The Israeli Law Against Insulting a Public Official - An Affront to Democracy and an Affront to Human Decency

The existence of this law on the Israeli books is beyond unacceptable for reasons that go even beyond what one who values Democracy might think.
 The law heralds from the time of the Ottoman Empire. Not only did the State of Israel retain a law from an inimical, invading culture; the Ottoman Empire was guilty of the genocide of the Armenian people because they were Christian.
That genocide, early in the 20th C., served as a model for the genocide of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis a few years later.

That law in Israel is being used to silence many, many Jewish social activists in Israel who have complained against various corrupt government officials. The court system is flooded with Accusations of "insulting a public official". The law applies to any and all public officials who feel themselves insulted when their corruption is made known - including "Social Services", which market in children.

According to the Honorable (retired) Head of the Family Court in Jerusalem, Judge Chana ben Ami, Social Services in Israel regularly lies to the Courts. Since her retirement, Judge Ben Ami has stated that the Social Workers routinely produce mendacious documents to the Juvenile and Family courts. The judges, pressed for time, are apt to accept their documentation without scrutiny. Judge Ben Ami did scrutinize the documents and found them to be no less than routine perjury. She cites on instance in which she did not want to OK and adoption that Social Services requested as she noticed that the testimony was contradictory. She said that the Social Worker told her that she *had to* OK the adoption because they were under their quota of children they had to produce for adoption.

Judge Ben Ami stated this, and other equally unconscionable behaviors by the Social Workers in Court, publicly in a number of fora since her retirement. In response, the Social Workers Association in Israel contacted the then Minister of Justice, Tzipi Livni, and requested that she "act against" Judge Ben Ami.
The link to their letter is here.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/oqarl73

Inter alia, Parents whose children have been wrongfully removed from them are among the social activists being silenced by this law in Israel.

Children and Parents are committing suicide in Israel in off the graph numbers as a result of how they are treated by Social Services - and that law is being used to keep it quiet. Some accounts get into the news. Many, who knows how many?, do not.

So long as the State of Israel refuses to adhere to universally accepted norms of Democracy, it has no right to be called a Democracy and should be anathematized by modern, civilized nations.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though very real, is also a very effective device for smoke screening the mistreatment of Jewish citizens at the hands of the government of the State of Israel.

Thank you for your consideration,
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel