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A Strange Free Speech Victory in Israel
by
20 Nisan 5767, 4/8/2007
It sounds like one of the silliest court cases in Israel but it actually is an important one. A Tel Aviv magistrate's court in Israel actually just defended freedom of speech. And it is a court decision that carries implications for other cases. The court case was a libel suit filed by municipal veterinarian of Raanana and Kfar Sava, Dr. Israel Glass, against another veterinarian and animal rights activist, Dr. Yuval Samuel, because the latter had written in an internet forum and elsewhere had accused the former of being a Gestapo member and operating concentration camps. It all had to do with animal rights. You see, in 2004 there were some outbreaks of rabies in Israel and the Raanana vet ordered stray cats killed. The animal rights nuts got their knickers in a twist about that and attacked him. Glass filed a libel suit against Samuel (for details, Hebrew only, see this). Glass is himself son of Holocaust survivors. The judge in the case, Avigail Cohen, tossed the suit out. It was protected speech, she insisted, whether or not one agrees with the claims or the style of speech of the animal nuts. It is legitimate debate about public matters and issues. Now I mention all of this because of how dramatically it illustrates how selective free speech is being protected in Israel and how outrageous and anti-democratic was the court ruling of the Arab woman judge Reem Naddaf in the Gordon-Plaut case, a case that bears some distant resemblance to the above suit.  While calling a private citizen (a veterinarian) a member of the Gestapo is protected speech in Israel, criticizing the political opinions of an anti-Semitic extremist academic and a public figure who writes columns for neo-Nazis and anti-Semites all over the world is libelous, ruled Judge Naddaf of Nazareth magistrate court last year. When Neve Gordon, an anti-Israel extremist from Ben Gurion University, and his destroy-Israel anarchist friends illegally entered Ramallah to interfere with Israeli anti-terror military operations and to prevent the arrest of wanted Palestinian murderers, he was denounced by me as belonging to a group of "Judenrat wannabes". I also denounced him for his long campaign to promote and endorse Holocaust Denier Norman Finkelstein, who evidently is being fired this month from DePaul University for HIS Neo-Nazi activities. Gordon filed a malicious frivolous "libel" suit against me in Nazareth court hoping to get a radical anti-Israel Arab judge. He got Judge Nadaff, who ruled that calling practitioners of such illegal anti-Semitic pro-terror behavior "Judenrat wannabes" is libelous. In her verdict the judge also justified and legitimized Holocaust revisionism. Prof. Alan Dershowitz denounced the judge and described Gordon thus: "It is my opinion that Neve Gordon has gotten into bed with neo-Nazis, Holocaust justice deniers, and anti-Semites. He is a despicable example of a self-hating Jew and a self-hating Israeli." Naddaf wants to create a system in which animal rights nuts can say whatever they want as protected speech, but Zionists criticizing the criminal behavior of anti-Semites and traitors may not. Her verdict will soon be reversed on appeal. Israeli anti-democratic judge trying to suppress free speech For more details on that Gordon-Plaut court case see this and this and this and this.
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