Sunday, July 11, 2010

From blind justice to blind hatred

British judge seems to be taking the idea of playing the devil’s advocate seriously.


Liat Collins
Columnist/JPost
11 July '10

Why do you always bash Britain in your columns?” a reader recently asked.

Thinking of an answer was not easy.

Because I care, is one obvious response. Because it deserves it, suggested a colleague.

I don’t enjoy criticizing the country where I was born and raised. But sometimes I just can’t help it.

I’m reluctant to kick England while it’s down – even on the TV in my Jerusalem living room I could clearly see the second goal against Germany that somehow escaped the referee at the soccer World Cup in South Africa.

Still, I’d find it hard to ignore another miscarriage of justice, one which has far more serious ramifications.

In Hebrew, the word for a judge and a referee are the same: shofet.

I don’t doubt the impartiality of the soccer referee who will go down ignominiously in World Cup history. I can’t say the same of the motives of the British judge in the memorable Brighton case earlier this month.

I’d like to take a vuvuzela and blow it as a wake-up call in the ear of Judge George Bathurst-Norman. Actually, I’d prefer to use a shofar, but then the British media would inevitably add the description “a ram’s horn used in Jewish rituals” and I’d probably lose any chance of a fair trial I might have had.

Not, of course, that Judge Bathurst- Norman would admit to anti-Semitism.

He doesn’t have to. He can simply be fashionably anti-Israel instead.

Bathurst-Norman took the principle of blind justice and apparently abandoned it in favor of blind hatred.

TO RECAP: During Operation Cast Lead last year, seven activists from a group called Smash EDO broke into an arms factory near Brighton, on England’s south coast, and trashed the place. A week ago, they were found not guilty of causing criminal damage, even though their raid resulted in £180,000 ($275,000) of broken equipment and property.

The activists told the court that sabotaging EDO MBM Technology was justified because they believed the company was sending arms components to Israel and they wanted to prevent “Israeli war crimes in Gaza.”

(Read full story)

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