Monday, July 06, 2009
More 'Academic' Atrocities from the Holy Land
pro-Terrorists
Tel Aviv University - The Terrorist-Financed NGO Gisha run by Tel Aviv U.
Law Professors Kenneth Mann and Sari Bashi
Lee Kaplan, www.IsraCampus.Org.il
3/7/2009
.It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for law, so much as a respect
for right.. - Henry David Thoreau
If you want to get to know Tel Aviv University Law Professors Kenneth Mann
and Sari Bashi, you need also to discuss the NGO, Gisha, which they
founded and for which they list themselves as legal counsels. As leaders
of Gisha, Mann and Bashi are two of the many lawyers in Israel who are
working diligently to death and hasten realization of the goals and
political agenda of the Palestinian Arabs. In particular, this is
manifested in their latest work opposing the Jewish states security
procedures in Gaza, better known as Hamastan.
Until very recently on leave from Tel Aviv Universitys Law School in order
to serve as Israel's first Chief Public Defender, Professor Kenneth Mann
has also held the positions of distinguished visiting professor at Rutgers
Law School and was a senior research associate at Yale Law School. At TAU
he has taught criminal procedure, evidence, trial practice, and supervised
a legal-aid clinic in criminal law. Part of Manns ideological commitment
to aid the .Palestinians. may have been gleaned at the University of
California at Berkeley, where he earned his BA and, then an M.A. from the
Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley. He earned his J.D.
from Berkeleys Boalt Law School which includes quite a few radical and
anti-Israel faculty members. Sari Bashi is an American-Israeli attorney
who teaches currently at TAUs law school and graduated from Yale Law
School in 2006. She co-founded Gisha with Mann shortly after her
graduation.
Gishas mission, according to Mann and Bashi, is as a legal NGO whose
purpose is "litigation and advocacy that aim to help individuals exercise
their right to freedom of movement while working for systemic change in
military practices and abuses at Israeli border-crossings and
checkpoints.exploiting "untapped potential for law reform effectuated
through intensive engagement with the military bureaucracy." It has an
emphasis on "the Gaza Strip, a severely underserved area whose viability
depends on the ability of people and goods to move in and out of its
borders." Prior to founding Gisha, while in Israel under a Fellowship
grant, Sari Bashi worked at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a
leftist anti-Israel NGO masquerading as a .human rights organization..
ACRI has even programs to encourage IDF soldiers to desert or refuse to
serve. Mann now serves as Gishas Legal Adviser and Chairperson of its
Advisory Committee.
Gisha uses the Israeli courts to sue the Jewish state for taking security
measures. Mann and Bashi feel that the same 1.5 million Arabs who elected
and cheer on Hamas and Fatah terrorism are victims of .collective
punishment. by the Israeli government, and suffer under .restricted
movement..
The alternative to such .collective punishment. is to sit back passively
while thousands of rockets are fired at Israeli civilians. Israel needs to
control the Gaza borders and entry points and has a right to do so under
international law. Israel deported 8,000 Jews before it left Gaza as a
price paid for peace, and what it received in return was Islamofascist
terror. Mann and Bashi evidently blame Israel for all that and have filed
suit against the Israeli government over security micro-procedures. In
other words, people with expertise in law think they have the right to
second-guess the militarys own leadership on questions of how to fight
terror.
Gisha receives the majority of its funding from Echoing Green, another NGO
that also funds such openly pro-terror groups as the International
Solidarity Movement. As an indication of their bias, Echoing Green named
ISM co-founders and leaders Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf (both of whom
have admitted they consider suicide bombings .legitimate resistance. and
the latter has openly admitted she works with Hamas, PFLP and Palestinian
Islamic Jihad) as among the ten best .social entrepreneurs of the year,.
and awarded them a $90,000 grant. Arraf only yesterday was arrested at sea
by the IDF Navy while trying to smuggle goods into Gaza for Hamas and to
open up a sea-borne weapons smuggling route for Iran. This was Arrafs
seventh voyage and she even received a medal from Hamas for her efforts.
