October 3, 2013 | Quote
An American Blogger vs. Palestine’s First Family
Jonathan Schanzer has been documenting abuses by the Palestinian Authority for years. Little did the counterterrorism analyst expect to find himself at the sharp end of the PA's spear—not in the West Bank but on U.S. soil.
It began with a blog post. In June 2012, Mr. Schanzer, a vice president at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote an online opinion post for Foreign Policy magazine about allegations of corruption surrounding the sons of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, Tarek and Yasser.
The response came quickly: In September 2012, Yasser Abbas filed a libel suit against Mr. Schanzer and Foreign Policy in a federal court in the District of Columbia. Following a yearlong legal saga, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan tossed out the case last week, concluding that Mr. Schanzer's statements in the article “are either not capable of defamatory meaning or are protected statements of opinion” under the First Amendment.
Judge Sullivan applied the District of Columbia's anti-SLAPP statute, which aims to curb “strategic lawsuits against public participation”—in other words, suits intended to silence critics. The decision is a significant victory against foreign poobahs who use Western judicial systems to muzzle commentators.
Mr. Schanzer had detailed Yasser Abbas's business empire for Foreign Policy, noting that it includes a monopoly on the distribution of some U.S. cigarette brands in the Palestinian territories; an engineering firm with offices across the Middle East that in 2005 built a sewage system in Hebron, with almost $2 million paid by the U.S. government; the chairmanship of a publicly traded insurance company; and a construction firm that has also received U.S. taxpayer funds.
Yasser Abbas is not just a successful businessman. He has served in official capacities in his father's regime: Last year Yasser delivered a message from his father to the emir of Kuwait, according to the Kuwaiti government. The Kazakh government in 2008 described him as a “special envoy” of the PA. Though Yasser's younger brother, Tarek, is less politically involved, according to Mr. Schanzer he “is just as ambitious in the business world.”
All this led Mr. Schanzer to ask, regarding the Abbas brothers: “Have they enriched themselves at the expense of regular Palestinians—and even U.S. taxpayers?” Mr. Schanzer paraphrased the allegations of a former PA adviser, Mohammed Rashid—who himself was convicted in absentia of corruption by a Palestinian court last June—that President Abbas has “socked away $100 million in ill-gotten gains.” Mr. Schanzer also said that “several Palestinians told me that the Abbas family dynasty is common knowledge” in the territories.