Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Sugar Daddies
Want to know WHY al-Kassam rockets are falling on Sderot every day? I
mean - besides the obvious cause, namely, the mega-stupidity of the
Israeli government ordering the eviction of all the Jews from the Gaza
Strip and turning it over to the genocidal terrorists of the Hamas.
Want to know the OTHER reason why the rockets keep falling?
It is because Israel's government does not have the courage to prevent
sugar from being imported into the Gaza Strip.
Huh? - you say?
Yes, the root problem is sugar. Why sugar? Well, Kassam rockets are
primitive little devices thrown together in the basements and underground
tunnels of the Gaza Strip. They use a primitive fuel that is mainly a mix
of sugar and fertilizer. If you think I am kidding, take a look at
http://www.me-monitor.com/files/The%20Growing%20Threat%20of%20the%20Kassam.htm
or
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0507/HowStuffWorks.php3?printer_friendly
or http://www.israelnetdaily.com/feed_content.php?feed=27641 . These are
NOT the Katyusha rockets of the Hizbollah, although a few katyushas have
also been fired out of Gaza by the savages.
This has been known for years. If Israel had simply announced that no
sugar at all (better yet - no fertilizer either) can be brought into the
Gaza Strip, the residents of Sderot would be strolling about in
tranquility, enjoying the evening Negev breezes and listening to the
birds. Instead, Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz prefer to be the Sugar
Daddies for the Gaza Strip.
The problem is that the same state of Israel that clobbered the Arab
aggressors in six days in 1967 and then rescued the Entebbe hostages in
1976 is today too afraid of its own shadow to stop the imports into Gaza
of sugar and fertilizer.
Sure, the academic moonbats in Israel would have a fit if the sugar
shipments were stopped and Gaza were placed under a sugar embargo. They
of course would oppose anything short of unconditional surrender by Israel
to stop the rocket barrages on Sderot. Their anti-Semitic friends
abroad would also chime in their outrage.
So to keep a lid on things, I hereby propose that Israel announce a
new dental health program of preventive dental medicine for Gaza. To help
prospective suicide bombers and rocket shooters from developing painful
problems of tooth decay, Israel will do the humanitarian thing and stop
all sugar imports! Any leftist protesting this would be seen as an
anti-dentite.
And then to offset any damages to Gaza from a halt in imports of
fertilizer, Israel can also shut off the water supply to Gaza and let the
locals fertilize their fields with human organic substances that cannot be
used to produce Kassam rockets.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/1#2179
2. Showdown at the OKnesset Corral
By Steven Plaut
I have been holding back a secret from you. 18 years ago I sold my
old apartment to Yitzhak Rubin. Because I liked him, I fixed all the
plaster cracks and electric sockets for him for free.
Who? . you ask? Yitzhak Rubin, the hero of the month in Israel.
Yitzhak Rubin is a film director. He makes artistic films and
documentaries. He has won international awards. But he suffers from a
disadvantage in post-survivalist Israel: he is a Zionist. He thinks
Israel has the right to exist. He is not a rightwinger. But being a
Zionist makes him a persona non grata among the artsy-phartsy elite and
among the leftist chattering classes.
And Rubin was the hero of a showdown in the Knesset education
committee last week. There he played Gary Cooper in a verbal gunfight
with one of the worst anti-Israel leftist extremist film makers in the
world.
We have had occasion to comment on Ayal Sivan in the past (see this:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/5175 . Sivan
makes anti-Israel propaganda "artsy" films that portray Israel as a nazi
country terrorizing the po' Arabs. He was involved in a famous court case
in France. After Jewish philosopher Alain Finkelkraut called Sivan an
anti-Semite, Sivan filed a malicious and frivolous SLAPP "libel" suit
against Finkelkraut and lost (see
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2006/07/court_dismisses.html
). In France, unlike Israel, malicious SLAPP suits get tossed out of
court.
Siven was also in the news recently because he was awarded an Israeli
government contract to make a marketing film for oranges, and many people
protested aghast at that, given Sivan's politics. The government backed
down and cancelled the contract (see
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1177591167987&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter
).
The showdown in the OKnesset Corral is described in this web page,
http://news.msn.co.il/news/Internal/Internal/200705/20070529133114.htm ,
alas only in Hebrew. But let me give you the gist.
Sivan was in the Knesset to complain that he had lost the contract to
make the marketing film. Yitzhak Rubin also testified there about how it
was all but impossible to get film funding in Israel, including from a
governmental fund, unless you are a far leftist anti-Zionist loony. Rubin
himself had competed for the same contract that was awarded to Sivan but
was turned down because he was not anti-Israel enough. He then told Sivan
before the committee that Sivan makes lousy movies, films that no one goes
to see, and added that Sivan's own father has not spoken with Sivan for 20
years because of Sivan's political extremism. (Rubin's words - I do not
know if it is true.)
Sivan had a conniption and started screaming and cursing at Rubin in
the Knesset committee. I can't cite every word he said or else I would
lose my PG rating (this is a family incitement service after all). But
his shrieks included, "I wager on your left testicle, you shitty one. I
(deleted reference to a heterosexual bodily function) your mother."
Rubin responded, "You mean in Birkenau?" (the concentration camp in
which his mother was held). Sivan answered, "Yes I (deleted reference to
a heterosexual bodily function) her."
We will continue to follow haute culture in Israel for you.
3. SLAPP Shenanigans:
June 6, 2007
Wall St Journal
Be Careful What You Sue For
By FLOYD ABRAMS
June 6, 2007; Page A19
Pursuing a libel or slander suit has long been a dangerous enterprise.