Gisha and Sari Bashi received over one million dollars from Echoing Green
for Gishas project to ease the .movement. of Palestinians, .movement. that
so often facilitates terrorist atrocities. Meanwhile. Echoing Green, the
source for Gishas funding, gets money from Saudi Arabia.
Kenneth Mann gave a law lecture on .Israeli apartheid. for the venomously
anti-Israel Alternative Information Center, itself with close ties to the
ISM and .anarchist. groups. Bashi obsessively uses the words .apartheid.
and .collective punishment. in describing Israeli security procedures.
Gisha makes little attempt to hide its political agenda and bias. In an
interview with the Jerusalem Post ("One on One: 'Control Creates
Responsibility'", Feb. 6, 2008), Gisha Director Bashi, called Israels Gaza
policy "illegal, dangerous and stupid." Bashi was sharply challenged by
Avraham Bell's January 2008 article (International Law and Gaza: The
Assault on Israel's Right to Self-Defense, Jan. 2008). In response, Bashi
simply repeated standard one-sided claims without providing a serious
legal analysis regarding the historical status of Gaza.
Gisha has a highly selective interest in applying international law to the
Middle East conflict. On March 2, Gisha issued a statement that called on
.both sides of the conflict. to .remove civilians from the cycle of
combat.. How nice, except there is no .cycle of conflict. and only the
Palestinians cynically use civilians as political pawns to get media
points. While noting that .the Hamas organization and militants in Gaza
must immediately stop the firing of rockets on towns in southern Israel.,
Gisha drew a parallel between these attacks and Israels response,
condemning Israel's .undifferentiated firing into crowded population
centers.. Gisha did not condemn Hamas practice of launching rockets from
within civilians areas (behind human shields), a practice that is clearly
a violation of international law.
Mann frequently drifts into anti-Israel ranting. According to Mann,
.The Israeli government's definition of a humanitarian crisis would
require human deaths. Now, there have been deaths -- among the chronically
ill, who were not permitted to leave the Gaza Strip for medical care that
is not available (or no longer available) there, due to the closure. There
have been deaths among those who are trying to bring the necessities of
daily life in through the tunnels. And, of course, there were many deaths
during Operation Cast Lead -- including an unusual spike in maternal and
neo-natal deaths due to lack of care, as the UN has reported. It is not as
if nobody knew. Many experts have stated that this policy of collective
punishment against an entire civilian population under a belligerent
military occupation is illegal under international law..
A humanitarian crisis among the Palestinians actually consists of a
situation in which the terrorists do not having any foreign aid money to
steal. Meanwhile Mann laments as part of his .humanitarian crisis. the
deaths among those .who are trying to bring the necessities of daily life
through the tunnels.. The necessities of life these people bring in are
explosives and rocket components. If Mann wants his Palestinians to have
easy access to civilian supplies, maybe he should get them to stop
shooting rockets and release Gilad Shalit.
For Gisha and its lawyers a one million dollar grant must help alleviate
any potential guilt pangs about their serving as apologists for the
misbehavior of Palestinians. Sari Bashi mentions that her family in Israel
used to yell at her over for what she does, but now they just avoid the
subject and invite her over for family gatherings. It would be interesting
to learn what they will say about her funding coming indirectly from Saudi
Arabia and from groups that want the end of the Jewish state and to excuse
the murder of Israelis as .legitimate resistance..
Its troubling to think that the next generation of Israeli lawyers
responsible for litigating in arenas of international law are being taught
by such radicals.
2.
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial%20-%20Judith%20Nusbaum%20-%20TAU%20PsychoActive%20conference%20Eyewitness%20report.htm
PsychoActive conference at Tel Aviv University - Yet another TAU
"academic" exercise in one-sided Israel-Bashing
Eyewitness report by Judith Nusbaum
1/7/2009
College of Management Academic Studies . Law Professor Orna Bar-Naftali
uses .Law. to Bludgeon Israel
Lee Kaplan, www.isracampus.org.il
28/6/2009
College of Management Academic Studies . Law Professor Orna Bar-Naftali
uses .Law. to Bludgeon Israel
Lee Kaplan, www.isracampus.org.il
28/6/2009
.There's no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of
law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the
truth..-Jean Giraudoux
The pursuit of personal political agendas has reached into even the law
schools in Israel and America, where international and humanitarian law is
supposedly debated and taught. A case in point is law professor Orna
Bar-Naftali, the head of the law school at the College of Management and
Academic Studies in Israel, one of the Jewish states larger institutes of
higher education. Bar-Naftali earned her law degree at Tel Aviv
University, then went on to earn other graduate degrees in America,
including a PhD in Law. She is now the Dean at the College of Management,
which boasts exchange programs with Fordham University in the US.
