This week, an Israeli court rejected a libel suit against a propagandist who made a film about the Jenin massacre that never was.
This just proves that changes need to be made to slander and liable laws, because it has longed seemed to me that it is not only possible to slander an entire group, it’s done all the time.
That’s exactly what history’s big lies have been - slanders and libels against the Jews and others as a group that have precipitated terrible suffering for masses of individuals.
The “the Jews killed Christ” slander, for instance, that continues to circulate to huge audiences, most recently in the form of the now-proven anti-Semitic filmmaker Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”
Innocent Jews have been killed or otherwise destroyed as a direct result of such slanders as the so-called “blood libels” - accusations that the Jews use the blood of (insert victim here) to make matzot. They have died because “The Jews started the war,” or “they own all the banks,” or “they invented communism/capitalism/ socialism” or “they’re trying to take over the world,” or any number of other ridiculous but no-less dangerous slanders.
Were someone to spread such ugly falsehoods about an individual, they would be breaking the law in most Western countries and could be sued. But to spread such stories about a group or an entire people, is, evidently, OK. This despite the repeatedly proven fact that this kind of lie tends to provoke catastrophe.
Sometimes, even when the slander or libel meets all the legal criteria, justice is still denied, particularly if the victim is a Jew, as in the cases of Alfred Dryfus and Leo Frank.
But it has never been possible for a group to sue for slander or libel and that needs to change.
You’d think that in Israel particularly, the home of possibly the most maligned group the planet has ever known, the concept of a legal remedy for blanket or collective slander would be possible. Something to counteract, and at the same time disprove, such horrible and violence-producing lies as the Palywood-staged al-Dura killing or the Jenin massacre myth.
But, evidently not.
The Jewish press reported an Israeli court rejected a libel suit against a pro-Palestinian documentary about the battle of Jenin.
The court turned down the suit filed against “Jenin, Jenin” director Mohammed Bakri by five Israeli veterans of the West Bank town’s 2002 fighting.
The suit alleged that Bakri, an Israeli Arab, had slandered the former soldiers by including baseless allegations in the film about military atrocities and of providing skewed translations for some of his interviewees’.
The court found that while the film was indeed slanderous, the plaintiffs couldn’t sue Bakri because the film hadn’t singled them out.
Twenty-three Israeli soldiers and about 50 Palestinians, mostly gunmen, were killed during the battle of Jenin, although initial reports by Palestinian propagandists, which were widely reported by the world press, insisted hundreds of unarmed civilians had been intentionally massacred by Israeli troops.
Though this was eventually proven to be a complete fabrication, its dissemination touched off anti-Semitic violence in Israel the elsewhere, and further damaged Israel’s reputation, which, of course, was the intention.
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