Margalit Har Shefi's main line of defence was that she didn't take Yigal Amir's biblical justifications for Rabin's murder seriously. As far as she was concerned, Amir was just expressing a theoretical position. To prove her point, her lawyer stressed that Har Shefi made a special appointment with her rabbi to seek advice on whether Amir was right, that Rabin was a "rodef," a persecutor, thus fair game for murder. The rabbi, in his wisdom, declared the concept of Rabin as "rodef" nonsense.
 
However, this of defence boomeranged, as anyone with an ounce of prescience could have predicted. The judges ruled that Har Shefi, by taking the trouble to seek rabbinical advice, proved that she took Amir's threats seriously. And they threw the book at her on this point.

But she had a foolproof defence and her astute attorney made no attempt
whatsoever to pursue it.
 
Why it is taking the Jewish residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza so long to understand the plot against them, in fact against the entire religious right, is simply beyond me. It is time they finally understood that an all-out covert war was declared against them, with the ultimate goal their removal from their homes to be replaced by the PLO's minions.
 
To achieve this, the Shabak's Hebron-based Jewish Department unleashed an unending string of dirty tricks to demonize all the Jewish residents of the Administered Territories. Numerous agents were planted among the "settlers," actually residents, to surveil their activities but also to organize violent, theatrical outrages, mostly against Arabs, using local dupes. Avishai Raviv, Yigal Amir's partner in crime is the most notorious of the agents while Baruch Goldstein, Noam Freidman and the Kahalani brothers are the most publicized of the patsies for peace.
 
But there were many others; recall the seventeen members of the Jewish Underground, led supposedly by Lieut. Oren Edri, who were arrested and subjected to dehumanizing incarcerations (Edri's face was rat-bitten), only to be found completely innocent of all charges. To stave off this humiliating setback, two members of the non-existant Underground, the Kahalani brothers were set up to take the rap for a planned massacre of Arabs, of which not an iota of proof existed.
 
(This is not the place to detail the full plot against the religious right. The gruesome facts are set out in my book and videotape Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin, available in Israel from the Zionist Book Club; call 02 6723703).
 
Immediately after Rabin's assassination, the blame for Amir's act was laid at the doorsteps of yeshivas he and Raviv pretended to study at and their rabbis, who were prodded by them into discussing whether Rabin was a persecutor in the biblical sense.  Within days, two rabbis were arrested, within weeks another rabbi was jailed without   charge for months. It was the rabbis, thus Orthodox Judaism, whom
the state declared responsible for Rabin's murder.
 
Since then, a trash film and book by Michael Karpin, as well as numerous magazine articles have been commissioned to maintain this piece of deceit. In fact, it was the provocateurs Raviv and Amir who entrapped the rabbis into discussing the "rodef" issue in the first place. Check the timing and locations, the concept was never discussed by any rabbinical authority until Raviv and Amir made it an issue.

So if Margalit Har Shefi asked her rabbi to comment on Amir's "rodef" murder justifications, it's because both she and the rabbi were deliberately entrapped by the Shabak. But Har Shefi's lawyer didn't have the vision or permission to defend his client with the truth.

Now what kind of personality could be recruited to deliberately discredit the good name of the Jewish religion? Adir Zik provided an answer in last Friday's Hatsofe: a stalker.

Avishai Raviv was ordered by his Shabak superiors, Zik unabashedly names Carmi Gillon as the chief superior and thus chief plotter, to marry a religious settler in order to maintain his credibility. He entered into a loveless marriage with one woman, who divorced him after two years claiming he was a wife-beater.
 
Immediately after the divorce, he sought a new religious wife in a hurry and actually became engaged to one of his quarries. Two women who dated him and broke off relations were stalked by Raviv for months on end. The stalking was interspersed with violent and vicious telephone threats.

Raviv's boss, who probably gave him the order to lure the women into marriage, was the Head of the Jewish Department, Eli Barak. And surprise, surprise, he is an infamous stalker. He stalked television reporter Carmela Menashe until it became national news. But that's not all, he was a wife swapper whose co-swapper friend supposedly committed suicide in New York, just when Barak happened to be visiting there.
 
Eli Barak was also a drunk driver who crashed his car and afterwards lied to the police, claiming his passenger was behind the wheel. Former Shabak Chief, Yaacov Perry, who preceded Carmi Gillon, has stated that he asked Rabin to remove Barak from the Shabak. But Rabin didn't do that. He saw Barak as so corrupt and corruptable that he sent him to America to learn dirty tricks and covert operations from the pros. When he got back to Israel, Rabin appointed him to head the Shabak's Jewish Department and ordered him put into effect a program of mischief-making against the settlers and their adherents.
 
Margalit Har Shefi is the latest victim of this program of mischievous entrapment. That is a fact which for reasons beyond my comprehension, are not understood by her, her lawyer or, apparently, by many Jews who fell victim to the same plot.

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