Orna Bar-Naftali has been working assiduously with leftist lawyers in
Israel and abroad to suggest that Israel routinely violates .international
law. and .human rights.. An examination of the womans background and legal
discourse becomes quite revealing of an agenda to smear Israel and drown
the Jewish state in a malaise of her legal .interpretations,. as well as
to provide propaganda against the Jewish state by certain NGOs that have
an anti-Zionist and even anti-Israel agenda.
We learn that Bar-Naftali is on the executive board of directors for
BTselem, an anti-Israel far-leftist NGO which pretends to be a human
rights watchdog agency, and one that accepts Arab rumors and statistics as
fact to damn the Jewish state. For example, BTselem in the past has
reported Arabs who were killed in suicide bomb attacks or armed terrorists
fighting the IDF as .civilian casualties.. The problem is that BTselem
sees no human rights violations when Arab terrorists murder Jews, only
when Jews try to defend themselves from such murderers. It has repeatedly
shown itself to be less than honest in reporting alleged .humanitarian
violations. by the IDF or by .settlers,. and is hardly a credible or
reliable neutral source of information.
Bar-Naftali worked between 1993-1996 as a legal United Nations Staff
Member of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York. Working
for the UN might have helped her develop her anti-Israel biases and legal
interpretations. The United Nations is anything but impartial toward
Israel and its peacekeeping mission was even responsible for aiding the
abduction and killing of Israeli soldiers, one an American, by Syria in
October of 2000. In Lebanon, most recently, the UN did all but nothing to
prevent the rearming of Hizballah.
Of particular interest is how Bar-Naftali, the lawyer, has declared the
.occupation. as being against international law and humanitarian law. The
word .Occupation. itself, according to anti-Israel radical leftists, is a
loaded word with dual meanings. Depending on the audience, it can mean
just Gaza, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) but increasingly what it
really means is all of Israel. To which .occupation. does Naftali refer
when she opines that Israels occupation is .illegal. per international
law?
It is this selective one-sided interpretation of .law. always against
Israel by Bar-Naftali that is particularly troubling. If one reads or
listens only to Bar-Naftalis .interpretations. of law, one might subscribe
to the notion that Israel does indeed violate international law and human
rights. However, it is the reverse that is true. A lawyer like Bar-Naftali
who leaves out historical or current facts to promote a cause or person in
court has an agenda, not a goal of participating in using law to uncover
truth and justice. Bar-Naftali may be a law professor at an Israeli
university, but she functions as an advocate for those who want to destroy
Israel, especially through disinformation. She has an impressive
curriculum vitae (she holds several advanced degrees from US
universities). Nevertheless, one has to scratch ones head about someone
who spent a life in academia studying law on two continents, yet uses that
training to support the goals of the most vile and anti-law groups
imaginable, the terrorist organizations and leadership of the PLO and
Hamas. At every turn Orna Bar-Naftali finds fault with Israel and some of
Israels Jews to aid a society that still practices honor killings and
promotes anti-Jewish blood libels.the Palestinian Arabs.
Most recently, Bar-Naftali lent her .expert. opinion to a lawsuit filed in
Canadian courts against a Canadian company for doing business with and
helping to build a Jewish community in the West Bank. Being an .expert. in
.international law,. Bar-Naftali provided support for the weekly rioters
in Biilin by advising the Canadian Supreme Court that Israel (a country
whose future lawyers she is teaching) has no jurisdiction over the
occupied territories.
