It’s all French to me: the Luré§at trial on a technicality?
This is quite unofficial, but I got an email about the verdict in the Luré§at trial. It was in French, so I used Babelfish to decipher it; therefore the following information is extremely preliminary and rather suspect. However, from what I could discern, it appears he may have gotten off on a technicality that doesn’t go to any of the important issues in the trial.
When I wrote this piece about the trial, I mentioned, “one of [Luré§at’s] defenses appeared to be that he hadn’t actually written the words in question on his website; someone else had.”
And that appears to be the point on which he may have been successful. More later, as I learn it.
[See this and this for additional information about the trial and the more substantive issues it presented. The third trial, that of Gouze, is due to start right about this time.]
As I understand this, the trial was about some French dude who published film that purportedly showed the collateral death of a Palestinian boy about six years ago.
The defendants claimed that the death was a hoax and that the French dude knew it.
Then there’s this other guy who has an entire website devoted to the alleged shooting with scrupulous skepticism about the video footage on the one hand, and the insistence that this alleged hoax is of world historical importance.
Sounds like a tempest in a teapot to me. It’s a certainty that many Palestinian civilians have been killed since 2000, most of them, of course, by accident, like the 19 that were killed after a radar malfunction. At the same time, it’s a certainty that the Israelis and Palestinians have to work out a modus vivendi, because neither people is going anywhere. Enough, already.
It does seem to me that the individuals who implied or accused this guy of deliberate hoaxing (if that’s the story) were wrong to do so, according to non-US law (of course in the US, according to Sullivan, you can say basically anything about a public person.)
However, being wrong in attempting to impeach someone else’s credibility because you don’t like their viewpoint should NOT in my view translate into fines and prison sentences.
Free speech has to be absolute, all the way. ALL THE TIME. And the remedy can only be good speech driving out bad. Any other alternative puts a clique or an elite in charge of determining values, and, ultimately, dictating values. Those are the marks of a closed society. No thank you.
I think Iraq and the terror war is also a tempest in a teapot.