occasional leftist posturing was the ideal recipe for bringing peace to the Middle East. Despite the fact that Natan's station was illegal, it was protected by the Labor Party establishment. Even the Likud governments feared challenging its operations lest they be accused of assaulting free expression. Eventually, Natan's station went bankrupt and he scuttled the ship smack in the middle of Israel's shipping lanes, creating a permanent hazard.

Years after Natan's station was set up, the Arutz Sheva station was established and - like Natan's - at first broadcast from an offshore boat. However, the moment that Arutz Sheva set up operations, the very same Left that had always defended Natan's illegal station suddenly demanded that "law and order" be applied and Arutz Sheva shut down.

Ever since then, the Left has sought means to shut down Arutz Sheva and protect its hegemony over all broadcasting. It has tried assorted legal tricks and suits. It has tried Knesset initiatives. It has tried boycotts. Yet, Arutz Sheva weathered it all. The Left even accused Arutz Sheva of having "inspired" the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, because it broadcast attacks on Rabin's policies. It tried to get the operators prosecuted for "incitement", that catchall crime dug up by Israel's leftist McCarthyists every time they wish to suppress free speech. A few years back, it looked like the Left was about to succeed in silencing Arutz Sheva, but then some Knesset Members passed a law that legalized Arutz Sheva. That should have been the end of the story, but not in post-democratic Israel. Some leftist groups and individuals filed a court petition to declare the Knesset Law illegal.

Now, let us put this in perspective. There are countries in which courts can declare legislative decisions to be illegal, on the basis of a Constitution. Israel, however, has no formal written constitution and so there is no constitutional basis upon which a court can override a Knesset law. Indeed, this is precisely the constitutional showdown precipitated by the Court’s ruling that Reform conversions in Israel must be accepted by the government and the Knesset law declaring that they are not acceptable. There exist several "Basic Laws" in Israel that are regarded as being somewhat more powerful than ordinary laws, thus serving as building blocks for a future constitution. However, the legal argument here is shaky. In reality, these Basic Laws are simply laws passed by one Knesset and there is no basis for claiming that a law from an old Knesset can be used to restrict legislative powers of a new Knesset. Moreover, there is nothing in any of these Basic Laws that really can be seen as serving as the basis for the more atrocious Supreme Court rulings. There is nothing in them that can used to justify the Court's ruling on conversions or this week's assault on Arutz Sheva. Indeed, Arutz Sheva could make a reasonable argument that its continued operation is protected under the Basic Law guaranteeing freedom of occupation.

The Supreme Court of Aharon Barak does not need any legal figleaf for its capricious, baseless rulings. It is sufficient that trendiness and "enlightened opinion" (meaning leftist secularist opinion) is served. The Supreme Court ruled that the law passed by the Knesset decriminalizing Arutz Sheva was itself illegal. In other words, the Supreme Court refuses to recognize the right of the Knesset to pass laws. Ultimate decisions regarding laws and legislating henceforth are the prerogative of the non-elected Supreme Court justices.

These of course are the same justices who put the murderers of Dani Katz back on the streets, who ruled that Israel has to pay indemnities to Palestinians hurt while attacking Jews and who have a long track record of other arbitrary, politicized abuses of their power. There is only one way to deal with these characters and here it is: Israel's Knesset must immediately pass a new law dismissing the current Supreme Court and firing Aharon Barak as Chief Justice, preferably taking away his pension rights as well. It must institute new rules under which Supreme Court justices and other judges may be dismissed by the Knesset or by popular ballot propositions.

In addition, the Knesset must not only legalize Arutz Sheva, it must turn over to Arutz Sheva the now bankrupt, but brand new, Channel 10 television station. It must privatize all the state-operated radio and television services and dismember the Israel Broadcasting Authority. The original logic behind having the IBA was so that Israel could express its own voice in its own defense, but the IBA has long been the voice of the PLO and the Far Left and there is no reason why taxpayers need to finance that when the EU and the New Israel Fund are so willing to finance anti-Israel propaganda on their own.

