Asymmetric Warfare: Hamas and the Livni Warrant

Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens
Standpoint Magazine
22 December 09

The Times reported yesterday that Hamas is "masterminding efforts to have senior Israeli leaders arrested for alleged war crimes when the visit European countries." The recent arrest warrant issued for Tzipi Livni by a British Court is certainly tied to this, and it is no surprise that the UK is the first port of call in this latest act of Hamas asymmetric warfare.

Although Hamas were not directly involved, it seems that they have acted as key facilitators, and claim to have provided lawyers with evidence of Israeli war crimes. This has been done through a Hamas initiative founded by Ismail Haniyeh called "the central committee for documentation and prosecuting Israeli war criminals," also known as Al-Tawthiq. According to its chairman, the commission's mission is to document and gather "evidence connected with Israel war crimes, tracking war criminals and prosecuting them in international, national and local courts."

Over the years, Hamas have been exceptionally successful at waging (and winning) an antisemitic propaganda war against Israel. So successful in fact, that in this country professing support for Hamas - a proscribed Islamist terrorist group - is now considered a mainstream position, which is held by some prominent politicians and high profile thinkers. Israeli officials have not yet come to terms with the effect that Hamas asymmetric warfare in Europe has on their ability to completely neutralise the terrorist threat they face at home. This Israeli underestimation of Hamas' capabilities outside of Gaza is no better illustrated than by the almost successful attempt to have one of their leading politicians put on trial for war crimes.

(Read full article)
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British judges being dangled like marionettes by Hamas: Group admits it was accomplice to UK court warrant against Tzipi Livni

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
21 December 09

If I have said it once, I have said it a hundred times on this website: there is a price to be paid for indulging anti-Zionist bigotry and it is a price which may be paid by some of the most treasured institutions of one’s own society.

British newspapers are reporting today that the anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying terror group Hamas (no they don’t describe Hamas that way on the BBC, but it happens to be accurate) played a key role in building the case which led to an arrest warrant being issued against former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni by a court in London 10 days ago.

The Times, in a report whose substance was repeated by the Daily Telegraph, quoted Hamas operative Diya al-Din Madhoun, who runs the terror group’s coordinating committee on such matters, as saying:

“We have provided a group of independent lawyers in Britain with documents, information and evidence concerning war crimes committed by Israeli political and military leaders, including Ms Livni.”

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Hardliners realise Britain is a soft touch

George Walden
timesonline.co.uk
17 December 09

The Tzipi Livni fiasco illustrates how slavishly this country follows hypocritical UN edicts

As a piece of legal grotesquerie, the attempted arrest of the former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has its funny side. The biggest joke lies in the role of the UN. It was the UN Human Rights Council that endorsed the report by the retired South African judge Richard Goldstone on the Gaza conflict, in which Israel as well as Hamas was accused of war crimes.

The fun lies in the membership of this august body, and guardian of all our rights. Currently those empowered to sit in judgment on the Israeli democracy include Cuba, China, Russia, Kirghizstan, Djibouti and Qatar. In a non-democracy, of course, Ms Livni would have had no bother; with no elections to dislodge her she would still be a minister, and so exempt from arrest. There must be a lesson there.

The joke gains resonance when we remember that in 2003 the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Commission elected a Libyan to its chair. It is of course due to Israel being surrounded by similarly backward and corrupt regimes, such as Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as to Israeli recalcitrance, that the Middle East remains in a permanent state of tension and Palestinians suffer.

So the Livni affair is a joke on democracies everywhere, though especially on us, which makes it a sombre matter. The move to get her arrested is part of the climate of creeping anti-Semitism in this country. We do not go in for the hard stuff yet, but whether it is subtly but relentlessly bent TV reporting of the Middle East conflict, or attempts in British universities to deny Israeli academics the freedom of expression notionally protected at the UN by countries such as Cuba or Libya, institutionalised anti-Semitism, assisted now by the law, is gaining ground.

Yet it would be a mistake to take too narrow a view of the business. Something in our culture and mind-set exposes us to asinine legal anomalies of this kind, and not just where Israel is concerned. While Ms Livni is absent from London, known Islamist terrorists are free to walk the streets, or to sit cosily at home filling in claims for benefits, because the law has made it impossible to convict them without endangering our sources of information.

(Full article)
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Guardian misleads on profile of pro-Palestinian lawyer

Just Journalism
17 December 09

The Guardian’s reporting of the Tzipi Livni arrest warrant story fell short of journalistic standards today when it failed to properly identify prominent pro-Palestinian lawyer Daniel Machover, who was quoted condemning the UK government for its response to the issuing of the warrant.

Machover is Chair of Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights and a partner at London law firm Hickman and Rose, which in 2005 successfully represented Palestinians seeking an arrest warrant in the UK against Israeli Major General Doron Almog over house demolitions in Gaza.

Only yesterday he authored an article published on The Guardian’s Comment is free website in which he claimed that Gordon Brown and David Miliband’s diplomatic intervention in favour of Livni ‘sends a message that Britain is in fact a safe haven for suspected torturers and war criminals’.

Despite his past and current active involvement in this issue, in ‘Outcry over plan to give attorney general veto on issuing of war crimes warrants’ by Guardian Legal Affairs Correspondent Afua Hirsch and Middle East Editor Ian Black, he is described simply as ‘a solicitor’. The article reads:

"I feel honest revulsion at the idea of a case where a judge has granted an arrest warrant and a politician gets on the phone and apologises," said Daniel Machover, a solicitor. "They have got to stay out of individual cases and legal decisions…

"It's outrageous and the only reason the Foreign Office wants to do it is to avoid embarrassment – there is no good legal reason," said Machover. "If there was an arrest warrant against Livni, it's because there was a case to answer according to a judge who found that there was reasonable suspicion."

This failure to identify sufficiently the contributor deprives Guardian readers and website users of the necessary information with which to contexualise his comments. They will have been misled by today’s description of Daniel Machover as ‘a solicitor’ because this implied falsely that he was being cited as an objective legal voice, rather than the extremely active pro-Palestinian legal advocate that he is.

Just Journalism’s August roundtable, which convened journalists and legal experts to discuss how international law is reported in the UK, addressed this very issue. Director of the Centre for Social Cohesion Douglas Murray discerned a ‘halo effect’ enjoyed by legal activists who are identified in the media simply as lawyers when they are, in fact, ‘more than lawyers’.

Just Journalism has contacted The Guardian on this issue and is awaiting a response.

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