Who Might Ask Whether It's Misguided to Fight for Jewish Rights?

...Indeed, who is the only source Rudoren can produce to justify the headline about the Law Center’s efforts being “misguided?” The Israeli attorney who had been defending the Palestinian Authority in cases relating to its financial support for terrorists described her as a “nuisance.” I’m sure his clients and others who believe those who commit terrorism against Jewish Americans and Israelis feel the same way. But it’s hard to see why anyone else would view her activities in that same light.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
25 January '15..

Lawfare is the term for the practice of employing legal proceedings to wage a kind of war on a country or cause. For the most part, the State of Israel has been on the receiving end of this effort as non-governmental organizations and others purporting to support the cause of human rights have attempted to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist and to self-defense with specious efforts to arraign before the bar of justice. But not everybody in Israel believes the best way to counter these attacks is to play defense or simply ignore it. Attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner founded Shurat HaDin—the Israel Law Center in 2004 to use the law to not only work for the rights of Jewish victims of terrorism but also to make the terrorists, state sponsors, and enablers in the business world pay for their crimes. For this she was rewarded with an article profiling her activities in yesterday’s New York Times that posed the question in its headline as to whether her work was “misguided,” a clear indication of the opinion of the paper’s editors. But that verdict can only be sustained if you believe those who support terrorism deserve legal impunity.

The piece by Jodi Rudoren does provide us with yet another tortured food metaphor from the paper’s Jerusalem bureau chief. In describing her relentless efforts to keep probing legal foes for weaknesses and to adopt the best strategies, Darshan-Leitner made an analogy to baking challah for the Sabbath. Rudoren uses that one line to attempt to gain some insight on her subject’s career but it doesn’t work.

Even less convincing is Rudoren’s effort to put down Darshan-Leitner as either a worthless publicity hound/profiteer or an impediment to the peace process. Indeed, who is the only source Rudoren can produce to justify the headline about the Law Center’s efforts being “misguided?” The Israeli attorney who had been defending the Palestinian Authority in cases relating to its financial support for terrorists described her as a “nuisance.” I’m sure his clients and others who believe those who commit terrorism against Jewish Americans and Israelis feel the same way. But it’s hard to see why anyone else would view her activities in that same light.

Bank of China Sued For Aiding Terrorist Massacre of H.S. Students in Israel

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Esq...
Israel Law Center..
23 October '12..

(New York, NY) The families of Israeli high school students, murdered in a March 2008 terrorist shooting in Jerusalem have filed a civil action against China’s banking giant, The Bank of China (BOC), for intentionally and recklessly providing banking services through their New York City branch to terrorist groups Hamas and the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ), their lawyers announced today.

The lawsuit is being brought in the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan on behalf of five families who lost loved ones in a heinous terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas. On March 6, 2008, a member of the Islamic terrorist organization, Alaa Abu Dhein entered the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem and opened fire on hundreds of students with an AK-47 assault rifle. Eight students were murdered in the shooting and many others were wounded. The suit, Rot v. Bank of China, seeks both compensatory and punitive damages.

“The Bank of China is just one example of how some financial institutions flaunt the requirements of the U.S. anti-terrorism regulations,” said the plaintiffs' attorney Nitsana Darshan- Leitner. “These banks that supply the lifeblood of terrorism must be shut down and penalized. The answer is simple, cut off the avenues purportedly upstanding banks use to front for terror and paralyze terrorist transactions, restrict the ability of PIJ and Hamas to illegally transfer funds, and massively reduce terrorist activity.”

“BOC knowingly assisted Hamas and the Islamic Jihad to carry out terrorist attacks with the full approval of the Chinese government, and rejected requests by the Israeli government to cease and desist. BOC even had the chutzpah to make these funds transfers through its U.S. branches right under the nose of the U.S. Justice Department, despite the fact that Hamas and the PIJ are designated terrorist organizations and that such wire transfers are a crime under American law. We expect BOC to now pay very heavily for its support for terrorism.”

Darshan-Leitner - North Korea’s forgotten past

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
29 May '12..

In the aftermath of the Israeli strike on the fledgling Syrian nuclear reactor at Deir ez-Zor on September 6, 2007, North Korea’s involvement in fueling Middle East conflict and warfare was revealed publicly to many around the world for the first time. Indeed, the Syrian reactor had been modeled upon similar reactors in North Korea and it is suspected that Pyongyang assisted in both building and outfitting the Syrian facility.

