INN today carries a news report on yet another one-sided biased "report" coming out of the misnamed Association for Civil Rights in Israel or ACRI. The "Association" is for Civil Rights for everyone except Jews. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) is an anti-democratic extremist group that does not endorse free speech. ACRI, like B'tselem, Physicians for Human Rights and many other assorted splinter far-left, anti-Israel, pro-PLO groups in Israel, pretends it is nothing more than a neutral human rights watchdog but this is an Orwellian lie. (B'tselem by the way distributed a special brochure this week via Haaretz in which it claims to prove that Gaza is still "occupied" by Israel because Israel refuses to let the Hamas import weapons freely at the entrance points into the Gaza Strip.  Importing explosives - now THERE is a human right B'tselem can get all indignant over.)  Its latest "report" is a one-sided attack on the Jews in Hebron. As usual. the ACRI just can't seem to locate any acts of violence against Jews by Arabs. And self-defense is definitely not a civil right of Jews in the eyes of ACRI.

ACRI is an extremist anti-Israel group that only cares about "human rights" when "defending them" is part of delegitimizing Israel (such as in this case). It has never heard of a human right for Jews not to be murdered by terrorists.

Think I am exaggerating? The president of ACRI, Sami Michael, best known for romanticizing communism, was cited in Haaretz (Oct 21, 2004) as justifying Palestinian terror attacks against Jewish Israelis. Here are his words as quoted by Haaretz: 

Michael understands the Hamas members who are fighting these Jews, who stuck a wedge down their throats. In an interview published in the latest issue of New Horizons, a monthly on society and the state published by the Berl Katznelson Foundation, Michael rejects the definition of Hamas fighters as "terrorists."
"Imagine the feeling if I woke up tomorrow and saw this neighborhood, which we inhabit, forcibly conquered by the Syrians, and they established settlements here, and in order to go to the bus station, I needed permission from the Syrian army. How would I feel?" the author from Haifa asked. "If I fight them, I will be considered a terrorist. Why am I a terrorist? Why do we call Hezbollah or Hamasniks terrorists? Why? Because he fights on his own territory? Suddenly, aliens, occupiers, land on him and tell him: "Your house is ours. It's his land, he and his forefathers were born here, and the settlers say: We will never leave ... How would you respond to this?"

A few years back, I approached ACRI and offered them an opportunity to defend free speech in Israel and prove they support human rights for all, even for those who might disagree with their leftist extremist ideology. As you may know, I am being sued in a harassment SLAPP** "libel suit" by a leftist extremist lecturer at Ben-Gurion University because I dared to criticize his political opinions and his public political behavior. The lecturer in question (Neve Gordon) served, for example, as a human shield for Yasser Arafat while Arafat was hiding in his offices the murderers of an Israeli cabinet minister and other terrorists, all this in order to interfere illegally with an Israeli anti-terror military operation. The suit is clearly nothing more than an anti-democratic assault on free speech by a leftist extremist who thinks it is a crime to criticize him.

So, I contacted ACRI and asked them to take up my case and denounce the Ben-Gurion extremists' tactic of trying to use SLAPP litigation as a bludgeon to suppress free speech for non-leftists. There can be no clearer opportunity for those who value free speech as a human right to denounce such misuse of the courts as this case. I invited ACRI to help defeat this cynical move by the leftist extremist in question, Neve Gordon of the political science department at Ben-Gurion University. The liberal Prof. Alan Dershowitz 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."

In response, I got a peremptory refusal from a spokesperson for ACRI. They are not interested in defending free speech for Zionists.

** SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. SLAPP suits are anti-democratic libel suits designed to suppress the free speech of one's critics.