Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Legal Beagles in Britain are doing the very important work of being Hamas's barristers, this time by seeking to have Ehud Barak arrested. Tom Gross at NRO: British lawyers seek arrest of visiting Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak:
Now that the Bush administration is no longer there to actively lobby for Israel, the situation for the Jewish state at the hands of the assorted Israel bashers and anti-Semites of the world is growing more and more grave.
Currently, the top-of-the-page headline on the home page of the influential left-wing British newspaper The Guardian is "Lawyers seek arrest of Israeli defence minister in UK for alleged war crimes."
Ehud Barak, who is the leader of Israel's Labor Party, is due to speak at a meeting at the British Labour party conference in the Southern English town of Brighton today. Barak is also scheduled to meet British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and David Miliband, the foreign secretary, for talks on the Middle East and Iran.
The Guardian notes that "The accusations against Barak are based, in part, on a United Nations investigation conducted by the former South African judge Richard Goldstone. It concluded earlier this month that Israel had committed war crimes."...
These are Goldstone's bastard step-children.
No surprise as to who's behind the funding of it, the usual combination of non-profits and European governments: Ford Foundation, European governments among those funding organization seeking to arrest Israeli Defense minister. The British court rejected the petition for arrest:
Westminster Magistrates court in central London on Tuesday evening rejected a petition to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the grounds that he committed "war crimes" by defending Israel from Hamas attack. The British government intervened on Barak's behalf, submitting legal briefs to the court, and thus avoiding what would have been the most serious clash between Britain and Israel since 1948.
The Jerusalem Post reports that Al Mezan is the organization behind the British arrest efforts. Al Mezan had instructed expensive London law firms to carry them out.
As noted by NGO Monitor, Al Mezan is funded by Sweden (1.1 million SEK), Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the Ford Foundation, the International Commission of Jurists, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Netherlands Representative Office, the International Human Rights Funders Group/co Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Open Society Institute, Medico International and the European Commission, among others...
Phyllis Chesler has more here: Israeli Minister Barak Escapes Arrest in England
Barak M. Seener has a lengthy and important piece on the phenomenon at Middle East Quarterly: Targeting Israelis via International Law
...More recently, however, individuals and organizations with political grievances have started to make use of war crimes legislation in order to pursue a variety of officials from states equipped with well-run courts and tribunals, notably the United States, Great Britain, and--most of all--Israel. Should this matter to us? Aren't war crimes clear and cut; shouldn't those who commit them be pursued with the full force of the law? This essay tries to answer those questions and others...
