Law?
Jews. The people of the Law.
Or so it should be. Which makes the
Noam Federman affair that much more
aggravating, not to say heartwrenching.
We don't usually expect a democracy to
have political prisoners. And we certainly
don't expect a society built on law to
imprison people without a charge being
filed or the accused even being told what
the charges are. And we expect the accused
to have access to a lawyer. Yet, Noam
Federman is being held without recourse to
any recognizable law. It's been more than
six months now, without charges or trial.
The entity persecuting Federman is an
Israeli police body known as the GSS. The
GSS have been acting strangely for quite a
while: they seem to have some sort of stake
in proving that there are Jewish terrorists
running around and being a dire threat to
peaceful Arabs. Something is wrong with
this picture. But there's more.
A while ago, a few former heads of the GSS
put their heads together and came up with a
possible way of keeping Jews from going back
and rebuilding their settlements after being
evicted by the government. The government
led by Ariel Sharon, the man who
invented
the settlements, by the way. The solution?
"Why don't we just turn the places over to
armed Palestinians as soon as the settlers are
out? That would certainly keep them from
returning".
Something is more than wrong.
Anyway, back to Federman. In 2001
a court handed him his thirtieth aquittal
after Arab false charges. No wonder
the GSS now finds it more convenient not
to bother with all these legal niceties - it
just leads to that pesky Jew getting out
of jail. Can't have that. The effendis will
be displeased.
Federman was in the past an activist in the
Kach movement. You know, that Jewish
terrorist organization which never seems to
have been involved in terrorism, and which
makes the Israeli legal system look like they
copied half of it from Stalin's Russia and the
rest from Mugabe's Zimbabve. The founder
of which was murdered, without the Israeli
police seemingly being terribly upset. His
son was murdered too, by Palestinians. I
don't think the powers that be were all that
upset with that assassination either.
So here we have a Jewish guy, in the Jewish
state, trying to be working for Jewish values.
For which he gets persecution (30 attempts
to have him charged with a crime, by the
year 2001), and prison without due process.
By the "guardians" of the Jewish state.
Have you figured out what's wrong with
this picture yet?
There's more on this steaming pile. The
other day, another Jewish fellow was
arrested.
He was rash enogh to protest against Noam
Federman's imprisonment. That earned him
a prison cell. There's no telling when he'll be
back on the street.
Looking at the strange happenings with
Israel's GSS, a story from the semi-
recent past (not from Israel) enters quite
unbidden:
There was this mental hospital which
got into a bit of a scandal over patients
rights being trampled, and rather badly
too. Some of them were long cured
and due for release, some were really
never all that ill and should never have
been committed. In the aftermath, the
media had a field day. Skit heard on
radio:
"We're talking to a patient who's been here
for twenty years now. How are you feeling,
now you're getting out?"
"I'm getting out? No one told me."
"Yes, you're getting out. Can we ask
you what you're here for in the first
place?"
"Well, I really don't know.. I mean, I was
only supposed to repair a water fixture.
And when I tried to leave they just laughed
at me and put me in a straitjacket".
Time for someone to reestablish Law
in Israel. You there, Netanyahu?
# Posted by The Cachelot @ 3:36 PM
