JRH 11/22/19
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Blog Editor: Rather than
capitulate to Facebook censorship by abandoning the platform, I choose to post
and share until the Leftist censors ban me. Recently, the Facebook censorship
tactic I’ve experienced is a couple of Group shares then jailed under the false
accusation of posting too fast. So I ask those that read this, to combat
censorship by sharing blog and Facebook posts with your friends or Groups you
belong to.
*****************************
The reign of the prosecutors
November 22, 2019
In Israel Thursday morning, the politicians were the big
story. Israel Beitenu chairman Avigdor Liberman was the villain who had held
the country hostage for nearly a year as he fed his narcissistic personality
disorder.
The left’s latest flagship, the Blue and White party is all
the once vibrant political camp can put together now that it has lost its ideology.
With its god of peace killed by suicide bombers and missiles, and its socialism
statues crushed under the weight of bankrupt government companies, all the left
has left is Blue and White. The party stands on two planks – destroying Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and eternalizing the regime of Israel’s unelected
bureaucrats.
The party’s figurehead – Benny Gantz – was tempted to join a
unity government with Netanyahu that would guarantee he would serve as prime
minister in a rotation agreement. But his comrades wouldn’t let him. Joining a
government with Netanyahu would be a betrayal of their very reasons for
existing. So, unhappily, he walked away.
And then there was Netanyahu himself. Thursday morning, his
supporters shook their heads in frustration and his enemies clapped their hands
in glee at the sight of Israel’s greatest stateman, the leader the public wants
to keep in office, unable to form a government,
The conversation about Israel’s politicians lasted less than
24 hours.
At 4 in the afternoon, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit’s
office announced that at 7:30 in the evening he would announce he his decision
to indict Netanyahu. The underlying message was crystal clear: The day after
Benny Gantz returned his mandate to form a government to President Rueven
Rivlin after he failed to get a sufficient number of coalition partners to
build a government, Mandelblit said that there’s no point in talking about
whether or not Israel is going to new elections in March.
Voters don’t decide anything. The lawyers do. Politicians
are irrelevant. The only people who count in Israel today are the unelected
attorneys who run the country.
But then we already knew that. And the fact that – as
expected – Mandelblit announced sternly that he is indicting Netanyahu on three
charges of breach of trust and one charge of bribery was at best anticlimactic.
The game was up – if it was ever in play – in February.
Last February, at the height of the first election campaign
of the year, when Netanyahu and his right wing coalition partners were leading
in all polls by a wide margin, Mandelblit took the unprecedented – and legally
dubious – step of announcing his intention to indict Netanyahu of those charges
– pending a pre-indictment hearing. The moment he made his announcement, the
right began to slide in the polls. The Leader had spoken. And we had no right
to question him. Blue and White’s scattershot campaign converged around
Mandelblit’s “recommendation.” The left had a rallying cry and a reason to vote.
Netanyahu’s neck was on the chopping block.
Ever since Mandelblit gave his “recommendations,” he and his
comrades have been the only political actors with any power to speak of. Our
actual elected leaders were rendered bit players in the lawyers’ regime.
Mandelblit’s announcement Thursday just made it official.
To the cheers of Israel’s corrupt media, for the past three
years our legal overlords have gnawed away at all aspects of political power in
Israel, and in the process – not that they cared – they corrupted Israel’s
legal system from top to bottom. From beginning to end, their criminal
persecution of Netanyahu has been a travesty of every norm in democratic
societies governed by the rule of law. Carefully edited and wholly distorted
recordings and transcripts of police interrogations of Netanyahu, his wife,
son, and advisors were systematically leaked to the media. The fact that every
such leak was a felony offense was of no matter. Netanyahu’s attorneys
submitted request after request for Mandelblit to order an investigation of the
criminal leaks. All were summarily and scornfully rejected.
As the probes escalated, overseen by State Prosecutor Shai
Nitzan, police investigators extorted Netanyahu’s closest advisors to coerce
them into becoming state witnesses against the most successful and admired
prime minister Israel has ever had. Investigators threatened Netanyahu’s former
spokesman Nir Hefetz that they would destroy his family and bankrupt him if he
didn’t turn on Netanyahu. They finally succeeded in breaking him after
incarcerating him in a flea infested jail cell for 15 nights, denying him sleep
and medical treatment and bringing a young woman he knew into an interrogation
room next to him and then threatening to destroy his family.
