Love of the Land: Judicial jihad: Engaging a new battlefront

Judicial jihad: Engaging a new battlefront

Shimon Samuels
Columns/JPost
14 December 09

On December 6, 2001, three months after the Durban hatefest, I attended the last meeting of its NGO Forum International Steering Committee in Geneva.

Though I had been successively elected and expelled, I now became privy to an eight-point plan attacking Israel as the last bastion of apartheid. It included educational, economic, cultural, diplomatic and legal campaigns to demonize, boycott, embargo and isolate the Jewish state.

Legal measures began with sporadic and - so far unsuccessful - attempts to arrest IDF reserve officers in countries of universal jurisprudence.

In 2005, I was charged with criminal defamation by a Franco-Palestinian charity, designated by the US as a terrorist organization. My sentence was one symbolic euro, which was politically too expensive. I won on appeal, and was taken to the French Supreme Court, where, this July, I was finally acquitted.

This long, agonizing and costly experience was emblematic of an epidemic of such suits designed to intimidate and silence pro-Jewish/Zionist activity. The charges against me were replicated against seven other targets - journalists, authors and a Christian Website. Parallel were the suits and countersuits relating to Muhammad al-Dura - the Palestinian child presented by French television as an IDF victim, in terms redolent of ritual murder.

Some denote such cases as "lawfare." Perhaps more appropriate would be "juridical jihad," due to the clearly Islamist context of the most litigious plaintiffs.

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Love of the Land: Judicial jihad: Engaging a new battlefront