The British publication, The Observer ran an article the other day by Conal Urquhart under the title: Israel shaken by troops' tales of brutality against Palestinians. It is a collection of horror stories admitted to by the soldiers who perpetrated the brutal acts in the 1990’s and compiled by Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Reading the Observer’s article I was reminded of a brutal act that took place eight years ago right here in Canada.
His name was Matti Baranovski and he was 15 years old when in the year 1999, a number of young men who were a little older than himself swarmed and kicked him to death in the city of Toronto then stole his money and his cigarettes.
The police rounded up a number of suspects, among them a soldier in the Israeli army with dual Canadian and Israeli citizenship. Before the court procedure had started, almost everyone I spoke with in my capacity as a journalist expected to see all the suspects sent to jail except the Israeli soldier because everyone agreed no judge in Canada would dare convict an Israeli soldier of a serious offence.
This was 1999 and the incidents compiled by the Israeli psychologist had taken place at about the same time thousands of miles away. Here is the description of one such incident.
"The soldiers described how the violence was encouraged by some commanders. One soldier recalled: After two months ... we do a first patrol with him … there is … a little boy of four playing in the sand … the officer … grabbed the boy… he broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here and started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock ... The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing."
As the Matti Baranovski trial went on in Toronto and tidbits started to come out of the courtroom, a few people began to believe that the evidence was so overwhelming the judge will be forced to give the Israeli at least a symbolic jail sentence if not send him to jail for a long time. Based on what they heard, the people thought the soldier was a cold blooded killer and, pointing to the fact that he was the oldest of the gang, they thought he must have been the leader of the gang and the instigator of the crime.
Then came the day of judgment and every suspect in the gang was found guilty and sent to jail except the Israeli soldier who was found not guilty and was set free. The mother of the dead boy who is herself Jewish said she did not expect to see justice done in this country because an Israeli soldier would never be found guilty of a serious crime here.
The Israeli soldier was no saint according to two other Canadian judges. A high school dropout, he had gone to jail twice before, convicted of assault using a weapon. However, these were short sentences for offences that were light compared to what he was charged with in the Baranovski case and they came before he had become a soldier in the Israeli army. Had the judge found him guilty in the Baranovski case, the sentence would have been much more severe than the two weeks he received in each of the previous convictions.
Another thing that baffled observers was that this man was not yet a Canadian citizen when he developed a criminal record. According to Canadian law, therefore, he should have been deported to Israel a long time ago but was not. Had he been deported, Matti Baranovski would be alive today. And being a good and smart student, Matti would be 23 years old now and probably pursuing a master’s degree at some university. But the Israeli soldier was not deported when he should have for reasons that no immigration official was able to explain and Matti Baranovski died as a result.
Canada is notorious for sending innocent people to jail because when in doubt, judges prefer to err on the side of conviction and they would throw someone in jail on the flimsiest of excuses. Thus when people see that someone is set free as in the case of the Israeli soldier despite the overwhelming evidence in favor of conviction, they smell something fishy.
When they get past their timidity and start to speak out, the people admit they believe there are two systems of justice in this country, one for the Jews and one for the rest of us. But when you remind them that the natives feel they are treated worse than the white folks by the courts, the people amend their observation and say there are three systems of justice in this country, one for the Jews, one for the rest of us and one for the Natives. So I ask: how many tiers of justice do we want in this country? Is this what multiculturalism was meant to represent?
The fact that this unhealthy sentiment is harbored by people even among Jews, one being the mother of Matti Baranovski, is an indication that once a group of people represented by a lobby reaches a level considered to be preferential, cynicism sets in and affects our trust in the system of justice itself.
Because this is a serious development with far reaching consequences, we must conclude that Zionism run amuck is a condition that will no longer be tolerated in our society. And our leaders should muster the courage to come out and denounce it publicly with the same force that they denounced anti-Semitism in the past. It is asinine to stand in the legislature and denounce a bunch of kids for vandalizing a headstone at a cemetery then reward someone for sending an innocent kid to that same cemetery the next day.
Just consider this, even after all that happened, the Israeli soldier was allowed to stay in Canada where he pursued his education at taxpayers’ expense, something that was denied to Matti Baranovski. There is indeed something fishy here not only with the system of justice but with immigration too.
A Jewish friend of mine who never forgave God for being so unjust as to let the Holocaust happen had this to say: I feel the pain in my heart for Matti and for his parents but I console myself with the thought that Matti may have died so that the Israeli soldier be denied the chance to return to his unit in Israel and kill Palestinians. In this sense, Matti may have been the first Jewish martyr to die a horrible death so as to save young Palestinian lives. Not an ideal situation but a thought that makes my pain a little more bearable.
Good for my friend. But I am still not convinced that justice should be this convoluted. In the case of the Israeli soldier, Canadian justice was prostituted because of the disproportionate weight that the Zionist lobby has in this country and this must come to an end. No ifs or buts.