LEFT-WING WITCH-HUNT OF RIGHT-WING WOMEN

Letter from Ruth Matar (Women in Green) Jerusalem
Thursday, May 3, 2007

The Israeli Left-Wing does not like Right-Wing women. As a matter of fact, they probably don’t like any women who dare to disagree with them. However, they go a bit too far when they try to railroad their female political opponents to jail.

Let me discuss four examples of such cases.

NADIA MATAR, Co-leader of Women in Green, was charged with “insulting a public servant”, which offence may carry a jail sentence. The trial judge dismissed the case, as having political overtones. However, the State appealed, and a three-judge Appeal Court has yet to come out with their verdict.

MARGALIT HAR-SHEFI, a young woman from Beit- El, served six months in prison of her nine month sentence, before being pardoned by President Katzav. Har-Shefi studied and participated in anti-Oslo protests together with Yigal Amir between 1993 and 1995. She was convicted after the Court determined that Amir told her that he had planned to kill Prime Minister Rabin, and that she did nothing to stop this from happening.

Knesset Member Ami Ayalon (Labor) reopened the painful Margalit Har-Shefi case by repeating his claim that she didn’t know that Yigal Amir wished to kill Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. He said: “I know of this from intelligence [sources]; I was head of the Shabak”. She sat in jail for not having stopped the murder. However, documented evidence indicates initial widespread animosity throughout the system towards her – or the right-wing public she represented.

MIRIAM ADLER, a mother of six children, was a passionate opponent of the Disengagement from the Jewish communities in Gaza and Northern Shomron. She was deported, together with her husband and children, from Sa-Nur, in Northern Shomron, in the summer of 2005. I am reproducing Miriam’s story in its entirety at the end of this Letter, where she describes her brave resistance to an Israeli Court attempting to put down its political opponents, with no regard for morality or justice. I strongly recommend that you do not fail to read her story.

NAOMI BLUMENTHAL, former Likud Knesset member and Deputy Minister of National Infrastructures, was convicted of bribing 15 Likud activists and central committee members. However, she merely hosted them and their spouses in the Ramat Gan hotel before the December 2002 party primaries.

She was sentenced to an eight-month prison term and further punished with a fine of 75,000 NIS. She recently lost her final appeal against this sentence and is scheduled to begin her prison term shortly.

Coincidentally, when I was searching the Internet for information about Naomi Blumenthal, I came across an excellent article by Steven Plaut, published in the Jewish Press. (Steven Plaut is a Professor on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Haifa)

Israel’s Politicians Get Tough With Crime!
Steven Plaut, The Jewish Press, March 23, 2007

SO let’s se if we have all of this clear.

The Israeli Minister of Finance is evidently a crook who stole oodles and got caught trying to transport a quarter million dollars in evidently criminal cash out of Poland. (Caught by the Poles!) And the Israeli media and police hush it up for ten years. Not a whisper in the press.

Then nary a day goes by without new information about Olmert’s own criminality. The heads of the income tax administration get arrested for taking bribes. Haim Ramon gets convicted for sexual harassment but is still Olmert’s choice to replace the current Minister of Finance when HE goes to prison. Ehud Barak, probably the most corrupt politician ever to head the Labor Party, is the leading contender to take it over again and has never been indicted for HIS many corrupt financial dealings. Amram Mitzna was never indicted for his dirty deals with oligarchs and just managed to hornswaggle the taxpayer into subsidizing housing in his new hangout Yeruham in enormous amounts. Half the mayors in Israel should be in prison for intentionally creating astronomical deficits that the Histadrut wants to dump on the taxpayer. A Labor Party Knesset Member gets drunk and beats up guards at a club.

The Olmert junta is trying to suppress information on its colossal failure in the war last summer. Maariv reveals that one of the katyusha missiles Ehud Barak placed in Lebanon landed smack in the middle of the Haifa refineries and only by divine intervention did not set the place ablaze, giving off poisonous gas. And the paper says there were OTHER hits still classified.

And after ALL of that, who is actually going to jail? Poor little Naomi Blumenthal.

Who? Naomi Blumenthal was a Knesset backbencher in the Likud. She is one of the politicians in Israel LEAST deserving of being imprisoned. Her heinous crime? At a Likud primaries evening vote, she paid for some hotel rooms for party central committee voters who lived too far to go home after the vote and who cast votes for the Likud slate composition.

It is not even clear that there is anything wrong with that. So Naomi just lost her last appeal and will do prison time to create the impression in the press that Israeli politicians are intolerant of criminality and lawbreaking.

* * * *

Miriam’s Story — The Story of Israeli Dissident Miriam Adler, Mother of Six
by Miriam Adler

We went to live in Sa-Nur four years ago, together with two other families, in order to renew Jewish settlement there. We found the settlement virtually abandoned. Naturally there was no grocery store or kindergarten there, nor any elementary services. Everything got done slowly and with great difficulty. Our first task was to open the roads for Jewish vehicles. This involved not a few arguments with the IDF which wanted us to travel in convoys accompanied by military vehicles. We insisted on driving alone, so after a few months the roads around Sa-Nur were opened for Jewish traffic. However, my husband, Yaron, encountered two shooting incidents when driving, and our children were miraculously saved from a car bomb carrying half a ton of explosives.

Apart from the “security” tasks we also had a lot of social work to do, since the community included young religious families on the one hand and middle-aged Russian-speaking artists on the other hand. We got involved in everything, from setting up a kindergarten and library to re-opening the art gallery and helping absorb new residents. We also became the major activists opposing the deportation plan in Northern Shomron. I was the Sa-Nur spokesperson. I tried to present forceful positions.