More recently, shipments of North Korea missiles destined for Iran, Libya, Syria and other outlaw regimes in the region have been intercepted or turned back by the United States. Reports have also surfaced of North Korea assisting Hezbollah to build underground bunker systems in southern Lebanon to safeguard its rocket launchers from Israeli aerial attacks.

While today North Korea is finally acknowledged to be a major player in providing support and resources to the terrorist groups infesting our region, its involvement in aiding those extremist organizations that target the Jewish state had begun many decades earlier.

Weisberg - Suing the devil – and winning

Araleh Weisberg..
Israel Hayom..
18 May '12..

The late Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jew, was wheelchair bound. In 1985, he took a cruise on the Italian ship Achille Lauro, which was hijacked by the Palestine Liberation Front near Egypt. The terrorists threw Klinghoffer overboard, while he was alive, and let him drown. The incident shocked the world, including a 10-year-old girl named Nitzana. Back then, she didn't fathom that the first time she would appear before Israel's Supreme Court, it would be on Klinghoffer's behalf.

Attorney Nitzana Darshan-Leitner is considered a legal trailblazer in Israel. Together with a long line of friends and colleagues (and a husband), she founded the Israel Law Center ("Shurat Hadin" in Hebrew), a Jewish human rights organization, in 2003. Over the course of the last nine years, the organization's litigators have filed hundreds of lawsuits against terror groups and governments that support terror.

"We have been awarded more than a billion dollars so far," Darshan-Leitner said proudly in an interview with Israel Hayom. "But we have only been able to collect $120 million, which has been distributed among families of terror victims. I suppose that we will never see a large portion of the sums we have been awarded by the courts."

Next Tuesday, Darshan-Leitner will be presented with the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism. As she walks on stage to receive her award, she will likely recall the horrendous terror attacks that she had re-enacted, time and time again: with the bereaved families, in verbal sparring with the terrorists' defenders and in the battle she has waged against apathetic Israeli institutions.

Suissa - Rebels with a cause

David Sussia..
JewishJournal.com..
08 February '12..


“Leon Klinghoffer’s blood cries out from the depth of the ocean,” the 23-year-old law student told the Israeli Supreme Court in 1995. “We will not withdraw our complaint.”

That student was Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, and she had filed a petition on behalf of the victims of the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, during which a wheelchair-bound Klinghoffer was tossed overboard.

She wanted the court to forbid the terrorist act’s mastermind, Muhammad (Abu) Abbas, from entering Israel under the Oslo Accords.

The court sided with the government and rejected the petition, and Abu Abbas went on to mastermind more terror attacks. Darshan-Leitner never forgot that defeat. Years later, during the height of the Second Intifada, she founded the non-profit Shurat HaDin — Israel Law Center, to fight for the rights of terror victims.

In the years since its founding, Shurat HaDin has filed hundreds of petitions and lawsuits in courts around the world seeking justice for terror victims.

“So much of this legal field is new,” she told me last week in her office in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv. “We have to dig out the laws and statutes and apply them as best we can.”

So far, few entities have escaped their reach — they have taken on global banks, insurance companies, foreign countries and any person or entity they believe assists terror groups.

They served papers on former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami in the New York federal court on behalf of 17 Persian Jews unlawfully held in Iranian prisons. Charging North Korea with helping Hezbollah, they sued that country in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on behalf of 30 U.S. citizens who were hurt during the second Lebanon War.

Bankrupting Terror

AishVideo
15 March '10

Shurat haDin's Nitsana Darshan-Leitner is the voice of Victims of Terror. By suing Hamas and other terror organizations, she is hitting them in the wallet, trying to put an end to terror.



Our Mission

We tend to think of the fight against terrorism as a burden that falls mainly on the shoulders of government—our military, diplomatic, homeland security, and law-enforcement agencies. Yet there is one area where private citizens can play a leading role: In stopping the flow of funds to terror organizations. Beginning in the 1990s, Western countries, and especially the United States, passed laws making it possible for victims of terror to sue the regimes that sponsor terror, banks that transfer funds to terror groups, front organizations that pretend to serve charitable causes, and even the terrorists themselves. For the first time, terror victims and their families have a chance to fight back through the courts.

Visit Shurat HaDin's website at www.israellawcenter.org