Plaut Ploughs Phishy Gordon

Israeli Appeals Court: You Can Denounce the Radical Left

Read it all here.

Excerpts:-

An appeals court in the Israeli town of Nazareth overturned an earlier lower-court ruling that had awarded a legal victory to Neve Gordon, a far-Left Israeli lecturer in political scientist at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. Gordon had filed a SLAPP suit in that court against Prof. Steven Plaut, a prominent columnist and academic economist, based on articles Plaut had published denouncing Gordon’s political opinions and public political activities.

In particular, Plaut had censured Gordon for repeatedly endorsing the views and writings of Prof. Norman Finkelstein, recently fired by DePaul University in Chicago, and even comparing him to the biblical Prophets.

Gordon had won the first round in June 2006 when an Arab woman judge in the lower court, Reem Naddaf, found in his favor. The appeals panel, however, states that Naddaf’s judgment was replete with errors. Moreover, Naddaf made no attempt in her verdict to hide her own radical anti-Israeli political opinions, which happen to coincide largely with those of Gordon. She inserted outright political declarations in her ruling, including upholding the legitimacy of Holocaust revisionism and declaring that all of Israel is land “stolen from another people.”

Naddaf’s ruling was strongly criticized as biased and antidemocratic in articles all over the world. Plaut’s lawyer, Dr. Haim Misgav, suggested that Gordon had filed his SLAPP suit in Nazareth court solely because he knew many Arab judges sat on the bench there and was hoping to get a radical anti-Israeli Arab to hear the case. Naddaf awarded Gordon nearly 100,000 shekels (currently almost $30,000) in compensation and costs for what she considered “libelous” in Plaut’s criticisms of him.



Plaut filed an appeal against the ruling, which under Israeli law must be filed in the same district court as the first legal round (Nazareth).

The court ruled that Gordon had lied when he claimed Plaut had called him a “Jew for Hitler” and a “Holocaust denier,” and the appeals judges repeatedly reproved Naddaf for erroneously ignoring the fact that Gordon lied in those statements. It ruled that Plaut’s descriptions of Gordon’s academic record as consisting largely of anti-Israeli hate propaganda misrepresented as scholarship were entirely legitimate.

The court also ruled that sarcastic and harsh criticism of leftist anti-Israeli radicals is protected speech, thus defeating the entire rationale for Gordon’s SLAPP suit. It ordered Gordon to return 90% of the “damages” the lower court had awarded him, but allowed him to retain 10,000 shekels as compensation because two of the three appeals judges thought this would deter the use of Holocaust-era imagery in public political debate in Israel.

Regarding the small residual payment the court declined to refund to him, Plaut quipped, “Henceforth Neve Gordon will be intimately linked in Israel’s legal system with far-rightist Ben Gvir as the two comrades who legally snipped the margins of free speech in Israel. In the Procaccia-Ben Gvir ruling the Supreme Court ordered Dankner to pay a single shekel in compensation when calling someone a ‘little Nazi.’ We may be appealing to Israel’s Supreme Court to overturn the undemocratic 10,000-shekel residual.”

“Another loser in all this is Ben-Gurion University,” adds Plaut. “It is now clear to all that parts of Ben-Gurion University have followed a policy of hiring and promoting anti-Israeli radicals on the basis of turning out hate propaganda and misrepresenting it as scholarship. Academic standards have been trashed in some departments of that university. My near-complete court victory will only produce escalated exposure and criticism of Israel’s academic fifth column and of the failure of Israeli universities to enforce academic standards when it comes to anti-Israeli extremists.”