 |  | 
No dignity
By URI DAN
(September 23, J Post) - The police and press lynching of Binyamin
Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, raises serious questions about the
basic rights of Israeli citizens.
Is Israel really a state of law, as it purports to be, in which a man
is considered innocent until he is proven guilty? The Netanyahu
name has been smeared unmercifully during an investigation of a
monetary dispute, which, if it had involved anyone else, would
have ended up in a civil suit in court.
Instead, Netanyahu was immediately accused of accepting bribes
and obstruction of justice. And since Netanyahu is one of the few
Israeli leaders that the world knows, the story immediately turned
into a hot international item.
This is what happens when state institutions begin to run wild,
with no one to stop them. After all, this is the same Israel Police
that arrested an innocent man and threw him in a lockup with
criminals for three days, simply because a 12-year-old girl made
up a rape story, and supplied a description of her "attacker" that
looked like the poor young man. The same police that so
oppressed an elderly couple that they almost confessed to falsely
reporting Amnon Rubinstein's death to the Knesset, even though
they hadn't done so.
In the Beersheba area, meanwhile, gangs of Beduin thieves and
robbers roam, and the police are so helpless that people are paying
these criminals protection money. In the North, police failed to
identify in time those Israeli Arabs involved in the terror
campaign in Tiberias in Haifa. And what about the serial rapist?
So it's no surprise that the police, at the nadir of its fortunes,
responded with such alacrity to the Yediot Aharonot report on the
Netanyahu-Amedi dispute, and acted as if it was the newspaper's
investigation division.
It is certainly the paper's right, perhaps even its duty, to do such
an investigative report on the Netanyahus, with all its attendant
gossip value, guaranteed to provide the public with its daily fix.
But to turn it into a criminal-political story it needed the help of
the police, to whom the paper rushed to submit its findings. (The
police also made sure the paper didn't lose its scoop, calling the
Netanyahus for questioning only after Yediot had published its
promos for the story.)
That's when the brutal assault on the Netanyahus began. Even as
they were still being questioned, our journalists competed for the
best quote from "police sources" on the progress of the
investigation. Then a "senior police officer" was quoted in
Ha'aretz as saying that the police "hadn't leaked anything" and
that the "reporters had made up" the stories.
So one of two things: Either that senior officer is correct, and all
the garbage we heard on all our media outlets that night was
totally fabricated. Or the police were in fact feeding the
journalists, which is behavior more appropriate to a authoritarian
regime - that of Spain's Francisco Franco, for example. Internal
Security Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was in Spain while his
minions were trampling on the Netanyahu's rights perhaps should
have reminded them.
If the police really wanted to behave in a fashion worthy of a
democracy, it could have sent its terrific investigators to question
the Netanyahus discreetly, to check if there was even any basis to
the suspicions. If the police-media complex hadn't been set into
gear so quickly, Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein would have
come to the defense of Netanyahu, and given him some kind of
hearing.
After all, Netanyahu has at least as many rights in this country as
the proverbial average person traditionally nicknamed Buzaglo.
Would even Buzaglo have been cut to ribbons and tarred and
feathered in the media over a financial dispute of this nature?
There was a great deal of maliciousness here, in an attempt to
"catch Netanyahu red-handed," for personal or political reasons.
The police, which has already stomped on the rights of so many
people, would be bad enough, but what about the media darlings
speaking so highly of the police and praising them - Dan Meridor
for example, one of the people responsible for the Basic Law:
Human Dignity and Freedom?
Where is the dignity here? Where is the freedom? Clearly they
exist only for Arabs who are suspected of involvement in terror
attacks. When it comes to the former prime minister of the Jewish
state, the personal and political viciousness and hatred will
overcome not only good sense, but also the law.
Every Jew here should ask himself: If this is what the authorities
are doing to a former prime minister, what might the authorities
do to him?
|
|