Soccer Dad

But just try to collect ...

Backspin linked to a story last week about Moshe Saperstein's legal victory against the PA and PLO.

Except unfortunately we've been down this road before. When the estate of Yaron Ungar won a judgment of $116 million against the PLO, the U.S. government fought to prevent the estate from collecting.

In a case that pits judicial process against the foreign policy concerns of the executive branch, federal attorneys argued that evicting the Palestinian Arabs from their longtime location would damage the Middle East peace process and "cause serious embarrassment" to America in its relationship with the United Nations.

"In consideration of the strong foreign policy interests at stake here, the United States asks that the Court dismiss this matter on any available legal ground," stated the 30-page document, which was dated September 12 and signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Danna Drori.

This is nothing new as the Flatow family discovered even earlier.

Eighth Circuit Judge Myron H. Bright, sitting by designation, wrote that the court regretted that its holding would prevent the family of college student Alisa Flatow from recovering against Iran, a nation found by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to have offered material assistance to Palestine Islamic Jihad in the attack.

...

But Bright said the bank’s California property could not be the source of any recovery.

“The government of Iran should pay its debt to the Flatow family, but BSI cannot be held liable for this debt,” Bright said. “We follow the clear path set out by the applicable case law.”

Flatow’s lawyer, Thomas Fortune Fay, blamed this and other appellate court defeats on opposition from the U.S. government, which he said repeatedly blocks plaintiffs’ efforts to collect against the handful of officially designated “terrorist states.”

“We filed over 30 attachment actions in the Flatow case,” Fay said. “The State Department has come out consistently in support of Iran. It tells Iran and other countries that we’re not very serious in this war on terrorism.”

That Congress passed a law giving American citizens the standing to sue for damages inflicted by terrorists is a good thing. The reality is, unfortunately, that winning in the court of law and actually getting to collect are two separate things. The latter will necesarily run afoul of the federal government's desire to be the sole arbiter of foreign policy.

I wish that these lawsuits would get wider play in the MSM. While they may not prove the complicity of many of their defendants in terrorism beyond a reasonable doubt, they do bring a preponderance of evidence suggesting that governments such as Iran or the Palestinian Authority are actively choosing to be against us. But the MSM for reasons of its own doesn't wish to shatter the myths of moderation.

Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Blogdigger tags: Terror, Verdicts Against Terrorists, Estate of Yaron Ungar, Stephen Flatow, Moshe Saperstein.