{"id":9176,"date":"2014-01-16T18:40:27","date_gmt":"2014-01-16T18:40:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kohelet.org.il\/article\/price-tag-attacks-indignation-is-not-a-policy\/"},"modified":"2014-01-16T18:40:27","modified_gmt":"2014-01-16T18:40:27","slug":"price-tag-attacks-indignation-is-not-a-policy","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.kohelet.org.il\/en\/article\/price-tag-attacks-indignation-is-not-a-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Price-tag attacks: Indignation is not a policy"},"content":{"rendered":"Price-tag hooligans are motivated by a combination of half-baked ideology, racism and contempt for the law. Their actions are stupid and criminal. Price-tag offenders are not, however, by any stretch of the imagination terrorists, against whom the full panoply of Israeli laws designed to fight terror ought to be enforced.\n\nIn the decades prior to the fall of Communism, the legal systems of most Central European states looked a lot like their Western counterparts.\nPeople accused of crimes such as fraud, assault, even murder, were arrested, investigated and tried, pretty much like in the West. The accused had the right to defense counsel. Acquittals were rare, but the same could be said of other legal systems \u2013 such as Israel\u2019s.\n\nIt was only when an indictment had a whiff of politics about it that the system exhibited Dr. Jekyll\/Mr. Hyde characteristics. Due process was suspended. Guilt and punishment were determined in advance.\nEvidence was irrelevant. The accused was usually convicted of a crime he never contemplated committing; his real crime was to have opened his mouth or used his pen.\n\nIsrael\u2019s criminal justice system tends to exhibit Jekyll\/Hyde characteristics of its own. Crimethink, to use Orwell\u2019s term, is punished far less often than in Eastern Europe before 1989, though the phenomenon is not unknown \u2013 think of Margalit Har-Shefi, who was jailed for allegedly knowing what Yigal Amir was thinking, or of Elitzur Segal, who received a fine and suspended sentence for writing nasty things about a former IDF chief rabbi.\n\nBut in cases with political overtones a suspect\u2019s due process rights are liable to take a beating. Thus the state prosecution authorized totally unwarranted wiretaps of Haim Ramon\u2019s phones when it was trying to put him away for sexual harassment.\nDuring the Gaza disengagement, Israel\u2019s state prosecution took a long, wholesale and officially sanctioned walk away from the law, using pretrial arrest to deter protesters and looking the other way when police beat them up.\n\nIt\u2019s about to happen again, with Israel\u2019s \u201cprice-tag\u201d malefactors as the next set of victims.\nPrice-tag hooligans are motivated by a combination of half-baked ideology, racism and contempt for the law. Their actions are stupid and criminal. The phenomenon is spreading and justifies devoting more police resources to forestalling it, as well as stern punishment for offenders \u2013 once they\u2019re convicted in open court.\n\nPrice-tag offenders are not, however, by any stretch of the imagination terrorists, against whom the full panoply of Israeli laws designed to fight terror ought to be enforced. These laws set aside due process and expose suspects to potentially unlimited incarceration, as well as bodily harm, at the whim of state authorities.3 Once they\u2019re classified as terrorists, people suspected of price-tag violence may never get their day in open court. They may, for example, spend years under administrative arrest.\n\nSome of those so imprisoned are likely to be innocent.\nThere is an orchestrated campaign on the part of some politicians and the press to get price-tag hooliganism reclassified as terror. This is partly the result of genuine indignation, and partly the attempt of some politicians to curry favor with publicists and prosecutors who tend to believe right-wingers are bad news in whatever they do.\n\nBut indignation is a bad policy where law enforcement is concerned.\nIt creates an atmosphere in which officials think the ordinary rules are suspended, and they can do whatever they want. This is particularly true when the loaded word \u201cterror\u201d is used, and those accused of terrorism can find themselves without rights.\nRecently the police, frustrated by their inability to acquire the evidence needed to put the leaders of Israel\u2019s murderous mafia behind bars, asked Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein to sanction the use of administrative detention against them. Wisely, Weinstein refused.\nSuspension of due process is not a proper remedy for the incompetence of Israel\u2019s police. It is neither needed nor justified in dealing with pricetag hooligans.\n\nWe need to fear a public atmosphere that gives sanction to decisions whereby certain crimes, or worse, certain groups of offenders, are no longer subject to due process.\nSuch sanction not only provides opportunities for those charged with the authority of the law to abuse that authority, but gradually shifts society toward tolerance of the suspension of due process, to no longer conceiving it to be an essential aspect of civil liberties and human dignity. In denying due process to hooligans who indulge in vigilantism and mob rule, we become more like them.\n\nIn free societies, people suspected of crimes are entitled to punctilious observation of their legal and human rights. The point of these rights is not to protect criminals. It\u2019s to protect all of us, and to ensure that we always keep in mind the moral distinction between those who break the law, and those who uphold it.\n\n \n
The views in the article do not necessarily reflect the forum\u2019s positions<\/h6>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Price-tag hooligans are motivated by a combination of half-baked ideology, racism and contempt for the law. Their actions are stupid and criminal. Price-tag offenders are not, however, by any stretch of the imagination terrorists, against whom the full panoply of Israeli laws designed to fight terror ought to be enforced. In the decades prior to […]","protected":false},"featured_media":9137,"template":"","article-category":[525],"custom-tags":[],"ppma_author":[59],"class_list":["post-9176","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","article-category-publications"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPrice-tag attacks: Indignation is not a policy - kohelet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.kohelet.org.il\/en\/article\/price-tag-attacks-indignation-is-not-a-policy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Price-tag attacks: Indignation is not a policy - kohelet\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Price-tag hooligans are motivated by a combination of half-baked ideology, racism and contempt for the law. Their actions are stupid and criminal. Price-tag offenders are not, however, by any stretch of the imagination terrorists, against whom the full panoply of Israeli laws designed to fight terror ought to be enforced. 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