Two weeks before the deportation we were arrested in the middle of the night in my parents’ home, where we were visiting: Six policemen burst into the house, without uniforms, identification tags, or police IDs. They shoved us and hit us and my father and my mother, who has a heart condition. They smashed my father’s spectacles, pushed my mother with such force that she suffered from hemorrhages beneath the skin, and confiscated all weapons they found (though all were licensed).

My husband was taken right away. I was on the balcony on the upper floor of the house. A policeman who was not identified in any way approached me and demanded that I accompany him. I refused to do so. He called for backup and a real fight started. Three thugs fastened my hands together behind my back. I understood that this was my deportation, and I tried to stop them in every possible way, as though they were attacking me in my home in Sa-Nur, or as any woman would resist if attacked by three thugs whose identity was unknown to her. I was dragged and beaten down three flights of stairs, without shoes and without the head covering which is mandatory for Orthodox Jews. These thuggish policemen cursed me in a way that I don’t wish to repeat.

Humiliation continued in the police station. No-one removed my hand-cuffs. I was not permitted to cover my head, and I was not examined by a doctor even though I complained of pains and demanded it. As I stood there I saw the thugs who had attacked me writing an arrest report, coordinating their testimony all the while.

In the police station we were issued an administrative order, signed by the General of the Central Command, Yair Naveh, who ordered us (the two heads of a household including six children) to remain in full house arrest in Kiryat Arba from August 8 until September 25. We refused to sign the administrative order and were consequently kept in custody. Judge Noam Solberg tried to release us but encountered a declaration by the GSS that if we were released we would be re-arrested. We also petitioned the Supreme Court – in vain. Our six children were deported without their parents, which further intensified their fears, and caused trauma with which we are still coping in our three eldest children.

I submitted a complaint to the department for investigation of policemen in the Ministry of Justice. The file was closed in record time – within 48 hours – because of “lack of public interest”. The thugs who beat me were not even questioned. No-one bothered to reply to the appeal submitted by my lawyer.

I, on the other hand, was charged with attacking the three policemen, and my case, strangely enough, was deemed to be of considerable interest to the public, which caused me to conclude that this trial was the epitome of injustice: My family was cruelly thrown out of its home for no good reason; we were arrested, again for no good reason, my dignity was violated as men dragged me through the street without a head covering; my six children were traumatized; my attackers were not even questioned and to top it all, there I was, on trial for attempting to defend myself against three anonymous thugs who burst into my parents’ home in the middle of the night. I protested all this then and I continue to do so now – both as a Jew and as a woman.

I was charged with violation of the general’s order, assault, and making threats. In the first court session, I announced that I will not participate in this performance. I did not appear in the following sessions, mainly because the policemen who attacked me gave evidence and I was emotionally incapable of facing them again. So, the judge issued a warrant for my arrest without any release option. I was arrested, and the prosecutor insisted that I be kept in custody until the end of the proceedings. I was therefore forced to undertake to appear for the sessions. Since I have six children, I was not prepared to stay in jail and preferred to appear. But I have not cooperated, instead declaring at every opportunity that I was the victim, and that the system is now further harassing me by bringing me to trial. I refused to testify or bring witnesses since I refused to recognize my status as the accused.

I was found guilty, as was expected, of attacking policemen in serious circumstances, and of making threats. Surprisingly I was found not guilty of violating the general’s order. In other words, the policemen may have had no grounds for arresting me in the first place, thus legally entitling me to resist arrest. Despite this, I was found guilty of “assaulting” the three of them. I may be sentenced to imprisonment.

The system continues to harass both my husband and myself. My husband has been charged with obstructing a policeman and with making threats. This was a totally minor incident in which the policemen said that they had been insulted. He was arrested without being shown any document justifying the arrest, and was released only after informing the interrogators that he suffers from epilepsy and would sue them were anything to happen to him during his arrest. It is likely that he will be charged in the near future. Against me, a trial is being conducted in Kfar Saba. I stand accused of attacking a policeman and also “violating the obligation of a parent towards a minor”, because I participated with my baby daughter in a demonstration in Sa-Nur against the Eviction Administration, and my daughter could have been injured. Why? Of course, because there were violent policemen there! In this trial as well I announced that I do not recognize the authority of this unjust Court and I was only making an appearance there so as not to be further separated from my six little children by further unjust arrests.

This is more or less our current position. We feel that the legal system has targeted us personally because we dared to openly and forcefully oppose being deported from our home, and also because we refused to give into almost any of the legal system’s demands. We refuse to recognize this horrible legal system, and have undertaken to pay the price for this, although it is of course very difficult for the two of us to struggle alone against such a strong system. I regard the charges brought against us as deliberate harassment, at a time when my husband and I are trying to rebuild our lives and those of our six children.

Our trials are show trials conducted by a corrupt regime that is attempting to suppress its political opponents even at the price of abandoning morality, integrity, and justice. I consequently refuse to play a part in a despicable performance directed by an evil regime. I shall not play the part of the accused. And if the show must go on, then at least, exempt me from being present.

* * * *

Dear Friends,

The only crimes of these unfortunate women was in daring to disagree with the ruling Israeli Left and by publicly opposing its policies.

Is it possible that the Left Wing sees women as easy targets?

WHY THIS WITCH-HUNT ON RIGHT-WING WOMEN?

I am, as always, happy to hear your thoughts on this topic.

With Blessings and Love for Israel

Ruth Matar

=============================================
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