Mind you, it is .International Law. that helped create the Oslo Accords in
the first place. In fact, Israel has conceded a .legal entitlement. to the
Palestinian Authority to create a Palestinian state if it would just stop
terrorism against Israelis. Israels Supreme Court has been used by PA
Arabs to sue Israel and in many cases the Arabs have won. But that isnt
good enough for Bar-Naftali. She thinks Israels Supreme Court is
illegitimate (no doubt because Israel itself is also) and she wrote the
Canadian court that:
.I have been advised that in the case of Biilin vs. Green Park Intl Inc.
et al., the defendants have filed two motions
with the Quebec Superior Court on issues res judicata, justiciability, and
forum non-convenience. I have been asked to
provide an opinion on the issue of justiciablity and to answer the
following question:
Is the issue alleged by the plaintiffs of violation of International
Humanitarian Law and Canadian Domestic Law
justiciable before the Israeli courts, and are those courts willing to
adjudicate on the question of the legality of settlements in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories in this case?
In my opinion, the answer is negative. The core question of the legality
of the establishments of settlements is non-justiciable before the Israeli
Courts..
Naftali goes on to state, The Plaintiffs (hereafter Biilin) have brought
suit against the corporate defendants and their registered director
(Hereafter Green Park Companies) under the provisions of the Geneva
Convention Act, R.S. 1985,
C G3, and the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act S.C. 2000 c. 24.I
understand those statutes have been incorporated into Canadian Domestic
Law and that they incorporate principles of International Humanitarian Law
as found at article (49) (6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention dated August
12, 1949...
The .Plaintiffs,. as Bar-Naftali refers to hooligans, thugs, and rioters
in Biilin, should be redefined for what they really are: weekly
international anarchists rioters from the International Solidarity
Movement and their Arab irredentist friends. The Geneva Conventions apply
to established nations who signed an agreement to be followed in the event
of war. This does not apply to violent rioters and vandals.
Bar-Naftali is .fishing. for international condemnation and isolation for
the Jewish state abroad, using, or rather misusing, law to justify her
actions. A recent ruling in a US court requires the PA to pay damages to
American families whose children were killed in PA sponsored terrorist
attacks. The PA .defense. that this was in time of war and not subject to
legal action fell on deaf ears when the judge pointed out that there is a
peace process, not a war. This might also come as news to Bar Naftali. And
why does Bar-Naftali have nothing at all to say about the Palestinian
refusal to release Gilad Shalit? On the one hand, Bar-Naftali erroneously
cites the Geneva Conventions (a frequent ruse of the PLO) to bludgeon
Israel, while on the other has nothing to say about the treatment of
Shalit under the same Geneva Conventions and Red Cross guarantees.
In the legal mind of Orna Bar-Naftali, Israel has no jurisdiction over
Judea and Samaria, no matter what international law says (see the writings
of Prof. Louis Rene Beres on this matter). What a pity this woman hasnt
the time to use international law and the courts to tackle the issue of
honor killings in the PA, or the land law on the books there that
condemned an Arab to death for selling land to a Jew.
But wait, there is more:
Quoting Bar-Naftali and a co-author in another article in the Berkeley
Journal of International Law:
.The intrinsic legality of an occupation is to be measured in relation to
three interrelated fundamental legal principles: (a) Sovereignty and title
in an occupied territory is not vested in the occupying power; under
contemporary international law, and in view of the principle of
self-determination, said sovereignty is vested in the population under
occupation; (b) The occupying power is entrusted with the management of
public order and civil life in the territory under control. In view of the
principle of self-determination, the people under occupation are the
beneficiaries of this trust. The dispossession and subjugation of these
people is thus a violation of this trust, and (c) The occupation is
temporary, as distinct from indefinite. The violation of each of these
principles, as distinct from the violation of a specific norm which
reflects an aspect of these principles, renders an occupation illegal.
Further, these principles are interrelated: the substantive constraints on
the managerial discretion of the occupant elucidated in principle (a) and
(b) respectively, generate the conclusion that it must necessarily be
temporary, and the violation of the temporal constraints expressed in
principle (c) cannot but violate principles (a) and (b), thereby
corrupting the normative regime of occupation. This occupation is illegal.
