Love of the Land: Preparing the ground for murder

Preparing the ground for murder

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
14 January '10

Whoopty do - the ostensibly uplifting news is that our attorney-general has at long last made a pro forma move against a libel of particularly monstrous ramifications. Talk about too little too late! It took him a long time, and Menahem Mazuz has managed the grudging gesture literally only days before his six-year term ends.

It was by way of a consolation prize that he decided to support an appeal to the Supreme Court by combat soldiers and bereaved families against Israeli-Arab director Muhammad Bakri for his slanderous 2002 film Jenin, Jenin. Mazuz's announced intention to attend the hearing was meant to sweeten the pill of his refusal to indict Bakri for libel, as the Central Region District Court suggested he should in 2008.

For those who don't recall, here's a brief recap: Directly after the 2002 Pessah Seder carnage at Netanya's Park Hotel, the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield, which spawned whopping falsehoods about war crimes by soldiers in Jenin. Bakri's pseudo-documentary was instrumental in propagating these falsehoods. After our ever-solicitous Supreme Court unanimously permitted local cinematheque screenings of Bakri's creation in 2003, soldiers and families of fallen fighters sued him for libel. The district court accepted thatJenin, Jenin was defamatory, but argued that the state, not individuals, should take legal action. Mazuz refuses to prosecute on behalf of the state, though he has magnanimously offered to side with the plaintiffs in their appeal against the lower court ruling.

The upshot is that the aggrieved soldiers, who put their lives on the line for us all - along with the kin of those soldiers who indeed gave their lives in Jenin - are turned into veritable footballs. The district judge and Mazuz agree that Jenin, Jenin is nothing but a smear job. Yet while the former insists this isn't a matter of private grievances, the latter maintains it can only be litigated as a private complaint.

Related Video: Road to Jenin

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Love of the Land: Preparing the ground for murder

Love of the Land: Mohammad Bakri: ‘art’ is his shield

Mohammad Bakri: ‘art’ is his shield

FresnoZionism
fresnozionism.org
31 December 09

Filmmaker and actor Mohammad Bakri, a ‘Palestinian resident of Israel’, may be prosecuted for criminal libel for his 2002 film “Jenin, Jenin”.

You may recall that in 2002, after a horrendous wave of bombings and shootings in which hundreds of Israelis were murdered and thousands injured, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank to root out the terrorists responsible for it. One of their strongholds was the city of Jenin, in Northern Samaria. According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the period of 2001-2002, 57 Israelis were killed and hundreds injured by terrorists based in or directed from Jenin alone. During April 3-11, 2002, IDF soldiers fought a fierce battle in Jenin with members of Fatah’s al-Aqsa brigades, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

After the first day, the fighting moved to the adjacent ‘refugee camp’, which had been heavily fortified and booby-trapped by the Palestinians. Nevertheless, in order to reduce civilian casualties as much as possible, IDF soldiers fought house-to-house instead of employing artillery and air strikes. As a result — as ultimately attested to by the UN — only 52 Palestinians were killed, almost all combatants; but 23 Israeli soldiers were lost, 13 of them in one ambush on April 9.

After the battle, Palestinian spokesmen such as Nabil Sha’ath, Hassan Abdel Rahman, Yasser Abed Rabbo and Saeb Erakat, claimed that Israel had massacred hundreds of Palestinians, burying them in mass graves or leaving their bodies to decompose under the rubble. But unlike the situation in Gaza, the Palestinians did not control access to the area, and the truth ultimately came out (although, as CAMERA notes in the link above, the fact that they had lied through their teeth didn’t seem to hurt the credibility of the Palestinian spokesmen with the international press).

(Read full article)

Related: The Road to Jenin by French director Pierre Rehov

Love of the Land: Mohammad Bakri: ‘art’ is his shield