The following is a report from Arutz 7 in March 28, 92.  Arutz 7 or Channel 7 is a radio station that broadcasts to Israel from a ship offshore. The Knesset passed legislation over three years ago - sponsored by MK Tzvi Hendel - legalizing Arutz-7, but the law was challenged in court by Knesset members of the left wing parties who did not like what Arutz 7 was broadcasting. They made this challenge even though the left never complained when Abie Nathan's Voice of Peace station broadcast from offshore.   The extremely left wing supreme court of Israel nullified this law in order to silence the radio station. 

   Prof. Eliav Shochetman, a Hebrew University law professor spoke with Arutz-7 on 3/28?/02) about the ruling: "It is unprecedented in that the Court has never before nullified a Knesset law to this extent; there were only two previous cases in which it nullified trivial aspects of Knesset laws... 'Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation' provides in paragraph 4 that the legislator may negate the fundamental right of free occupation [work] for a 'worthy purpose.' [This would imply that the Arutz-7 law is acceptable]. The Court's ruling deals with this question, and states that this is not a relevant consideration in this case, because, for one thing, Arutz-7 was illegal. However, this is very problematic, because Arutz-7 was never declared illegal, and in fact operated on the basis of previous guidelines governing Abie Nathan's Voice of Peace station that stated that a station broadcasting from the ocean is not illegal. Arutz-7's operations were always based on Communication Ministry legal counsels and on the Assistant Attorney-General to this effect. Therefore, it is unclear to me why the Supreme Court stated that Arutz-7 was operating illegally."

    "In addition, Clause 4 of the Punishments Law specifically states that the Knesset has the authority to turn illegal behavior into legal behavior. Therefore, even if we say that Arutz-7 was once illegal - an assertion to which I do not submit - the Knesset has the right to legalize it, thus that Arutz-7 should not 'suffer' at all from behavior that may have once been illegal... The legislator thus comes in the name of hundreds of thousands of people who do not want to hear radio broadcasts other than Arutz-7; can this not be termed a 'worthy purpose?' Technical details would have to be worked out, of course, but to call this law illegal is very [problematic]."

    It should be noted that the Court did not nullify the law based on the claim made by Attorney-General Elyakim Rubenstein, namely that the process by which the law was passed was faulty.

    The judges stated in their ruling, "The spectrum of frequencies for national commercial radio broadcasts is a limited resource that belongs to the entire public… The job of the authorities is to serve as a trustee for the public to preserve this resource and use it for the benefit of the public. In this framework, it is also responsible to allocate it efficiently and fairly among those who wish to utilize it." The Court's ruling was that the Knesset did not, in fact, allocate it "efficiently and fairly." However, the Knesset legal counsel claimed that it is precisely the prerogative of the Knesset, as the elected legislative body representing the national public, to be the one to decide what is to be considered an "efficient and fair" allocation.

The Assault by Haaretz on Freedom of Speech
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
17, Feb 2002 

    Jews are murdered every day in Israel because the Israeli governments of Peres and Rabin and Netanyahu decided to follow the editorial advice of Haaretz and implement and sustain the Oslo "peace process".

    But the moral responsibility borne by Haaretz for the hundreds of murders since the beginning of the "peace process" are only a small portion of the indictment of the "newspaper".

    Haaretz has always been a newspaper in which nothing but Far Left anti-Jewish opinion may be expressed, with the exception of a single weekly token Op-Ed from someone from the Right. The ratio of Far Left to moderate Right is about 100:1. This is the manifestation of the Haaretz concept of pluralism. Even the letters to the editor at the paper are screened so that only the most dogmatic followers of the communist parties or the most anti-Zionist extremists are allowed to appear.

    And alongside this singleminded determination to give voice only to extremists and anti-Semites in Israel has come the long campaign by Haaretz AGAINST free speech.

    That campaign came to a head in this morning's paper in which the official editorial called openly for the suppression of free speech in Israel. Now let us be clear about something here. Haaretz has NEVER criticized any of the Arab fascist Knesset Members who regularly endorse the annihilation of Israel, support Hizbollah atrocities and attacks against Jews, support bin Laden's attacks on the US, and openly endorse Palestinian terrorism, including suicide bombings. That is all free speech. It is all protected expression.