This is the nature of the Israeli occupation. The extrinsic legality of an
occupation is to be measured by its exceptionality. Once the boundaries
between the exception and the rule are blurred, the occupation becomes
illegal..
Note that what is missing here is a discussion of .occupation. when the
enemy forces are still trying to annihilate the .occupier. or where the
.occupied lands. actually rightfully belong to the .occupier.. In the case
of Israel, the .occupied. territories are its historic heartland. Also
missing are territories owned by victors and taken away from aggressors in
wars the latter started.[1]
And as usual, Bar-Naftali leaves out the important information to damn the
Jewish state when it suits her. In a bit of irony the above by Bar-Naftali
unintentionally makes a case for Israels control of its .occupied. lands:
Point of fact: there were 25 Jewish communities in Gaza, Judea and Samaria
prior to the Arab attacks on the new Jewish state in 1948. Overrun by
armies of the Arab Nation at that time, Egypt and Jordan, the land these
were based on was legally purchased. Despite this, the Arab armies took
the land (and even murdered the occupants after the Armistice as in Kfar
Etzion). Using Bar-Naftalis own arguments, the land was thus occupied by
Arabs against international law and certainly the murder of 35 Jews in a
pit in Gush Etzion was a .humanitarian. crime.
But the fact that Israel regained this property in 1967 in a defensive war
means nothing to Bar-Naftali, because she is only interested in Israel
being decreed guilty of violating .international law. and .humanitarian
rights.. Going a step further, settlements established by Israel in Gaza,
Judea and Samaria after 1967 are at worst disputed territories, since they
are in areas illegally held by Jordan or held in trust by Egypt and not
owned by those countries. In most cases they are on lands purchased
legitimately by their .occupants.. In other cases they were built on
ownerless sand dunes or desolate empty areas.
Even worse, she does not even support Israel in having a right to defend
its own people from terrorism. It should come as no surprise that
Bar-Naftali also found fault with Israels Operation Cast Lead that she
also declares as supposedly being in violation of Humanitarian Law (unlike
the firing of missiles at schoolchildren in Sderot). When Israel used
International law to justify Operation Cast Lead into Gaza after the
southern part of the country endured over 7,000 missiles attacks by Hamas,
Bar-Naftali took strong exception to this.
In discussing Israeli operations in Gaza, Bar-Naftali complains that
international law, her field, is bankrupt, and the results of the IDF
operation in Gaza only reinforces her opinion. .Today, this discipline is
utilized only to justify the use of force,. she said. .It has ceased to
exist, because there is a clear inconsistency between the rules and the
reality to which they are applied. Distinctions between types of conflicts
or between civilians and combatants no longer exist in the field, and one
can put forward weighty and serious reasons that will justify almost any
action. The implication is to validate the use of almost unlimited force
in a manner that is totally at odds with the basic goal of humanitarian
law. Instead of legal advice and international humanitarian law minimizing
suffering, they legitimize the use of force..
If one uses the logic of Orna Bar-Naftali, the use of force is always a
violation of Humanitarian Law; accordingly the allies in World War II were
in violation of Humanitarian Law for using force to end Hitlers reign.
Arab terrorism never seems to interest her. The early Oslo Accords
stipulated there would be an independent Palestinian state by 1998 only if
the Arabs would stop terror against the Jews. Instead, they escalated the
terror. In Bar Naftalis opinion, evidently there is no lesson to be drawn
from that
The joking definition of chutzpah is said to be a man who murders his
parents then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an
orphan. That seems to be a good parable for the type of legality promoted
by Orna Bar-Naftali. It involves using the law to indict Israel for being
the victim of the most brutal and lawless groups of Islamofascist
criminals on the planet, and for daring to defend its own population.
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[1] Something of note that few readers would know, the law school at UC
Berkeley actually encourages lawbreaking when it comes to Israel and even
provides office space at California taxpayer expense to the Arab boycott
and divestment movement on campus. The office of the Law Students for
Justice in Palestine devotes all its time to proving that Israel, founded
by the UN in 1948 under international law is, in fact, an .illegal. state.
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