scaramouche

...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

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Irreverent, contrarian, delighted to be out of synch with the zeitgeist, I depend on my sense of humour (such as it is) to keep me sane in this wacky world.

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Friday, 27 November 2009

Official Jews in pursuit of the unsue-able: Great news--if parliamentarians are amenable to the idea, you, Jacques and Jill (or Gilles, if you're so inclined) Canucki will be able to sue a foreign government or foreign officials to seek recompense should they be deemed responsible for a terror incident that took the life or lives or your loved ones.

Won't that be great?

What's left unstated is how, precisely, one is supposed to collect from, say, the governments of Iran and/or Saudi Arabia, or for that matter from Al Qaeda, or for that matter from freelancers like Major Dr. Hasan who were supposed to be working for America but who were actually Soldiers of Allah. In Hasan's case, would one get to sue the U.S. government for not doing its job properly and removing the shrink from what turned out to be the scene of his jihadi crime (in the event that one of the Fort Hood victims had been Canadian)?

Then there's the fact that litigation, unlike "tolerance," is a two-way street. So while you're busy suing a Saudi sheik, he's there suing, oh, off the top of head, Rachel Ehrenfeld, for a book in which she links Saudi Arabia and the funding of  jihadi terrorism, or a foreign government (the U.K., Belgium) is suing one or another highly-placed Israeli for "war crimes."

It reminds me of that warm 'n' fuzzy Barney song: "I sue you/You sue me/We're a litigious company/With a great big suit and a huge pay-off to boot/We will both get lots of loot..."

Update: This is what we’re up against, from “NGO ‘Lawfare’: Expoitation of Courts in the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” a 2008 paper prepared for NGO Watch by Anne Herzberg:
The use of courts to prosecute violations of human rights has grown exponentially since the 1990s. This growth has coincided with the vast accumulation of power by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the expansion of the concept of “universal jurisdiction.” NGOs claiming to promote human rights (many funded by European governments, the EU, and prominent foundations like the Ford Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Institute) are engaged in international lobbying as well as filing civil lawsuits or initiating criminal complaints against Israeli officials for alleged “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity” in Belgium, England, Spain, Switzerland, the United States, and elsewhere.
These legal actions, ostensibly to provide “justice” to “victims,” are a form of “lawfare”i – a “strategy of using or misusing law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve military objectives” – intended to punish Israel for anti-terror operations, as well as to block future actions. They are also a means for actors that are not accountable to any form of democratic check to subvert a country’s foreign policy and interfere with diplomatic relations.
While Israel is not the only country that has been subject to NGO lawfare (several prominent NGOs have filed similar suits against US officials in France and Germany), it is a primary target of these efforts. Though claiming to promote universal human rights, these same NGOs have not pursued cases against Palestinian, Hezbollah, Syrian,or Iranian officials involved in terror.
The strategy to delegitimize Israel using legal frameworks was adopted at the NGO Forum of the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa (“WCAR” or “Durban Conference”). The NGO Forum crystallized a plan in which Israel would be singled out as a “racist” and “apartheid” state and isolated internationally through a campaign of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions and explicitly adopted lawfare to advance the political war against Israel.ii The NGO Forum Declaration called for the “adoption of all measures to ensure [the] enforcement” of international humanitarian law, including “the establishment of a war crimes tribunal to investigate and bring to justice those who may be guilty of war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing and the crime of Apartheid . . . perpetrated in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
This movement is led by Palestinian NGOs such as Al Haq, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), and Badil, and aided by international NGOs including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, International Federation of Human Rights (France), and the Center for Constitutional Rights (New York). These NGOs are largely supported by European governments and receive funding from prominent foundations...

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:10 | link | comments (1)


Comments:
#1  27 November 2009 - 17:33
 
How much you wanna bet that the most prodigious litigants will be Pallies suing Israel?
Anonymous
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