    On the rare occasions when the Attorney General or police questions an Arab Nazi about such statements, Haaretz invariably rushes to his aid, moaning about democracy and the right to express any opinions openly. Even when Arab Knesset Members and others attacked Israeli police or other officials violently, THAT too was regarded by Haaretz as protected free expression as well, as are all acts by Arabs throwing rocks at Jews. And of course Haaretz has always regarded PLO murders of Jews with more than a drop of understanding, what with all those settlers creating frustrations for the Palestinians and all.

    But Haaretz has always found that certain forms of speech are illegitimate, NOT protected by rules of democracy and so in need of prosecution. Those of course are expressions and speech with which Haaretz disagrees. It has never criticized any of the McCarthyists from Meretz and the Labor Party who file regular petitions to prosecute Rabbis and other dissidents. And it goes without saying that Haaretz has never protested the banning and criminalization of the Kach-Kahanist splinter groups nor the declaration by government McCarthyists that these are "terrorist groups" and "racists". All of a sudden, controversial opinion is NOT in need of defense.

    In the editorial today (Feb 17, see below), the Haaretz editors remind everyone of how consistently they have opposed free speech and democracy when it comes to those Kahanist splinters. Haaretz regards the Kahanists as racists, unlike those Arabs calling for genocide against the Jews and praising Hitler. And in post-democratic Israel, opinions that a leftist regards as "racist" are prohibited under Israel's racist "anti-racist" laws.

    In today's editorial, Haaretz calls on the police and the leftist Attorney General to expand their net, and to arrest and prosecute all others who express "racist" opinions, such as the opinion that says that supporters of Arab terror and of the PLO should be expelled from Israel and the "territories". These calls for "population transfer" by some on the Right constitute racism and fascism, in the eyes of the Haaretz editorial writers, and so should be prohibited. How many Israelis should be jailed according to Haaretz injunctions? Well, the editorial mentions that according to a recent opinion poll, 35% of Israelis support the idea of "population transfer" for Palestinians, and Haaretz makes it clear that it expects the police to arrest all 35% of the population who thinks so. The fact that Haaretz itself has always supported the forced ethnic cleansing and expulsion of all Jews from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip does NOT apparently constitute racism and fascism though.

    It is there in black and white. Haaretz is demanding that the "Moledet" political Party, and Avigdor Lieberman and his party (not mentioned by name in the editorial but clearly indicated), should be arrested, banned and criminalized in the name of protecting democracy and free speech. So should anyone putting up a bumper sticker that reads "Where there are No Arabs, there are No Terrorist Atrocities". The editorial also mentions by name the ex-general Efi Eitam, Israel's most promising and fascinating rising politician from the National Religious Party (an ex-kibbutznik turned Orthodox Jew and a powerful speaker). Seems HE dared to disagree with the Haaretz commies as well.

    Now I have never understood why newspapers that openly oppose free speech and democracy should be exempt from becoming themselves targeted by everyone from the police to hooligans. I have never been able to work up a tear when Neonazi or Stalinist newspapers or magazines get trashed by critics and opponents. I would find it hard to cry if a PLO Kassem 2 missile hit the Haaretz editorial headquarters at high noon.

    And if a future government of the Right should ever decide to send in troops to shut the newspaper down, then please excuse me if I sit out the protest rallies and demonstrations supporting the right of Haaretz to publish its papers freely.

Haaretz's Editorial: Legitimizing vile talk

    Comments filled with contempt for Palestinians in the territories and Arab citizens of Israel have recently been echoing widely through public forums. Right-wing politicians have started to speak openly about a need to remove Palestinians from the territories. Sometimes they are careful not to use the word "transfer" which still carries a public stigma - but transfer is nonetheless exactly what their suggestions mean. In an atmosphere of frustration and despair stirred by the lethal conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, such proposals win an unprecedented measure of public support. In a poll Ma'ariv published this weekend, 35 percent of respondents supported transfer.

    The government, the Knesset and the main political parties are failing to clamp down on the degenerating norms of public discourse. Racist, fascist formulations attain quasi-legitimacy when they come from the mouths of ministers, Knesset members and rabbis. Minister Binyamin Elon's comments supporting transfer and a public campaign staged by Moledet on this subject have not been met by a single denunciation. Blunt statements made by Minister Uzi Landau suggesting that we do to the Palestinians "what the Iraqis did to the Kurds," and vituperative comments made by Minister Avigdor Lieberman, have been condoned as natural expressions. It appears that media outlets eyeing improved ratings prefer such spokespeople to more temperate speakers, and so they give them ample air time.