Oscar Wilde sued the father of his young lover Alfred Douglas for having
referred to him as a "posing Somdomite" and wound up not only dropping his
case but being tried, convicted and jailed for violating England's
repressive laws banning homosexual conduct. Alger Hiss sued Wittaker
Chambers for slander for accusing Hiss of being a member of the Communist
Party with Chambers, and of illegally passing secret government documents
to him for transmission to the Soviet Union. In the end, Hiss was jailed
for perjury for having denied Chambers' claims before a grand jury.
More recently, British historian David Irving sued American scholar
Deborah Lipstadt in England for having characterized him as a Holocaust
denier and was ultimately so discredited in court that an English judge
not only determined that he was indeed a Holocaust denier but an
"antisemite" and "racist" as well.
On May 29 of this year, the potential vulnerability of a plaintiff that
misuses the courts to sue for libel once again surfaced when the Islamic
Society of Boston abandoned a libel action it had commenced against a
number of Boston residents, a Boston newspaper and television station, and
Steven Emerson, a recognized expert on terrorism and, in particular,
extremist Islamic groups. In all, 17 defendants were named.
Those accused had publicly raised questions about a real estate
transaction entered into between the Boston Redevelopment Authority and
the Islamic Society, which transferred to the latter a plot of land in
Boston, at a price well below market value, for the construction of a
mosque and other facilities. The critics urged the Boston authorities to
reconsider their decision to provide the land on such favorable terms
(which included promised contributions to the community by the Islamic
Society, such as holding lectures and offering other teaching about Islam)
to an organization whose present or former leaders had close connections
with or who had otherwise supported terrorist organizations.
On the face of it, the Islamic Society was a surprising entry into the
legal arena. Its founder, Abdurahman Alamoudi, had been indicted in 2003
for his role in a terrorism financing scheme, pled guilty and had been
sentenced to a 23-year prison term. Another individual, Yusef Al-Qaradawi,
who had been repeatedly identified by the Islamic Society as a member of
its board of Trustees, had been described by a U.S. Treasury Department
official as a senior Muslim Brotherhood member and had endorsed the
killing of Americans in Iraq and Jews everywhere. One director of the
Islamic Society, Walid Fitaihi, had written that the Jews would be
"scourged" because of their "oppression, murder and rape of the worshipers
of Allah," and that they had "perpetrated the worst of evils and brought
the worst corruption to the earth."
The Islamic Society nonetheless sued, claiming both libel and civil-rights
violations. Motions to dismiss the case were denied, and the litigants
began to compel third parties to turn over documents bearing on the case.
In short order, one after another of the allegations made by the Islamic
Society collapsed.
Their complaint asserted that the defendants had falsely stated that
monies had been sent to the Islamic Society from "Saudi/Middle Eastern
sources," and that such statements and others had devastated its
fund-raising efforts. But documents obtained in discovery demonstrated
without ambiguity that fund-raising was (as one representative of the
Islamic Society had put it) "robust," with at least $7.2 million having
been wired to the Islamic Society from Middle Eastern sources, mostly from
Saudi Arabia.
The Islamic Society claimed it had been libeled by a variety of
expressions of concern by the defendants that it, the Society, had
provided support for extremist organizations. But bank records obtained by
the defendants showed that the Islamic Society had served as funder both
of the Holy Land Foundation, a Hamas-controlled organization that the U.S.
Treasury Department had said "exists to raise money in the United States
to promote terror," and of the Benevolence International Foundation, which
was identified by the 9/11 Commission as an al Qaeda fund-raising arm.
The complaint maintained that any reference to recent connections between
the Islamic Society and the now-imprisoned Abdurahman Alamoudi was false
since it "had had no connection with him for years." But an Islamic
Society check written in November 2000, two months after Alamoudi publicly
proclaimed his support for Hamas and Hezbollah, was uncovered in discovery
which directed money to pay for Alamoudi's travel expenses.
To top it all off, documents obtained from the Boston Redevelopment
Authority itself revealed serious, almost incomprehensible, conflicts of
interest in the real-estate deal. It turned out that the city agency
employee in charge of negotiating the deal with the Islamic Society was at
the same time a member of that group and secretly advising it about how to
obtain the land at the cheapest possible price.
So the case was dropped. No money was paid by the defendants, no apologies
offered, and no limits on their future speech imposed. But it is not at
all as if nothing happened. The case offers two enduring lessons. The
first is that those who think about suing for libel should think again
before doing so. And then again once more. While all the ultimate
consequences to the Islamic Society for bringing the lawsuit remain
uncertain, any adverse consequences could have been avoided by not suing
in the first place.
The second lesson is that in one way (and perhaps no other) we should
learn from the English system and award counsel fees to the winning side
in cases like this, which are brought to inhibit speech on matters of
serious public import. Because all the defendants in this case were
steadfast and refused to settle, they were eventually vindicated. But the
real way to avoid meritless cases such as this is to have a body of law
that makes clear that plaintiffs who bring them will be held financially
responsible for doing so.
Mr. Abrams, a partner in the law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP,
represented Steven Emerson in the case discussed in this op-ed.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118109777647426054.html
See also this:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/727jbsso.asp
4. Exposing Jewish "Progressives":
http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/21766/Exposing_The_Agenda_Of_Jewish_%27Progressives%27.html
5. Hillel Halkin's silliness:
http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/21761/Dividing_Jerusalem_Is_No_Solution.html
