Israel Matzav

What Israel can learn from Denmark

How many Israelis remember Tatiana Soskin? Take a look at the picture at top left and read on:

On a hot day in June 1997, Tatiana Soskin took her black and white caricature sketch of "Mohamed" and attempted to attach it to an Arab storefront. Israeli security forces arrested her for attempted vandalism and attempted incitement to riot. She was arraigned and ordered by the judge to be taken to the Beer Ya'akov Mental Hospital for a series of psychiatric exams to be sure that this "Kahanist racist" was mentally fit to stand trial. While there she commented, "I would rather be in a small mental hospital here than to live in the bigger mental hospital that is the State of Israel!"

Judge Zvi Segal presided over this case against Tatiana Soskin. The young immigrant from the Soviet Union wearing a KACH shirt didn't stand a chance! In the judge's view she was guilty of incitement, racism and perhaps even endangering world peace! He even went so far as to compare her childish "pig poster" to the most evil anti-Semitic forgery ever conceived... the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion!" But young Soskin had no regrets..."I haven't done anything I should be sorry about. I think it's a matter of freedom of speech... how can somebody sit in jail for a drawing? It's only a drawing!"

But Judge Segal was not moved nor finished with the 28-year old Hebron resident as he tried to compare her drawings to the atrocities committed by the Nazis! Tatiana saw her chance and took this opportunity to give the judge a history lesson. "How can you compare a drawing to the actions of the Nazis and the slaughter of millions of our people? My motivation was love of Jews. My relatives who perished in the Holocaust would be ashamed to hear what you said! My grandparents died in the Holocaust but, if they heard this, they would die again!" In lieu of Judge Segal's disgraceful behavior, many of us are wondering why Judge Segal has never been required to submit to a series of mental exams as Tatiana was... to determine if he was fit to be a Jew!

Tatiana Soskin was the perfect victim. She is poorly educated, with few friends and with no family in Israel. There would be no protests in the Western press for this young Russian immigrant. Even the Jewish lawyers at the A.C.L.U. would be of no use. Besides, if asked, they'd run over to Israel to defend Mohamed, the pig! And so on January 8, 1998 Tatiana began her two-year sentence.

In Denmark on Saturday, at a traditional midsummer festival, a group burned an effigy of Muhammed instead of the usual witch. Watch the video below:



More on this story - including a translation of the Danish that none of you understood - at my friends the Baron's and Dymphna's Gates of Vienna. Somehow I doubt that the Danes who burned the effigy will be arrested.

Update July 2 4:15 PM YouTube took down the video. It can now be found here.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:34 AM