    In such circumstances, it is little wonder that people who want to grab the spotlight and hope to join the national leadership, ratchet up the tone of their statements and end up making truly reprehensible comments. Efi Eitam for instance was not ashamed to call the Arab citizens of Israel "a cancerous growth." In a public appearance last week, Eitam also developed some kind of theory about the "feminine" character of Islam. If there were not now a fear that his views might catch on, they could easily be dismissed as mere drivel spouted by an ignoramus.

    After a prolonged debate about principles, the Kahane-led Kach movement was deemed illegal. Movements such as Moledet, and various public figures, who express positions regarding the Palestinian population which resemble Kach's views ought to face legal review as well. The government attorney general recently ordered the police to launch an investigation into who was responsible for the slogan "No Arabs - No terrorist attacks." After issuing such an order, how can the attorney general close his ears and ignore similar explicit statements made by public figures?

    Israeli society is not alone in being exposed to such extremist viewpoints during a time of national crisis. However, the tensions now gripping the society are not some warrant that justifies a gross slippage of national moral standards or the corruption of public discourse by extremist right-wing leaders who managed to carve a place for themselves in the consensus. Israel's society is not just locked in a struggle to achieve security - it retains a strong obligation to preserve its values, and to protect them, even in circumstances of crisis. This is a crucial task which should not be under-estimated.

Israel Supreme Court's Latest Judicial Atrocity
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
9, Jan 2002 

The Rabbi and the McCarthyists
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
1, Jan 2001

The Sneak Attack of the Robed Rascals
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
30, Dec 2001

Judicial Atrocities
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
27, Nov 2001

Israel's Newest Judicial Atrocity
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
9, Nov 2001

Israel's Newest Judicial Atrocity
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
9, Nov 2001

The Likud's First Amendment
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
2, Nov 2001

The Person the Israeli Left Most Loves to Hate
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
20, Aug 2001

Hypocritical Interrogation
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
16, Aug 2001

Stripping Bills of the Fabric of Sanity
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
26 June 2001

New Free Speech Rules In Israel
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
25 June 2001

The Grand Entente
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
18 June 2001

Protected Speech
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
24 May 2001

Do you think he got all his books back?
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
22 May 2001 

Freedom of Information Act Ignored
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
10 Apr 2001 

Latest Victim of Assault on Free Speech in Israel
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
10 Apr 2001 

More Judicial Atrocities
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
5 Apr 2001 

Haaretz on Free Speech at Yale
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
29 Mar 2001 

The Leftist First Amendment
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
22 Mar 2001 

Free Speech and Ben Gurion University
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
14 Mar 2001 

The Israeli Supreme Court Porks Democracy
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
12 Mar 2001 

Return of the T word
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
27 Feb 2001 

SUPREME INJUSTICE Israel's Anti-Democratic Supreme Court
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
22 Feb 2001 

The Radical Secularism of Tel Aviv University
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
21 Feb 2001

The True Tale of the Arrest of Ralph Kronenthal
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
7 Feb 2001

One Last Act of McCarthyism
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
6 Feb 2001

Treachery
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
6 Feb 2001

Sarid's Petition to Prevent Arrest of Meretz Activist
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
26 Jan 2001

Sarid's Petition to Jail a Rabbi
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
25 Jan 2001

His Opinions Frighten Me!
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
22 Jan 2001

So Come Get Me!!
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
7 Jan 2001

Metastatizing McCarthyism
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
5 Jan 2001

New Attacks on Free Speech
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
29 Dec 2000

Bolshies on the Warpath
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
27 Dec 2000

Tamirian Democracy
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
27 Nov 2000

Jews Do Not Have Free Speech in Israel
Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
27 Nov 2000

Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
17 Nov 2000

Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
12 Nov 2000

Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
5 Nov 2000

Dr. Steve Plaut's email-newsletter
splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
6 Nov 2000

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