In the earlier stages of the probes, then police inspector
general Roni Elshech spun wild, unsubstantiated and frankly insane conspiracy
theories about Netanyahu, including the claim that he hired private
investigators to tail police investigators. Elshech then went out of his way to
prevent the government from appointing a successor for him as he approached the
end of his term of service. Still today, more than a year later, Israel has no
police inspector general.
Then of course, there is Mandelblit himself. Mandelblit who
claims not to have known about the abuse of witnesses – but then refused to
investigate the allegations. And Mandelblit who promised – after publishing his
“recommendations” for indictment at the height of the election campaign – that
he would approach Netanyahu’s pre-trial hearing with an open mind. That promise
was exposed as a lie when the chief prosecutor Liat Ben Ari left the hearing
two days early to take her family on a safari in South Africa. Wouldn’t want a
little thing like the Prime Minister’s legal fate to ruin her chance to see the
elephants.
The same Mandelblit refused to investigate Ben Ari when
recordings emerged last month showing that she submitted a false deposition to
a court in relation to a lawsuit submitted against her by a former subordinate
attorney.
Then of course there is the substance of the charges
themselves. The charge that Netanyahu accepted a bribe is based on an invented
notion that positive media coverage of a politician is bribery. The notion that
press coverage can be considered bribery exists nowhere in the democratic
world. No prosecutor in the world has ever indicted – or investigated – a
politician or media organization of having committed bribery involving the
provision of positive coverage. Senior American jurists appeared before
Mandelblit in Netanyahu’s (self-evidently unserious) pre-indictment hearing to
warn him that pursuing bribery charges against politicians for receiving
positive coverage is a recipe for destroying freedom of the press and democracy
itself.
But then, that is the entire point of going after Netanyahu
with invented crimes. Now that Netanyahu has been charged for bribery – and
incidentally, he never even received positive coverage from the media organ
accused of providing it – every politician that gets on the lawyers’ bad side
will be sweating bricks any time a reporter writes something nice about him.
After Mandelblit made his primetime announcement, Netanyahu
pledged to fight for his freedom and for the restoration of Israeli democracy
and the rule of law. In his speech Thursday night, he made an impassioned
appeal to his “decent” political rivals to join him in this fight.
If any politicians doubt that Netanyahu’s struggle is their
struggle, they should look no further than the prosecution’s announcement last
week that it was opening a review, ahead of a criminal probe – of Gantz’s role
in the so-called “Fifth Dimension Affair.” The Fifth Dimension was a start-up
Gantz headed. Its sale for $14 million allegedly violated standard procedures.
Maybe Gantz did nothing wrong. But then, Netanyahu is being
indicted for crimes that don’t actually exist. So it doesn’t matter. The
message is clear. Every politician is at the mercy of the prosecutors. Fall out
of line, and you will become a criminal suspect before you can say,
“prosecutorial abuse.”
It’s certainly true that the left shares the prosecutors’
hatred of Netanyahu. Blue and White exists to destroy him. But all the leftist
politicians – and Liberman – who are celebrating today need to understand that
the Netanyahu they love to hate is their best friend and defender today. If
Netanyahu is found guilty of crimes that were invented for the purpose of
destroying him, then their goose will be cooked along with his.
Politicians may make us happy or sad, frustrated or
infuriated. But today, in post-democratic Israel it hardly matters. Netanyahu
called last night for an “investigation of the investigators.” Unless our
elected officials join forces to heed his call, they – and the voters who
elected them — will never be relevant again.
++++++++++++++++
Blog Editor: Rather than
capitulate to Facebook censorship by abandoning the platform, I choose to post
and share until the Leftist censors ban me. Recently, the Facebook censorship
tactic I’ve experienced is a couple of Group shares then jailed under the false
accusation of posting too fast. So I ask those that read this, to combat
censorship by sharing blog and Facebook posts with your friends or Groups you
belong to.
____________________
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