Plaut got hit with a SLAPP suit there. SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, and it's banned in much of the United States, as it is used to stifle first amendment protest rights.
Israel's laws are of course different, but Plaut still ended up victorious.
From FrontPage Magazine:
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. Plaut is a critic of Israel’s radical academic Left and is associated with websites that monitor it, including www.isracampus.org.il.
More...
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. Finkelstein, a fawning admirer of the Hezbollah terror organization, is a favorite of neo-Nazis like Ernst Zundel. Commentary senior editor Gabriel Schoenfeld has condemned his "crackpot ideas, some of them mirrored almost verbatim in the propaganda put out by neo-Nazis around the world."Still more...
"The Israeli judicial system has been very weak in defending freedom of speech for those who do not belong to the Far Left,” said Plaut in response. “Moreover, the filing of SLAPP suits to harass and silence political opponents and critics has not been reined in at all, endangering Israeli democracy. In my court case, we saw a politically biased, lower-court Arab judge attempt to inject her political support for a radical leftist into Israeli case law and muzzle Israeli freedom of speech. The next item on the country’s judicial agenda must be the removal of Judge Reem Naddaf from the bench before she can do any more harm."
Plaut went on: "This is a near-complete victory for those who think that all in Israel, and not only the seditious far Left, should be entitled to freedom of speech. It is unfortunate that the appeals court balked from going the extra few centimeters and ruling that the pro-terror political activities of a radical may be legitimately denounced even using Holocaust-era terminology. The greatest hypocrisy in Israel is that far-Left Jews and extremist Arabs denounce Israel and Zionism as Nazism and genocidal and this is always protected speech, but denunciations of those same extremists are not."
I'm kind of ambivalent as to whether it's comformorting--or disturbing--that left-wing academic extremisim is not confined to the United States. Call it the duality of man.
Related posts:
DePaul's Finkelstein accused of "threatening and discourteous behavior"
Breaking: DePaul's Finkelstein resigns!
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